Control: An X-Men Adventure and Wolverine Romance

The Dreaded C Word

To begin, let's go all the way back. Back to when I was a young teenager; when I found out I was different.
And No, not in the usual 'I must rebel against the system by being into unusual music and wearing a lot of black' kind of way, not that I didn't emnrace that rite of passage too. I was no different from other people my age in that regard, and there's nothing wrong with self-expression, of course.

My real difference was quite drastic. I was an anomaly. A serious one, at that. I got very sick, the dreaded C-word, and survived.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I died in hospital. Yes, I died. I went through the pain of my body slowly self-destructing for over a year and being pumped full of all sorts of chemicals for treatment, and then I died. It was at fourteen years of age, when I woke up in the morgue, that I realised I was very different to the average human... after some considerable panic set in. It became clear that the cancer was not the only mutation happening within my cells.

All trace of my illness was gone, aside from my lack of hair, which too would quickly recover. How was this possible? I screamed the place down from inside the refrigerator full of the hospital's dead until someone finally came to my rescue. The woman who pulled me out looked like she was going into shock when her eyes confirmed what her ears were already telling her.

"Oh my god," was all she managed to say.

In fact, she kept muttering it, over and over as I struggled down from the cold metal tray. I collapsed onto the floor after rolling to the side. My legs burned and ached, I hadn't been able to stand for months and my limbs would not do exactly as my brain told them to. I couldn't support my own weight. It was like having a leg go to sleep on you, only it was my whole body. Frustrated and exhausted, I paused for a moment. I gasped for breath, each intake of air feeling like ice water in my lungs. I was shuddering from the cold and the pain, and she hurriedly fetched a senior member of staff. I tried to look round as the convuldions lessened and my haggard breathing grew stronger. The nurse returned with two more people in tow. They were all shocked into stunned silence.

My breathing continued to strengthen, and my ribs no longer felt like they were being crushed as my chest rose and fell, rhythmically now. As the pain began to fade away I began to notice other things. The brightness of the fluorescent lights above, the smell of formaldehyde, the whirring of an airconditioning unit.

Finally, I was brought some clothes and a blanket as soon as the adults calmed down enough to see my terrified expression, mirroring their own. Tears began to well up in my uncomfortably dry eyes, and I began to cry uncontrollably. After all, it would be hard enough for a fully developed adult to comprehend their death and apparent resurrection, never mind a fourteen year old who had just spent the past year of their life dealing with the trauma of cancer and accepting the eventuality of their early death. I couldn't remember anything from 'beyond'.

When news of the event spread, everyone had an opinion about it. From the religious nutcases claiming divine miracle or harbinger of the end times, to those who declared it an elaborate scam. I was relentlessly quizzed about what it was like to die and constantly called a liar and a fraud.

The honest truth was that I couldn't exactly remember what had happened, not beyond my last few minutes. There was only darkness, nothingness. I was astonished how many people insisted that I was wrong about this. How many of them had actually died? How could they tell me what I ought to have experienced? The plain fact was that I had no more idea than anyone else about any of it...

I received a great deal of letters suggesting that this was 'the work of the devil' or that I had 'been spared because I had a higher purpose that their God wanted me to fulfil'. I just wanted things to return to normal as soon as possible, but that was somewhat difficult with all the chaos that I had caused by waking up.

My condition took a bad toll on my parents too. My father found it especially hard to accept that I had somehow survived to begin with, he no longer saw me in the same light. At times it felt like I had disappointed him by surviving - and returning as a mutant. Looking back on everything, I don't blame them. They had been preparing for so long for my death. Every counsellor told them I'd be going to a better place but, ultimately, I'd be leaving them forever.

It wasn't as easy as you might initially think for them to accept that I really was back. My mother would have nightmares that she'd only dreamt that I returned to them and she became extremely overprotective, as many parents do when their child survives a serious illness. If I got so much as a cold, she would wrap me up in so many layers that I looked like the Michelin man and drag me to the doctor's. In fact, to be perfectly honest, she went a bit mad. To begin with, I had strict curfews and she would check up on me every hour or so by text, then it escalated further and she would not let me go to school anymore. She didn't want me to interact with anyone in case I got sick again, even though, since I had woken up, there was seemingly nothing I couldn't heal from. I never seemed to get sick anymore.

She insisted that homeschooling me was the only option. I loved my mother, I really did, but it is incredibly hard at such an age to understand that she wasn't intending to keep me prisoner. She did not realise that her actions were damaging me and driving a wedge between us. We fought all the time, all three of us. Her behaviour spilled over into other aspects of her life as well. The incident had changed all of us dramatically. My father could no longer look me in the eyes.

By the time I was 16, I felt like a prisoner of war. Every waking moment was miserable. I had no friends, little contact with the outside world at all and was self-conscious of my poor education. I ended up teaching myself as much as I could in an attempt to keep up. The internet was my saviour; without it, I would have gone mad too. My lack of a social life of any kind took its toll on me the most. Of all the things I pined for, this was the most significant. What use was a second chance to live life if I was forced to live it like this? I spent hours arguing with my parents before locking myself in my room and blasting some kind of angry music to drown myself in, knowing full well that they would be arguing with each other just as intensely now too. Looking back on those years was painful. I was becoming a shell of my former self. I felt I had no one who understood me, this new me. I didn't even understand myself.

So I left.