abnormality.

You asked how I found it, and my answer was this awkward half-story that was forgotten in the weeks that followed.

I was in bed, I said. You teased me, said I was jerking off. I blushed. No, no. I just moved my hand, and there it was. 

The truth is that I was in her bed. She was fucking me, hard. Maybe she told me to put my wrists above my head; I don’t remember. We like it when she tells me what to do. I feel safe in her bed, wrapped up in her words. But my hands moved, and there it was, and I forgot to breathe. 

You can only feel it when my left arm is lifted, but then, it’s hard to miss. The charts at my physician’s office and my specialist’s office and my radiologist’s office say that it’s at ten o’clock, sometimes nine. I have trouble thinking of my breasts as clocks. I drew on numbers and photographed them. My relationship with my camera has faltered in the last year, but I wanted to record this. I wrote a poem about what to do the night before a sonogram, but it was a failure. I didn’t know there would be four more sonograms, three mammograms, a biopsy. I didn’t write poems for those.

About the biopsy: I did not photograph myself after, although I meant to. I was tired. I slept all afternoon, and woke up to grill ribs basted with my pomegranate barbeque sauce and vegetables painted with good olive oil, to drink champagne and listen to my friends tell me they loved me. We were grateful. It wasn’t malignant. I got drunk enough that everything felt better, but the next day, when you tried to touch my breasts, I still flinched.

…

When the radiologist called me last week and said I needed another biopsy, I threw up.

I didn’t tell either of you. 

…

There is a second waiting room, smaller than the first. I am the youngest one here, tattoos showing below the arms of the navy hospital gown. Here, they tie in front. It’s too big on me, and I pull it a little closer to my body. I look out of place because I am. These women are looking at me with uncertainty and distrust, and I want to throw up again. There are conversations, but no one speaks to me. A woman in her late forties comes in and sits down. She seems nervous. She asks if anyone’s had a biopsy, if they hurt. The room is quiet.

I’m here for my second, I say. I tell her that it’s not that bad, I tell her that she’ll be fine.

It is that bad: it took five tries to get the sample they needed. I slept with an ice pack, and still bruised. I can feel the needle digging through the tissue of my breast for the tumor. I bit my tongue to keep from gagging. The memory is enough to keep me from eating dinner.

There is a change after this. They either look at me with pity or avoid my eyes. They are here for routine exams, their breasts pressed between plates of glass once a year, hold still and don’t breathe, there we go. I am here because something isn’t right. They should be here: they are older, they own their homes, they have families, they have health insurance they get from their jobs. I’m twenty seven. I spent last summer in the midwest, nursing my mother through breast cancer. Sitting in this waiting room feels like a sick joke.

After the procedures, the radiologist takes me into a back room to show me my films. She explains the concern: that while my tumor is currently benign, it has irregular growth patterns. There is another language for this: hypoechoic, shadowing, precancerous. She tells me that they want to keep a close watch on it. She wants me to go get an MRI; she tells me that I will need to be more vigilant, that with my body and my history, I am at risk. We’ve already talked about a lumpectomy. I don’t bring it up now; I’m afraid that if I do much more than nod my head, I’ll break down.

If I opened my mouth, I’m afraid I’d tell her that I want them taken off.

This isn’t true. What I mean is that I don’t want cancer. I don’t want it now, I don’t want it in five years. If it’s inevitable, I want them gone. I am tired of strangers’ fingers moving across my breast, nine or ten o’clock, heads nodding when they feel it. There’s a "suspicious area" in my right breast, too, and that’s why she wants the MRI. I thank god I can’t feel it. I am tired of my own fingers moving across my breasts, searching for how my body could fail me.

…

I’m calling on Monday to make the appointment; I needed a few days. There is more to say than this, but: we went to our therapist, we broke up on the way home. There is more to say than this, but: not now.

…

It’s been the longest summer. I don’t remember what it’s like to feel safe.