plans

One of my friends has a cyst on her ovary. They don't know yet if it's cancerous or not.

The rest of our friends are all talking about perhaps planning a group vacation together. Like to New York or something. I'm thinking I'd rather spend that kind of money taking a vacation by myself (thus, a "vacation") to Seattle or something. Which, to them, makes me antisocial, selfish, and weird. We're not "Friends," we're not the Bayside Gang. Why should we plan vacations together? How would plucking ourselves out of a SoCal coffeeshop and transporting ourselves to more coffeeshops thousands of miles away constitute as a vacation? How can moving the bickering and teasing and conversation and laughter from here to there be worth all that money?

I think that this is their idea of what we're *supposed* to do. Because one of us might have cancer, we should take some cheesy, lame vacation together before she dies. And we can all reflect life together that way, and she can fittingly die *whilst* on vacation, in one of our arms.

I honestly don't know how to feel about the cyst. I'm pretty much pretending nothing's wrong until we know exactly how bad it is. I never taught myself how to deal with things like this. I tend to get numb, or bitter, or both.

Everyone else wants to do the *right* thing, to whisk her away to New York and pretend that problems don't exist, to pretend like paradise is here on Earth, even if people do get things like cancer.

And I want to yell at her to stop being such a bitch, to stop expecting me to kiss her ass even more now when she's so goddamn fucking mean to me. I wonder if I would feel a certain degree of relief if she were gone, but I can't know that. I think of her "going away" and feel relief, but I think of her "dying" and it fucking rips me up.

But I still wouldn't take the vacation with everyone. They can all take scripted memories of Ground Zero and the Statue of Liberty, I'll take the memories of real life, how she can make us cry laughing one minute and make us want to either punch her or slit our own wrists the next minute.