It's the way the sunlight hits the water (fiction)

She's lying on her back, alone, in bed, idly fondling one breast. Why? Why not. It's there. Consider it some kind of half-assed self breast exam. She's not expecting to find anything, and is quite shocked when she does. It's not as though her breasts are large or that they cannot be deftly maneuvered and plied by her probing fingers. The pea-sized lump is surprisingly easy to find and she wonders when it was introduced into her body and she strains to remember the last time she performed some sort of impromtu, casual search for things that didn't belong.
She feels it incessantly. She takes her groping hand away, and then seeks it out again, chancing that it was a figment of her imagination and she won't be able to recreate it. It's still there. It's quite small: the size of a pea or even smaller, but it's hard and she's confident that she has never encountered it before.
She shoves all the negative thoughts from her mind. She is too young. She eats well, is fit and healthy and there is no history of breast cancer in her family. Some fucking niggling voice tells her that this is the price that she has to pay. This is the price for living a blessed life and for not being appreciative enough. She won't entertain any further thoughts. She will not deal with this tonight: it is currently beyond what she is capable of. It's like being slapped across the face by one's lover at a restaurant and she is choosing to walk out as though nothing has happened.
A week goes by, and in that week the lump is there - readily accessible. She feels it furtively when she goes to the washroom at work. She seeks to defy its existence when lying awake in her bed. It's not going away, she panicks. This is bigger than she is accustomed to. Up until now everything was manageable, fixable. Smashing her face into the dashboard of her parents' car at four years old: they stitched it up. Badly spraining her arm playing basketball when one of her classmates shoved her roughly to the floor for some supposed slight that she had no recollecion of: it mended. The pictures of her ovaries splotched with endometriosis (why had they taken pictures? she had felt reduced to some obscene medical textbook photo op - surely she was composed of something more beautific than that vein-shot, pinkened mess): it was cauterized. She asks her mother about it, hoping her mother has weathered her way through her own, similar experience, but no.
She didn't want to tell anyone, in all reality. She was quite confident that if she ignored it it would go away, shrivel up and be reabsorbed back into her body to reappear at a more appropriate time, say in her late fifties. This was somehow her mother's fault. She was a byproduct of her parent's coupling, so surely her mother should shoulder some of the blame as to why her body might possibly be failing her.
She promises to go see a doctor. By the time she makes the phone call to arrange an appointment she is in some sort of full blown anxiety attack; the kind that outwardly appears as though everything is perfect, but that one word, one touch can utterly shatter. The receptionist asks if it is a routine checkup and she says, "No. I think I've found a lump in my breast". The receptionist tells her it will be about a week. Indignantly she wants to insist, but I've found a lump in my breast, but instead she says nothing, because she chooses to believe that the receptionist's nonchalance means that this is all some sort of non-event.
The stats are good. Odds are she has a benign lump. She's taken statistics. Christ, she got an A+ in statistics, but even if the odds were 1% she still wouldn't sleep until it was confirmed. And she doesn't sleep. So many different tangents. This is karma's way of saying that she hasn't been a good enough person. She could care less about anything. What is the point in seeking joy knowing what might be looming on the horizon. She is paralyzed by the thought that she might have to endure a mammogram, a biopsy and the additional period of waiting on tenterhooks until that debacle is sorted out, let alone the possibility that she might have something much more sinister in store for her. She resolves that if this is nothing, that she will love life and never complain about anything again. She is so goddamned angry that that is happening now when everything is going so well. But isn't that when it always goes awry? The run in the stockings? Getting your period the day you're supposed to meet your lover? A dead battery with a job interview in twenty minutes?
And what if? Just what if? She'll maybe lose her hair. Maybe she'll be too ill to work (but she'll work for a while and it will go through the grapevine and people will ask her with unbearable and vaguely insincere kindness how she's doing, while secretly trying to distance themselves from her, from death). Oh Christ. She remembers her grandmother dying in the hospital like it was yesterday. Cheeks puffy from the steroids as she sat propped in the sterile and starched hospital bed with some ridiculous stuffed animal that had been given to her by her niece and her grandmother offering her some orange juice, or apple juice or whatever the hell it was (the kind that comes in the transluscent cup sized containers with the metal foil on top as though to add further insult to the fact that its recipient's stay is quite temporary). And she hovered in the doorway, seeking solace in her parents' company. It's quite clear to her in retrospect that her nanny most likely just wanted to embrace her grandchildren one last time because, yeah, it was pretty much the last time she saw them but the puffy face and the flourescent lighting and the inordinate, garish cheeriness of that stuffed animal was too much.
Who do you burden with this?
She promises to be good, promises to be good. And everything is so good. And her father calls because her mother has told him, but she can't choke it out and she feels like less of a daughter for not sharing with him when they end their conversation. And babies are born and people get engaged and lovers come and go and she makes new friends and reconnects with old ones and this is just in the span of a week.
And she waits for the appointment and she feels really very alone, but it's most likely nothing even though she's already decided what she'll do if it isn't nothing (she'll blow the majority of her savings touring the fucking world, and then she'll come home and catch up on all the sleep and eating and reading that she's been missing and then she'll take too many pills).
And the appointment comes and, irony of ironies, as she is sitting in the office waiting for her doctor she can't seem to find the lump and, red-faced, she explains this to her doctor who listens and then examines her and tells her that yes, there is a lump, but it's a fibroadenoma which is benign and somewhat commonplace and its size can fluctuate with one's menstrual cycle which, when she thinks back on it, makes sense given where she is on her cycle and she feels a little ridiculous, but her doctor tells her no, nothing is ever ridiculous.
And she takes the bus home and can't concentrate. And it's the way the sunlight hits the water as she's coming home that makes her thankful that she's wearing sunglasses because she's starting to cry. It has something to do with the way the construction worker sitting across from her is nodding off with a slight smile on his face, and the way that two people meet her anxious and tremulous gaze that she casts frantically about which leads her to a rather surreal and unexpected feeling of connectedness as she quells the tears.
This is her first glimpse of what is to come. Of things that she cannot best. Things that will arrive announced and demand your attention even though you have done all that you can to dissuade them.
Later in the evening, when remembering her grandmother she starts to cry. Great, wracking sobs that she knew were welling and cresting within her since she had left the doctor's office. She can't get rid of the image of her grandmother, her wordly, travelled nanny, propped up in some coarse, starched white bed, wanting to feel her grandkids hands clasped in hers one last time.