It’s nearly midnight on a Sunday as I write this. I’m stretched out on the couch, wide awake, listening to Tugboat snore contentedly from his bed across the room. He’s on his back, feet sticking straight up in the air—the position he only finds when he’s fully at peace. I’ve come to learn that’s his tell. When he sleeps like that, he’s happy. Probably dreaming about food. Or getting pets from literally anyone in the building. Either way, it makes me smile.

In a few minutes, the calendar will roll over to the 15th. That means I have twenty-two days left before I learn what comes next in this cancer story. Twenty-two days until scans, answers, and whatever reality is waiting on the other side of early January.

Since radiation ended, sleep hasn’t come easily. It’s not that I don’t sleep at all—I do—but it’s restless, shallow, and easily interrupted by my own thoughts. These nights are strange because they’re both exciting and terrifying at the same time. That probably sounds contradictory, but it’s true.

They’re exciting because I can imagine a version of January where I’m told the radiation worked incredibly well. Where the words “we don’t see any cancer” are said plainly, almost casually, as if they aren’t capable of rearranging an entire life in a single sentence. That version of the future is easy to picture, and it fills me with real optimism.

But I’ve also become more of a realist than I used to be—maybe because of all this, maybe because you don’t get to be naïve forever. I know the odds aren’t great. A coin toss at best. And that means I have to hold space for the possibility that the news won’t be ideal, and that this road doesn’t end as cleanly or quickly as I’d like.

I want to be clear about something, though: this isn’t despair. I’m not spiraling or sinking or giving up. I still have hope. I still have faith. What I do have is a lot of quiet time to think—about mortality, about time, about what actually matters when the noise dies down. That might sound cliché or even a little pompous, but given the circumstances, it feels unavoidable.

This is usually the part where that Tim McGraw song sneaks into my head—“I went skydiving, I went Rocky Mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu.” To be extremely clear: I will not be skydiving, I will not be bull riding, and there is a zero percent chance I will be spending even a fraction of a second on a bull named Fu Man Chu. I’m reflecting on life, not actively trying to shorten it.

Still, the song does its job. It got me thinking about the things I do want to do, and that list surprised me.

I want to live in Montenegro for a while, drinking coffee by the water and working my way through the eighty-four books currently sitting in my backlog. I want to graduate from being a modestly competent cook to a genuinely impressive one. I want to give away all my bourbon to people who will save it for the right moments—to forget hard times, remember good ones, and laugh at everything in between that made our friendships what they are.

I want to get a bespoke three-piece suit made in Italy, wait until cancer is firmly in the rearview mirror, and then wear it to hit on a woman wildly out of my league—fully expecting to get rejected and enjoying the absurdity of it anyway. I want to watch my nieces and nephews grow into adults who are better people than I ever managed to be. I want my mom to go back to Germany, where she met my dad, before she gave up so much of her own life to help her kids become adults half as good as she is.

More than anything, I want to get better at saying no—to the noise, the distractions, the things that feel important in the moment but won’t matter at all when you finally sit down and take inventory of your life. And I want to keep adding to this list as time goes on.

This isn’t a morbid bucket list. It’s not wishful thinking born out of fear. It’s a future I’m genuinely excited about. That’s why these sleepless nights are strange—they’re filled with both anticipation and uncertainty. The fear that some of these things might not happen is real, but the truth is that fear exists for everyone, cancer or not. None of us are guaranteed time.

Time is precious. It’s strange and fragile and unbelievably valuable. And wasting it—out of habit, fear, or apathy—feels especially stupid once you’re forced to really look at it.

So with that, I’m going to close the laptop and pick up my book. Because I know someone will ask, it’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and it’s incredible.

If the posts between now and early January are a little sparse, that’s intentional. There isn’t much new to report in these twenty-two days, and I’ll do my best not to sound pretentious or boring while we wait. Come January sixth and seventh, though, I’ll have a story to tell—good or bad.

And if you have any book recommendations, I can always make room for an eighty-fifth.

I haven’t written in almost two weeks, mostly because these are the dog days of cancer—the slow, uncomfortable stretch where nothing really happens but the waiting. I’m stuck in a holding pattern until the first week of January, when I head back to Houston for scans and, yes, the now-routine anal probing. Never thought I’d reach a point in life where I could say that without either laughing or thinking, “WTF?” But here we are. 2025 has been full of surprises.

The truth is, without any new medical chaos to report, I kept convincing myself I had nothing worth writing about. Who wants to read about me walking Tugboat, or the book I’m reading, or the PlayStation game my little brother and I dive into at night? Who cares that I’ve been learning to cook things I can’t pronounce with ingredients I can’t identify? (Tonight’s class is allegedly Mediterranean, but based on the grocery list, it could also be witchcraft.)

Then my friend Amy stopped by this afternoon to return some measuring cups and to distract Tugboat, who treats visitors like his personal entertainment staff. While I was stressing about my “lack of content,” she said something that stuck with me: that after the heaviness of all the Houston stories, there’s beauty in the mundane. People might actually want to see the quiet parts too.

It helps that she said this in a very elegant British accent—the kind that sounds like M from the James Bond movies. The one difference is that Amy looks absolutely nothing like Dame Judi Dench, something she would want on record.

So with her voice in my head (and yes, it is objectively better than the voice in my own head), I started thinking about the past couple of weeks. And honestly? Things have been boring… in a very good way.

I’ve been going back to work, which keeps my brain too busy to spiral about what radiation may or may not be doing inside me. I’ve been going to the gym again, which feels like getting a small piece of normal life back. I even squatted heavy for the first time since this ridiculous bag was attached to me. Hitting 300 pounds again was an emotional rollercoaster: good because it felt like progress, bad because 300 pounds is still very much 300 pounds, frustrating because it used to feel easier, and optimistic because once things are fully normal again next year, I know I’ll be able to push past it.

Evenings are for video games with my younger brother, whose superpower is turning my mind off better than any meditation app ever could. And Tugboat—my furry little tyrant—has softened enough to follow me room to room. Realistically, he wants treats. I choose to believe it’s affection. If he could read this, he’d roll his eyes so hard he’d sprain something.

I still have thirty days until I get any real answers, but when I look at the last thirty since radiation ended, life hasn’t been bad. In fact, it’s been pretty good. I’ve had far fewer reasons to pity myself than I would’ve guessed, and that alone feels like something to hold on to.

For now, the dog days of cancer and the beauty in the mundane are enough to get me to whatever comes next.