A Place to be Held

I've been in and out of hospitals since I was fifteen. It 's annoying. More surgeries than I can count. You learn a different kind of tired when hospitals are the main landmarks of your life. It's not just fatigue. It's a slow erasure.

They schedule you into time slots: treatment, check-up, scans, a week of waiting, a week of hoping. Your parents become guardians who hover, who wash, who memorize every medication like a prayer.

That is my life. And these are my parents.

Because I was diagnosed with Hodgkin, they treat me like I'm made of crystal. Careful hands, careful words, careful lives built around me. I can't remember the last time I ate a french fry without someone watching. The last time they let me do something on my own. The last time I felt truly free.

I got tired of being wrapped. I got tired of being the subject of whispered plans and the polite versions of conversation that only happen in waiting rooms. I wanted something messy. I wanted a place where nobody measured my breath.

It was my birthday. One of the good ones. No hospital, no surgeries. I wasn’t in pain. I was going to get a piece of some sort of crazy, gross “healthy” pie my parents had bought me. But still it was my birthday. Which meant countless tears from my mom, my silent dad reading the same article about my disease for the third time. I couldn’t handle it. Not anymore. I had made it to twenty.

So I left with a backpack that only held a sweater, a thin book I’d never finished, and a bottle of water that felt heavy in my hand. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't make a scene. I stepped out the back door while my mother was in the kitchen humming a song I used to hate because she sang it all the time when I was small, and my father was in his chair pretending not to read the same news article for the third time. I walked until the porch light was a dot behind me.

I walked and walked and walked until the road ran out and the woods swallowed the sound of cars. The trees thickened like a crowd and the sky narrowed to pale glass peeking between leaves. I walked because walking is the kind of thinking that lets you skip explanations. With every step I thought: if I disappear, maybe they'll keep living. Maybe they'll stop standing on my edges like they expect me to get better. Maybe it will be simpler that way.

At first the forest was a relief. The air was different, not the antiseptic kind of clean you get in hospitals but a wild, living smell. The leaves, a low speech. My sneakers ate the path. I laughed, a short bark, because I surprised myself by laughing. It felt like someone else's sound. It had been too long. I was free.

Then the path forked. There was a marker but it was worn and lopsided and...I guessed.

I guessed wrong.

The left turned into a tunnel of trunks. I kept going left because going back would mean opening the house door and answering the questions. So I went deeper.

I was lost. Completely lost.

The phone was useless. No signal, a battery blinking a single pale bar. I crouched on a rock and felt the ache in my chest. It wasn't new. It was the old ache you learn to set aside during chemo, the one that paled when the nurse came in with a plastic cup of pills and a smile. Here in the dark, it made the world small.

I had one idea. To make a shelter.

I tried to make it with branches like I'd seen on shows. It was pathetic. A waste of time.

Cold seeped into my ribs. The hospital had taught me how to sleep flat and patient, eyes on the ceiling while iv lines hummed in the background. The ceiling was a sky full of leaves and nothing hummed but a distant creek.

I yelled once. It came out thin. The forest answered with small noises and the rustle of something moving away.

I thought about leaving. I thought about just lying there, about how quiet the world might be if I stopped breathing. The thought was clear and mean and very seductive.

In the hospital there are spreadsheets of survival: percentages, odds, stages. At night those numbers burrowed into me and told me things I didn't want to hear. They told me I was a burden. They told me love was a math problem some people solved by subtraction.

I folded my arms around myself and tried to sleep. Then a light walked toward me like someone had lit a single match in the dark.

A lantern. The flame didn't howl. It glowed like a patient animal. A woman walked slowly, not surprised to find me sitting on a log like a cast-off thing. She could have been seventy or forty; the forest doesn't age the same way for people you meet under trees. Her hair was a knot like an old scarf. Her hands were the kind that knew how to hold things without needing them explained.

“You shouldn't be here at night,” she said.

I wanted to say the usual: I'm fine. I'm okay. But the words wouldn't come. Instead I said the honest, small thing: “I'm lost.”

She sat beside me and set down the lantern. “Most of us are,” she said.

She smelled like wood smoke and something sweet and ridiculous and human. She didn't pry. She didn't look at me like a case file or a project. She looked like someone who had lived in her own skin long enough to know what to do with strangers.

“My name's Marie,” I said because silence felt dangerous.

“Carla,” she said. “You look thin.”

I laughed. It came out like a cracked bell. “Yeah.”

We sat with the lantern between us. The trees around us listened like they had nothing else to do. For some reason, I told her bits and pieces: fifteen, Hodgkin, surgeries, the careful love of my parents. How I woke one morning and decided that being wrapped in their care felt like a sentence. How I wanted to go where nobody had to watch the rise and fall of my chest.

When I finished, she did not offer a pat answer like “you're brave” or “you must fight.” Instead she reached across and took my hand. “You're not the first to want to run,” she said. "And you're not the first to think the world would be quieter without you.”

“Many, many years ago,” she said, “there was a boy. He was bitter and thought he would be happier empty. He sat under a tree and a dog came to him. The dog was thin and wounded and waited while the boy picked at his own scabs. The boy fed the dog. In feeding the dog he learned his hands still had work to do.”

“What happened after?” I asked.

“The world tends to answer in pieces when you put something gentle into it”, she answered.

“Call it whatever you want,” she said. “A call, a light, a thing that makes you reach out instead of turning away. Most people expect shouting. Most times it's a whisper.”

A whisper. The word felt cheap and true. All my life the loudest things had been machines and alarms and phones that scolded. A whisper felt like permission.

She didn't scold me for leaving. She didn't do the thing my mother would do. Fold up the betrayal into a lecture; instead she said, “If you go back, you'll find a house full of worry. That's not nothing. If you stay out here because you're trying to spare them pain, that's not courage. That's absence.”

I slept that night wrapped in an old blanket she gave me. It smelled faintly of lavender and a life that wasn't mine. I dreamed of hospital ceilings morphing into leaves. I woke with the sun knitting gold through the canopy and for a minute I forgot every calculation I'd been taught about prognosis and pity.

In the morning she had disappeared. I was alone again. I walked through the trees. There was a broken sign, a scrap of plastic, a tire ringed in moss.

An old conversation with my mom echoed in my head while I tried to find a path.

“Stop with the Bible, Mom,” I said, “Don’t you see? God is a farce. It’s a lie. Why would He put someone through so much pain? Your daughter through this?”

“He never gives us something we can’t handle,” she said.

“Lie,” I said. “All lies”

She snapped back: “I don’t know what God looks like to you. And I don’t give a damn. For me, the call comes in small things. A hand that reaches across the table. A person who insists on staying even when it’s inconvenient. It’s not about earning mercy. It’s about letting yourself be held.”

At that moment, letting myself be held felt easy. I had been trained to be self-sufficient in a way I resented. But, for some reason, I wished that God existed.

I believed I would come back because it was better to make people stumble around me than to disappear and leave the empty chairs. I believed everything would be fine.

But I could feel the life draining out of me like I was a broken pipe. I was dying and no one would hold my hand.

I wanted the mess of human voices. I wanted my mother’s clumsy warm hands on my forehead. I wanted my father to tell the stupid fence story again and make me laugh. I wanted to be known and to be allowed to be small and loud and angry and loved.

So I prayed. I prayed and asked for mercy as my breath faded away.