The Other Side of Tomorrow

When the warm air hits my face, I stop and take a breath.

Every time I leave that place I always feel like I’m breathing for the first time. Something about it makes me feel like I’m suffocating. I … shut down.

After a breath, I force myself into my car and drive away.

I head home, not in the mood to hang out anywhere on my own.

Today is one of those days where I miss having schoolwork. It’ll be hours before I need to make dinner. It’s time to kill with nothing really to do. Maybe my mom was right suggesting I get back into dancing. It’d certainly give me something to do when I don’t need to do anything else. I think I’ve had a hard time going back to dancing because in some ways it feels like that part of me died. My life has been different, and it’ll always be different now.

The old Willa is gone, my life where I was normal doesn’t exist anymore. The new Willa will always have to take immune suppressants and watch the types of food she eats—however, not as closely as it’s watched now—and be monitored for the rest of her life by doctors.

Until, inevitably, that kidney fails me too.

I try not to think about that too much, the fact that a transplant won’t cure me. I understand why a kidney won’t last, especially at my age, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the fact that one day this will be my life again.

And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envious of the naivety other people have about this kind of thing.

Not just kidney disease, but other illnesses in general.

I miss that.

I miss thinking nothing would ever happen.

And it’s not that I went around thinking it, but more since I didn’t know about this stuff I didn’t think about it at all.

I just lived.

Now, that worry hangs like a guillotine over my head. I’m sure, with time, it will lessen. But it’ll always be there.

When I get home, I head straight outside and to the expanse of beach outside our door.

The wind carrying off the ocean whips my hair around my shoulders as I stroll along. The water sparkles in the sunlight, looking as if it’s covered in glitter.

Eventually, I sit, drawing my knees up to my chest.

I startle when I feel the first tear on my cheek.

It isn’t often now that I cry about my situation. What’s the point in any of it? Of crying? Of being sad or angry? It doesn’t change the situation—it’ll still exist, I might as well be as happy as I can.

If I let it rob me of my happiness, I truly have lost everything then.

The tears, however, don’t seem to share in my mindset and continue to fall.

This isn’t easy, not by a long shot, but I’m thankful to still be here. To have a chance to grow up and get a job, maybe even get married one day.

Sometimes all those things feel like impossible hurdles to overcome, but I know they’re not.

What I’ve been through has been hard, so freaking hard, but the worst of it’s behind me and the best lies ahead.

That’s what I choose to focus on.

Not the bad.

Why anyone sits around and obsesses over bad things is beyond me. Bad things only have the ability to hurt you, to eat at you, if you give it permission. Sure, we all have days where we can’t help but feel down, but I also believe we can choose to make our own sunshine.

Or sometimes you’re lucky to have someone who is sunshine.

Like Harlow.