Nineteen is absolute. You lie on the verge of a daunting, jarring adulthood and the bitter end of your teenage years. Sun bites at your ankles while you roll in long grass as you aim to grip onto the last whims of nostalgia through the air. Cheap beer bottles clang in your bag, wrapped in towels to get them past your mother. Victoria’s Secret body spray fills your lungs as your mates attempt to cover the clinging smell of weed that they have smoked at the back of the school field. You fall in love maybe once or twice and donate your whole heart to be walked over with no remorse. Your youth and adolescence flee slowly before you have the time to say all the things you wish you had said to your childhood best friend. She's also packed up her life and let it carry her in a new direction; you haven’t spoken to her in quite some time; you worry she doesn’t think about you as much as you think about her.

At nineteen, I had just left my boyfriend of two years. When you leave your heart on the line at seventeen, and you think you know the world, nothing feels as though it can hurt you. You sit mighty and proud with your so-called lover until, ultimately, like most relationships at this age, it turns into a fucking burning pile of shit. You break up. Guilt consumes you; you cry to Radiohead and Mitski, sprawled across your bedroom floor, letting sadness swallow you whole. Sometimes you think you will never get over this; the world is ending, pits of fire are somehow burning up through your chest, and your heart aches, but ultimately, after some time, you are free.

Now this isn’t to say the pinnacle of being 19 is freedom through a frantic summertime, cramming one too many nights in a spoons garden intoxicated, a few questionable hookups that later make you think “what the fuck”, and getting giddy under disco lights with randoms in your local dire club, but my god, I felt free. Untouchable, even. Unfortunately, like all good things, summer started to come to a close. The sun closed her curtains; nights became longer and more bitter; friends came and went as September loomed in the distance.

Around this time, I had been pushing down the painful and burrowing feeling deep at the base of my lungs to try and fully encapsulate this feeling of freedom, which I hadn’t been able to grasp for so long. I didn’t want summer to end, and ultimately became blissfully ignorant of the fact that this aching feeling was growing more physical. I didn’t really care much about my health, if I’m being frank; what nineteen-year-old really believes anything can be that seriously wrong health-wise with them? I’d never even stepped into a hospital for anything since I was born; I had the immune system of a tank, and there’s nothing a Lemsip and some paracetamol couldn’t solve.

Even when this pain ultimately manifested into me spitting up blood in the sink, I simply wrote it off as a bad chest infection. I later wound up on sticky blue plastic chairs in my local A&E, literally looking like death and feeling like it too. My big medical ego took a slight battering after this; I realised it might actually be serious, but I was still naive. After some time, many sharp needles scratched and poked into me, sitting in some big, loud humming machines and running between 3 hospitals in one day, I was given a cancer diagnosis. A fist-sized, inflamed mass wedged between the back of my lungs and my heart was trying to kill me. It’s a very odd thing to process that your own body is actively trying to catch you out so young. Hospital staff had later told me that if it had been left too long, this disgustingly large, ever-growing mass eventually would’ve caused me to have a heart attack. Nineteen turned from my year of freedom to a year of unwillingly fighting for my life.

I was placed into a TYA ward system; the hospital in which I was treated held consultations in the main wing away from treatment spaces. This is where I met her. She was sat opposite me; we didn’t speak, maybe both too consumed by the anxiety-riddled conversations that we were both about to undergo in the sterile white-walled rooms ahead. She was fucking beautiful. I didn’t catch her name. I tried to find her Instagram on the way back home after hearing a mutter of it on the tannoy.

When I started my chemotherapy, she was already there, in the shared girls’ ward in which I was placed; one bedspace had birthday banners strung across medical equipment; she had even decorated her IV pole. Her hair had already started falling out a little bit and was pinned up in a messy updo to keep it from sticking to her shoulders. She wore a faded black slogan T-shirt, “I’m afraid of women”, and a pair of Iets Frans joggers. We were sat in the run-down games room, where I jokingly asked her about her T-shirt and wished her happy birthday. We spoke for the rest of the night until she had to go home. I can’t even remember what we spoke about, if I’m honest, but I just remember her being so gentle with me, like she already knew me.

As we both went through the trenches of chemotherapy together, my favourite pastime of the week while I lived in the hospital for 2 months was seeing her. Even when I got home stay for 4 days out of these 2 months, I still found myself wanting her there. When she came for inpatient treatment on the ward, we crawled into each other’s single hospital beds and watched Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on loop on the shitty, laggy TVs, cuddled up next to one another while literal poison ran through us. She was my solace through treatment, and as time grew and spending time with each other unfolded, I loved her more than I realised, maybe more than a friend.

Now love isn’t a word I would ever use softly, and after thinking I knew love from my previous relationship, I wasn’t sure I would see it again in the flesh out of fear of what it can lead to, but she made it feel so easy. If I’m being completely honest, this was the last place I’d expect to fall in love. A fucking cancer ward come on, is this “The Fault in Our Stars”? In a place so dull and depressing, she lit it up regardless of how shit she was feeling; she spoke to everyone she came by, and she was so herself that no one could stop her. In some ways, I was inspired by her to adopt this mindset, and I still carry it today.

As time slipped from under us and we both came to the end of our treatment cycles for good (thank fuck), I told her how I felt. We both sat in this limbo of love and friendship, and even though we both knew deep down this wouldn’t actually be a thing, I couldn’t stop this constant looping idea of her being my girlfriend. I had spoken of her so highly to all my close friends, and they all knew I loved her, so why couldn’t I commit to this actually forming into something? Maybe I was subconsciously trauma-bonded to her? Maybe I was scared of getting sick again, and that was holding me back? Her genuinely evil cheating ex? Whatever it was, I couldn’t seem to push past it. Something about it felt off even though it felt so right.

When we were both a few months out of treatment, we met up in her hometown to play pool; I purposely wore low-rise jeans with a hiked-up thong. She told me she liked my perfume. We both got very drunk. We fucked that night. We made out messily in the back seats of the car on the way home; everything was blurry, but I didn’t care. When we got back to hers, I had gotten so drunk that I lay across the kitchen floor in my thong and nothing else. I cried through mumbled words about how I’d ruined everything between us; even in the depths of self-embarrassment, she reassured me so kindly, ran me a bath and washed me while she embraced me tightly. As our lives kept turning, we met new people and experienced new things without one another, and I felt content with it. Life always keeps moving. The romantic love faded, leaving a platonic soft spot in its place.

We’re still friends now; I often think about how she taught me love can be easy even in uncertainty, whether platonic or romantic, and that you should tell the people you love that you love them regardless. Eventually, she packed up and moved to America; I often think about how she is doing out in the States, and I really hope she finds someone who loves her as much as she deserves. She will be so fucking lucky, lucky, lucky in life.