Page 119 of While I’m Still Here

I turn my head towards him. “Good fuck or bad fuck?”

“Good.” He rubs one hand over his mouth and looks at the photograph again. “Just… fuck, Bea.”

Strangely, that is better than if he'd told me I was beautiful. Beautiful would have made me argue. I know myself well enough to know that. I would have found a reason he was only saying it because tomorrow is surgery, or because he's sleeping with me, or because there are certain things you're apparently required to say to women who have cancer.

But Danny looks genuinely wrecked by a photograph of me laughing with my tits out, and there is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that. I look back down at the screen. “Why couldn't I see this before?”

I don't think I meant to say it aloud, and nobody answers immediately. Thank fuck. I couldn't bear a speech right now. I don't want somebody explaining beauty standards or self-esteem or telling me that I've always been perfect exactly as I am, because I haven't always felt perfect and pretending otherwise won't give me back the years I've spent treating my body like an unfinished renovation project.

Colin's thumb brushes slowly over the back of my hand. “I don't know, Bea.”

I swallow. “I've got hundreds of pictures I've deleted because my stomach looked big. Or my arms looked fat. Or my tits looked saggy. Fucking hell, I nearly deleted this one because of my stomach.” I touch the screen with the edge of my thumb, careful not to accidentally swipe it away. “And now I'm looking at it, and I don't even fucking care about my stomach.” My voice cracks on the last word. “I just want to keep my tits.”

The room becomes very still. There it is. The real reason we've been taking photographs. Not vanity and not even memory, not really. Bargaining. Some stupid little part of me has apparently decided that if Colin takes enough photographs, I might be able to preserve something tomorrow will take anyway.

Danny's shoulder presses more firmly against mine. “For what it's worth,” he says after a moment, his voice quieter than usual, “I could see it.”

I turn towards him.

He looks almost embarrassed now, which is so unlike Danny that it makes my chest ache.

“What?”

“This.” He gestures vaguely towards me, then the photograph, apparently incapable of finding a less ridiculous way to describe an entire human being. “What you're seeing now. I could see it.”

“Even the stomach?”

His eyes flick towards mine. “Especially the stomach.”

“Pervert.”

“Obviously.”

I laugh wetly and shove my shoulder against his, but he doesn't move away. “I mean it, Bea.” The humour fades from his face again. “You've spent nearly three years complaining about things I was trying very hard not to stare at during working hours.” That gets another laugh out of me, but his eyes stay serious. “You didn't have to change anything.”

Fuck.

I look away before he can see exactly how hard that lands, which is a terrible decision because Marcus is standing a few feet away. He has been quiet throughout all of this.

Of course he has.

Marcus doesn't rush towards silence and try to fill it. He lets it exist until somebody actually has something worth putting inside it, and right now he's looking at the photograph in Colin's hand with an expression I understand before he says anything.

He had a before photograph too. Maybe not like this. Maybe not taken deliberately on the final night. But there was a last photograph somewhere of Marcus with the chest he had before surgery. A version of him who still had two breasts, even if nobody around him would have used that language. A body that changed while the person inside it somehow had to continue.

His eyes meet mine. “Keep it.”

And somehow they're the ones that finish me. My face crumples.

“Fuck.” Colin immediately starts to lower the phone, assuming I don't want to see it anymore, but my hand closes around his wrist.

“No. Don't,” I almost beg and he stops. “I want to look.”

So he lets me. The four of us stand there around one stupid phone while I cry and stare at a photograph of myself topless. Nobody tries to distract me from it or tells me there will be a new body to love after tomorrow. Nobody tells me my breasts don't define me or that they're only tissue or that the important thing is getting rid of the cancer.

Because right now I don't need to know what won't change.

I need to be allowed to grieve what will. I look at my breasts in the photograph. At the soft weight of them against my chest. At the stretch marks along the sides that I've hated since they first appeared. At the nipples I've criticised for pointing in slightly different directions. At the body I have picked apart in mirrors, changing rooms, and photographs for years, always assuming I had unlimited time to learn to like it later.