Forever Friends Read Online Free

doctor’s words was enough to ease the year of emotional and spiritual drought.
    It had been for more than four complete seasons that she had been living a pretense while entertaining anxiety that nobody, not her siblings and family members, not her doctor, not even her closest friends, could possibly understand. As hard as she tried not to do so, for more than a year she had been preparing herself for the worst while trying to appear as if she believed the best.
    Margaret was sure she had fooled everyone into thinking she was strong and equipped and prepared to handle any treatment, any further surgery, any bad news. No one else, she thought, saw the lag in her thinking or the dulling of her purpose. No one else knew of the colorless way she now dreamed and she believed that she had managed to hold all of her trouble inside. But in spite of what she hid from others, in spite of how she thought she appeared, the truth was, in the past twelve months, two weeks, and four days, Margaret had lost her edge.
    She did not know for sure the exact moment it had happened. There was not one day when she felt it loosen and slipaway, an hour when she watched it narrow and disappear. It had been like a sand dune on the beach, sifting and sieved; it was simply there one summer and gone the next.
    She had talked openly regarding her concern, potential metastasis and a recurrence. She had gone to the library, read medical reference guides and stories of healing. She had learned how to access the Internet and find the latest information about breast cancer. She had asked questions of her physicians. She’d read reports and even gone to a medical conference. She had spoken of what might happen if the tumor spread. She’d done everything she thought she should do to be defensive and healthy and prepared, but none of the education or information or resolution could stop the simple and gradual way she had come undone.
    Over time and without evidence, Margaret had convinced herself that the cancer had returned, had sneaked through bloodlines and brain waves, and was growing all over her body.
    As hard as she had tried to maintain a rationality in her thinking, a levelheadedness during the time right after her surgery, as diligently as she had tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, there were moments when she thought she literally felt her cells bump and divide, moments when she was sure she heard tumors bud and flower across organs, moments when she was drowned in the perception that she was riddled with the disease and was taking her last breath.
    And it was in these moments, these dark and petrifying moments, that Margaret readied herself for death. And no one, not Jessie or Charlotte or Louise or Beatrice, no one hadbeen with her; no one had struggled alongside her; no one had stood ground with her when she wrestled and was finally overcome by the terror. This she’d had to do alone.
    So that now, even as she sat in her physician’s office hearing the words she was convinced she would never hear, seeing the proof on paper, the clear evidence that nothing abnormal was growing inside her, Margaret realized how deeply those moments of terror had eaten away at her confidence and eroded her sense of peace. And she was not sure she would ever be able to recover what had already been lost.
    It would take a lot of time, she thought as she sat across from her doctor, to eradicate the damage of doubt, months, maybe years to tighten up what had been stretched and pulled loose, a lifetime perhaps to patch up what was threadbare and unattached. And yet maybe, Margaret prayed in her fleeting and hopeful thoughts, maybe I can now finally be free.
    She waited in the wake of the good news, trying to imagine herself healed, trying to think how it would be not to take note of every change in her body, but she knew that even with the positive prognosis proven and displayed, it remained difficult to hold such confidence, to keep it in her