“No, I don’t need a wheelchair,” I say, trying to assert my autonomy, but then a nurse sees me take a shortened step — a near-miss trip. So butt in chair I let myself go limp, the Benadryl clogging up my consciousness, while Dave pushes me through the cancer clinic’s halls, a maze of salvation and hope. We were math majors in college together, twenty years ago. Now our project was my life. “Am I stressing you out?” he asks, after bumping me into another corner. “Yes,” I say, the filters thoroughly drugged out of me. “But you’re my teddy bear.”
Michael Nagle is a happy, queer, Sri Lankan American writer, living with cancer in Los Angeles. Instagram and X @nagle5000.