That Time My Uncle Thought I Had Three Months To Live

My phone lit up three times as I sat in the theater next to Gen, taking in Friends With Benefits.

It was a message and a missed call from Katie: Call me ASAP. I left the theater, sure that someone had died. I had that sick feeling in my gut when you know you are about to hear bad news. (Or it could have been the bag of popcorn I ate. Or maybe the Junior Mints. Tuna sub? Beer? Probably the possible dead relative thing.)

"What's up?" I frantically screeched into the phone. Kate informed me that one of our uncles called her dad, freaking out that there was something wrong with my heart and that I had three months to live.

"I thought maybe you knew and didn't want to tell me," Katie said. I reassured her that I did not have three months to live. I had, indeed, gone to a cardiologist who noticed thickened heart valves and leakage in my valves, but it was fine. (For now. But can I have your heart?)

We laughed it off and hung up. I called my dad and told him to tell everyone I wasn't dying. And if I were, would I really be spending my last days seeing Friends With Benefits for the second time? (Well, maybe. It has a really good soundtrack and Mila Kunis Justin Timberlake is super hot!)

It got me thinking, though. If I had three months to live, what would I really do with my life?

What am I doing with my life now?

After I had cancer, I promised myself that I'd stick to my ONE LIFE! philosophy. But that philosophy was really just an excuse for irresponsible behavior. It could have applied to any young twentysomething in America. Oh, you woke up in Brooklyn in a strange apartment and you can't find your shoes? Oh well, ONE LIFE! Oh, you went to Paris with no money and now you’re in debt? ONE LIFE! You don't want to go to work because there's a Full House marathon on? That's okay, ONE LIFE!

One life. We really do only have one life. We really only may have three months, three seconds to live. I was reminded of this just last week, at a funeral for a woman so many of us loved. Shit, life is short, I thought.

I need to live better because some cannot. Some are already gone. I need to be kinder, and stronger, and more productive. Healthier. Because whether I have three or three hundred months to live, I am going to make them fucking awesome.

We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to others. After all, we only have ONE LIFE.

a word on how i live (because you asked haha just kidding you didn't)

There are many moments that I feel that I have lost because they were not spent living.

They were suspended between my feet on the ground and the air outside. They were not here with me but I was in them anyway, and they floated. They happened, they are over, more will come.

These times are not a judgment on the rest of my life.

But maybe they are and that’s what everyone remembers when they look at me and I’m not laughing.

When I am okay and at work or in the streets or at the bar, I am trying to move around those moments. I am refusing to let them be the words on the paper but instead scratches in the margins. Because I cannot predict when I will be in bed next, I choose to make the times I am awake realized.

I need to feel my way through the days without thinking about what will happen next.

So—I say one life and drink and mess around and make stupid decisions and then I go home and I write and I feel good and happy and manic.

I am trying to live while knowing it can stop. I live for the Tuesdays I get out of bed and go to work but I remember last week when it took an hour to move my leg outside the covers.

I live for what I can know and what I do not.

One life.