So, I was in Michael’s the other day (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a craft store), and I had a near anxiety attack. While all these old ladies were buying their knitting kits, and the antisocial thirty-something men were buying model sets, I was getting teary eyes and goosebumps in the middle of the store. Everything felt meaningless and uncertain, and I felt like I could do noting to stop it. I had no idea why. Then, suddenly, I remembered the eighty dollars I spent on origami paper. I remembered falling asleep on my bedroom floor surrounded by hundreds of paper cranes. I remembered telling Love “I’m okay”, hanging up the phone, curling up on the floor, and sobbing with reckless abandon. I remember The Tumour.

We didn’t know about The Tumour for awhile. Griffin was happy and cheerful as always, and we loved her very much. But then came The First Seizure. I remember it vividly, how I was just innocently going to my photography class and wondering why I had such an ominous feeling. I walked into class feeling unnerved, only to find that Zimm, the teacher, was late.

“I think someone got sick,” said a girl I didn’t know, “Someone in B lunch.” For forty minutes we sat, reading and talking and chatting happily. B lunch ended, and, going to meet my friends in the hall, I snuck out of class. 

Of course, I figured it all out when Sakura-chan came up to me in the hall.

“Yeah, Aruka-sensei is sick,” she said, using Griffin’s pet name, “She fainted.” Her ponytail swished back and forth, a silky black mane, head cocked to the side. “I’m really worried,” I thought I had died. I couldn’t feel my hands as I staggered into class. I ran to Zimm, the photography teacher, asking him if she was the girl who was sick, and she was; she had a seizure at lunch. I sprinted out of the room, up the stairs to the nurse’s office to see if she was there, only to find Wheel (this was several weeks before we started dating).

“G-g-griffin…. had a…seizure…?” I panted, confused. He said that he was only about twenty feet away when it happened and that she had been taken on an ambulance. I went down to C-lunch to talk to Love and Shroom and my girlfriends, but we were all too scared to console each other. She came back to school, saying “I’m fine, I’m fine,” all giggles and laughs, about a week later. Then came another seizure. And another.

They found The Tumour in her brain, and she called it Mortaug. We were terrified, sleepless, neurotic- all of us, every friend. Emerson said we should make 1000 paper cranes, to give to her after the surgery. I bought eighty dollars worth at that fucking craft store, and those cranes were the only thing that kept me sane. I made 300, even though I had never done origami once before in my entire life. I had a three-hour conversation with Wheel, which is when I found out that I loved him.

I think The Tumour threw me off my rocker.

The surgery was a success, the tumour was benign, and Griffin was back to school in a month, but we never REALLY stopped being worried. For, if something bad can happen, it will happen to Griffin, and I will not be able to do jack shit to help her. I cannot do jack shit to help ANYTHING.

They threw The Tumour away at the hospital, but it lives in my head still. It lives in my psyche, in my soul, and I am scarred and traumatized. I am a baby, a slug, a vile, selfish human being for making this all about me, but I have a cancer in my soul. It feeds on my brain and makes me think things that are not true. It twists my emotions and perceptions, and gives me flashbacks, headaches, a guilty conscience. It has made me psychotic.

No amount of radiation or surgery will ever get rid of it. I am a ruined human being.

Hamlet Quote of the Day: Are you like the painting of a sorrow? / A face without a heart?