Here it is.
My moment of triumph.
After all, who could claim that they had overcome a stage three bodily mutation? Cancer, as I often say to myself, is a journey across water. There are days where you lay hove to in your minuscule raft and wonder when you'll wash ashore; other times, you're tired of being thrown around by Mother Nature in the pride of her strength, and just a glance at the cerulean waves urges you to plunge deep beneath the sea bed and drown in your own insanity.
I was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma two months after my fourteenth birthday. My parents were devastated - they kept their forgotten dreams to themselves, for they couldn't quite picture their only daughter getting married and bearing children of her own.
"Darling," my mother once said, during my sudden episodes of pain which left me hospitalised, "Do you see that little girl outside?" And I craned my neck to glimpse at the small child, the epitome of tragic innocence, who was ringing a silver bell beside the nurses' desks.
"One day, you'll be able to ring it too," she promised.
She didn't realise that glimmering tears were cascading down her cheeks.
The only friends I had for half a decade were the hospital staff: when I was feeling good, I could waltz into the kitchen and snag a bite of chocolate cake, or help a new patient adapt to life beneath blinding white lights and the scent of antiseptic. I declared that each and every one of them were to attend either my funeral or college graduation, to which they rolled their eyes and sighed. Now when my eyes skim across the flooded hall, at all their flushed faces, I see their smiles on my good days and their sympathetic frowns on not-so-good ones.
Martha, the nurse who had been with me since the day I entered through the glass doors a petrified teenager.
Janitor Jensen, my very own walking book of puns.
Doctor Lee whom, despite having given me excruciatingly painful doses of medicine, I love and am forever indebted to.
Martha hands me a glass of water and three pills, informing everyone of their significance. Her fingers intertwine with mine before a torrent of unfamiliar words flow out of her mouth.
'Take your last chemo, boys and girls
Ring this bell and tell the world
It's time to cheer, so let's all say
What an incredible day it is today.'
I ring it with everything left inside me. I ring it for the children who never had the chance to, I ring it for the patients still under those itchy hospital covers, I ring it for the people fighting to survive. And the moment warm applause replaces the merry chime, I cry, because it was the moment I knew I had won.
