I got an identity I never thought I would have: I became a breast cancer patient. One of my first feelings, after disbelief and fear, was guilt. There is no breast cancer in either my mother’s or father’s family, so I felt that I had somehow betrayed them both. I later learned that guilt seems to be a common feeling among cancer patients, regardless of nationality, age, gender, or anything.

My lump was well-behaved, and it was detected at an early stage. The surgery went well. Now I have a scar on my breast. I think of it as a victory mark, and I hope every cancer patient can see their scars the same way. Those scars are battle scars, and that battle is now part of our understanding of mero. In my battle, though, I was more like the battlefield itself. It was the doctors and nurses who fought for the life of me, another human being. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply dedicated we humans are in saving each other’s lives, and I had the concrete opportunity to experience it firsthand. The nature of my cancer is hormone-based, so I live the rest of my life knowing that it may return. However, although this type of cancer is a life sentence, it is not a death sentence.

Among other things, my cancer has forced me to realize that, on the most basic level, we humans are not genders, nationalities, social classes or other social identities but living organisms. From another perspective, we are animals, not plants, though increasingly we root ourselves in front of our computers and act as if reality happens online and we are mere observers of it. As animals, we were made for movement. To be able to do so is a gift, but it is a gift that must be used, otherwise our physiology suffers.

To improve my metabolism, I now force myself to go out daily and exercise, which has always been something totally not me. This is one of the poems I have written as a cancer survivor, as an owner of this new identity that has shaped me into a different human, a moving animal. The landscape in the illustration is a photograph I took during my walks after the surgery. For the longest time, the winter was very cold, so the field in the picture is actually a frozen lake. I used to walk there a lot. During my walks, I also photographed the witch’s brooms and combined them with the illustration's main character. I don’t consider her as me. She has her own identity as the protagonist of this cancer poem.

At the Edge of the Landscape

Crows tear through the flowerbeds at the edge of the landscape. You stand there like a bride only vaguely aware of the wedding arrangements, endlessly thinking of something gone.

Music floods from the window. The curtains have remained the same, but you are a different woman now, shirt buttoned to the top, because your chest has been tampered with, because it has been radiated.

It was strange to hear you had begun eating for two, that cancer was your own cells turned against you, and how their betrayal insulted you.

The curtain swings lazily like crime-scene tape in the wind, then a slight retreat

as the bells begin to chime and the train passes through.

Now it is gone.

Did it rejoice at finding so much food? Did it feel satisfaction milking the sore nipple, mouth full of bloody flesh? Was it ever ready to admit that it was the closest it could ever get to love?

The snow has begun to melt. The fields are flooded, but somewhere a fire is always about to ignite. Quietly, as if in someone’s dream, a witch’s broom has grown in the birch, as they say in English, or a wind's nest as it is called in Finnish. Whatever the language, such structures are notoriously resilient, but you are a different woman now, and music floods from the window.