The Friend Who Ghosted Me After the Diagnosis
My illness scared her away, and her absence hurt more than treatment.
Nisha answered my cancer diagnosis with four words, "Oh no. Call tonight," and then I did not hear from her for eleven months. Not a call, not a text, not so much as a heart under a photo.
We had been friends for nineteen years. I want you to sit with that number the way I had to. Nineteen years, since the fourth grade, since matching haircuts our mothers regretted, since she held my hand at my father's funeral and I held her sari pleats together with safety pins twenty minutes before her wedding. She was not a friend. She was a load-bearing wall.
The diagnosis itself was almost polite, as these things go. Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage two, the kind of cancer other cancer patients call lucky, which is a sentence you can only laugh at from inside the building. My oncologist had kind eyes and a habit of drawing lymph nodes on the back of prescription slips like a man sketching a subway map. Six months of chemotherapy. Good odds. I texted the news to my five closest people from the parking lot, engine off, hands steady in the way hands are steady... right before they are not.
Four of them called within the hour. Nisha sent her four words.
She never called that night. Or that week... Or at all.
Here is what nobody tells you about illness: the disease is only half the curriculum. The other half is a live inventory of everyone you love, conducted in real time, without anesthesia.
Some people astonished me. A cousin I barely knew drove me to four appointments and never once filled the silence with pep talks. My flatmate learned to cook khichdi three ways because it was all I could keep down after the second cycle. An ex I had not spoken to in years sent a card that said, "You are too annoying to die," which remains the single most comforting sentence I received.
And Nisha, my person, my nineteen years, evaporated.
I checked her profile from the chemo day chair, which I do not recommend. The drugs going into my arm were cold and tasted like metal at the back of my throat, a thing nobody warns you about, and on my screen Nisha was at a brunch... Then a beach. Then a friend's engagement, laughing, holding a sparkler.
The fourth floor of the hospital smelled like disinfectant and old coffee and something underneath both that I never identified, and I sat in that smell watching her live a life with my absence neatly cropped out.
The loneliness of that was more precise than anything the illness did to me. Chemo hurt everywhere... This hurt in one exact spot.
Halfway through treatment I wrote her a message that took me three nights... I never sent it. Instead, at 4 a.m., bald and furious, I wrote a poem, my first in a decade, because rage has to exit the body somehow and I was too tired to scream. It was about loneliness, about how an empty chair in a chemo ward has a louder voice than any person sitting in one. Months later, when my hair was a centimeter of stubborn fuzz, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly out of spite, and the fact that strangers read it and understood it did more for me than I will ever admit to my therapist.
I rang the little bell after my last cycle. People clapped. Nisha did not know, because Nisha did not exist anymore, as far as I was concerned. I folded nineteen years into a box and taped it shut and called it betrayal, because that was the only word I had.
Eight months after treatment ended, a letter arrived. Actual paper, actual stamps, my name in handwriting I knew better than my own.
Six pages.
Nisha's mother died when we were fourteen. I knew that; I had stood next to her at that funeral too, two small girls in white. What I did not know, because she had never once said it in twenty-three years, was what the eight months before that funeral looked like. Ovarian cancer. Fourth floor. The same hospital.
Fourteen-year-old Nisha had done her homework in that corridor, had learned the vending machine ate coins, had memorized the smell of disinfectant and old coffee and the something underneath, had watched her mother get smaller inside it week by week.
"I know exactly how the fourth floor smells," she wrote. "I could not walk back into that smell. Not even for you. Especially not for you, because if it took you too, I needed to have already lost you. I left first so it could not happen to me again. I know how that sounds. I did it anyway."
She had followed every update through my cousin. She had cooked food and thrown it away because delivering it meant seeing me diminished. She had driven to the hospital twice and sat in the parking lot, once for two hours, and turned around. The night I texted my diagnosis, she wrote, she had slept on her bathroom floor.
I read the letter four times and I want to be honest with you: it did not fix anything.
Understanding why the wall collapsed does not un-collapse the ceiling. I was still the one who sat in that smell alone.
People do not always leave because you matter too little. Sometimes they leave because you matter in a way they cannot survive.
But I called her. She picked up before the first ring finished, as if she had been holding the phone for eight months.
We met at a coffee place equidistant from our houses, a diplomatic summit of two. She looked wrecked and older and could not stop staring at my hair, which had grown back curly, a parting gift from the chemo. "It suits you," she said, and then put her face in her hands and cried so hard the barista brought water without being asked.
I did not comfort her. I am not proud of that, but I am not ashamed of it either. Some debts you do not wave away in an afternoon just because the explanation is sad. What I said was, "You get to earn it back slowly." She nodded like a person being handed exactly the sentence she deserved. I have been writing my way toward forgiveness ever since, and what I have learned is that it is not a door that swings open. It is a door you sand down a little at a time until one day it stops sticking.
Last month I had my one-year scan. Routine, they said, but no scan is routine to the person inside the machine. I told Nisha the date and did not ask her for anything.
She was there at 7 a.m. Fourth floor.
She did not wait in the parking lot this time.
She sat in the corridor, in the smell, knuckles white around a coffee she never drank, breathing through her mouth the whole time. When they called my name she squeezed my hand once, hard, and stayed exactly where she was, upright in that terrible hallway, doing the bravest thing I have ever watched a person do while sitting completely still.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.