When I First Saw You

When I first saw you,
You were what brought darkness
On a sunny day.
When I first saw you,
You were what most little kids
Are scared of being under their bed at night.
When I first saw you,
You were shoveling a path to my grave.

I was deeply afraid of you,
As was every other normal person on earth.
You were like a large figure looming over me,
But no matter how much I tried,
I could never get rid of you.
For months, I tried to leave you in the past
Like the day you got a bad haircut
Like the day you dropped an entire ice cream cone
Like the day you failed your algebra test.

But cancer isn’t like that.
Cancer isn’t something that you can just
Tuck back into your closet.
Cancer isn’t something that you can abandon.

It’s like an annoying sibling that never leaves you alone
It’s like a hit song that plays every time you turn on the radio and gets stuck in your head
It’s something you have to learn to accept because
You know damn well that it’s gonna be there for a while.

When I first saw you,
You were what brought darkness
On a sunny day
When I first saw you,
You were what most little kids
Are scared of being under their bed at night
When I first saw you,
You were shoveling a path to my grave

But now I see you as a part of me.
A part of my personality.
A part of who I am.

Not everything you don’t like is going to be something
You can leave in the past.
Sometimes the way you first see something isn’t how it really has to be.