You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie and you know it.
Catalog
Hazel
The hazel (Corylus) is a genus of deciduous trees and large shrubs native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. The genus is usually placed in the birch family Betulaceae, though some botanists split the hazels (with the hornbeams and allied genera) into a separate family Corylaceae. The fruit of the hazel is the hazelnut. Hazels have simple, rounded leaves with double-serrate margins. The flowers are produced very early in spring before the leaves, and are monoecious, with single-sex catkins, the male catkins are pale yellow and 5–12 cm long, and the female ones are very small and largely concealed in the buds, with only the bright-red, 1-to-3 mm-long styles visible. The fruits are nuts 1–2.5 cm long and 1–2 cm diameter, surrounded by an involucre (husk) which partly to fully encloses the nut. The shape and structure of the involucre, and also the growth habit (whether a tree or a suckering shrub), are important in the identification of the different species of hazel. The pollen of hazel species, which are often the cause for allergies in late winter or early spring, can be identified under magnification (600X) by their characteristic granular exines bearing three conspicuous pores. 2Species Corylus has 14–18 species. The circumscription of species in eastern Asia is disputed, with WCSP and the Flora of China differing in which taxa are accepted; within this region, only those taxa accepted by both sources are listed belo
That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.
The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.
I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the…
People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on.
To be with him was to hurt him—inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me; I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.
I'm like a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
I told myself that imagining...would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments.
My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean tides.
I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.
It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was choosing among truths.
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.
His every syllable flirted.
There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did…
Depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about death.
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.