…from “Landscapes of Cancer and Desire” by Annie Ernaux:
At what point did I stop thinking and saying, “I have cancer,” and start to say, “I had cancer”? I feel as though I am still between the two, in a zone of uncertainty because at any time I could slide back from the second state into the first, my cancer having recurred. But if I measure the reality of cancer by how indifferent I was last year to things that interest the majority of people, by my remoteness from world events of that time, and measure the unreality of cancer by the anger those events provoke in me again, by the mostly futile preoccupations I engage in anew, and the stretch of future that I have granted myself by buying a five-year warranty on a dishwasher, for example, then I can say, “I had cancer.”
Well, then 