When Homelessness Feels Small

This is in no way my post for day eighty or eighty-one. I'm just musing right now. I know I should write but I don't want to. Today, when I sent out a mass email asking people for baby toys a friend of mine responded. I haven't talked to her in months, so I asked how she was doing. I missed her. She said something about her cancer.

"Cancer? What?" I responded.
"Yeah, you didn't know I had cancer?"
"No."
"Thought I told you..."

It's not breast cancer or like a little tumor where you get rid of it and you're better. Stage four lung cancer. It's spread, possibly to her back. She told me a whole bunch of jargon about chemotherapy and radiation but I didn't even remember a single word of it. She was originally told she had four weeks to live but she's still around and it's August. I asked her if she is going to be okay. She told me the doctors just don't know anything right now.

She has a two year old daughter. She's twenty-two.

We were best friends in high school after we met in church. We'd have sleepovers and went to summer camps together. Her foster mother decided to essentially lock her up for almost a year. She went to school and home and that was it. She couldn't talk on the phone. Anything. Nothing. Even though she was kept captive she was still my friend. My sister in Christ we used to say.

We were both dating our first boyfriends during this time. The boys were best friends so we were a foursome together. We got coffee every Sunday. We were a family. I remember her boyfriend who was like a brother to me told me, "You are safe now. You finally found a family. You have people who aren't going to hurt you. We're a family. It took you long enough but you found your family."

That guy later sent me on a spiral into bulimia. My boyfriend lost his temper and hit a wall behind me while we were at a school dance, missing my face by a few inches but a little too close to comfort for me. My friend's mom locked her up. Just like that we weren't a family anymore.

Still, she and I remained in touch via facebook and myspace. We didn't talk all that often but I still consider her a dear friend. She's probably the only one who could understand what I went through in that silly church we survived.

And now she's dying.

She lives in north Washington by Canada. Obviously, I don't have the means to get up there and see her. Compared to her cancer I feel like my homelessness is nothing. I don't have any right to complain. I don't have an expiration date hanging over my head.

I don't know how I should feel right now. I am completely numb. Thanks to my Cymbalta I don't feel much of anything. Nor do I know if I should. It's not like I can say we're super great friends now, if we were I would have known about this eight months ago. But she is still dear to me. And I haven't even met her kid yet.

I don't know what's going through my head right now but I feel small and insignificant. Normally when something like this happens to other people they have someone to call and talk to about it. I don't. I don't have anyone that I make those kinds of phone calls to. So instead, I am here, going crazy inside my own head.