For three years I’ve hardly said “cancer” out loud. I’ve circled it, let it sit there unspoken, as if naming it might give it ideas. Not once have I properly written about it either, which is odd, given the old trade reflex: all material is a gift, isn’t it? Even this. Especially this.

“Talking to cancer.” Listen to that. What a load of upholstered nonsense. As if we were in correspondence. I had it. It went away. Burned out, sluiced with chemicals, a controlled demolition inside the body. The kind of treatment that would kill you if there weren’t something more urgent to kill first. Brutal, simple, almost elegant.

But then it comes back, or might, or has never quite left the room, and the silence starts to feel less like stoicism than superstition. As if by not naming cancer I’ve been trying to wrongfoot it, to keep it from settling in. A friend said she would ghost it. Refuse it the dignity of attention. I believe her. I think she could do it.

But I’m not a ghoster. I’m a caller-out. I drag things into language and pin them there, like a specimen, like a suspect under a lamp. Not because words have magic powers, though most of me believes they might, but because silence hasn’t done the job. Silence has only let it stalk about in the dark, bulking up, making threats.

So this is me saying “cancer”. Not with any great faith in testimony as cure. I’m just calling it by its name, giving it air, in the hope that once it’s said out loud it’ll know that I’m on the case.