Someone Worth Surviving For

You’re not going to be ready.
Not when it happens—
not when he arrives,
not when you hold the test in your shaking hand,
thinking you did everything right,
not realizing yet that you did.

He will be the right thing anyway.
The best thing.
The realest.

You’ll become someone you didn’t plan to be—
a mother with cereal in her bra
and lullabies tangled in her hair.
You’ll love him so hard
you’ll forget to love yourself for a while.
That’s okay.

You’ll get married.
It will feel like building something solid.
For a while it will be,
and then it won’t.
When he gets sick—
when your world tilts—
you will try to hold on to it all,
and end up cradling only absence.

Some things just break—
even the ones you build
out of all of that you are.

You’ll walk out of that life
carrying his blanket
and a version of yourself
you won’t recognize.

There will be years
where joy feels like cheating.

You’ll find it anyway,
everywhere.
You’re good at that.

One day,
you’ll fall in love with someone
who doesn’t need to be your first anything.
She’ll only want anything you can give.

You’ll meet her in a country
where you don’t know the words yet.
She’ll wait while you learn.
She’ll call you clever
when you don’t feel that way.

You’ll tell her everything.
All of it.
She will cherish all of you—
even the parts you thought
that no one could want.

And then—
after the scans,
after the doctor says the word
that splits you in two again,
that already took everything once—
you’ll ask if she still wants you.

She’ll say yes—
not because she doesn’t understand,
but because she does.

You’ll ask:
Even when I get sicker?
Even if I don’t make it long?
Even if we never have a child of our own?

She'll say:
Yes.
Still yes.
Always yes.

You won’t go back to the girl you are now,
but you’ll carry her with you.
You’ll find her sometimes.
In the way you still smile at flowers
in sidewalk cracks.
In how it still makes you cry
when someone is kind to a stranger.

You—me—we,
we will keep surviving,
but not just staying—
We will keep becoming
someone worth surviving for.