Letters to Luke ~ l.h ~

~Letters to Luke~

This story would probably be a a lot cuter if I wasn't dying. You see, my name's Aria and at the premature age of 13 I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. It's a bit of a mouth full. Basically my bones decided not to work properly, producing large numbers of abnormal blood cells. That's what the doctor's said anyway. My parents thought I just had a fever, but the fever never seemed to go away. It just got worse, until finally they decided to take me to the walk in centre. By this point my body was covered in bruises. But my parent's thought it was just because I was a child, running about and knocking into things. They didn't know that these bruises came from the simplest of touches, from the tap of an elbow to the stub of a toe. The doctors ran some tests, then some more, and then a CAT scan, finally deciding that I was in fact one of those unlucky children to suffer the oh so dreaded disease that is cancer. But I didn't understand, I thought they would give me medicine, make it go away like when you have a cold. But after 3 weeks in the hospital, and the loss of most of my hair, I realised this wasn't a cold. This was my life now.

I started to improve though, by that I mean the doctors thought the chemotherapy was working. They'd taken me off of radiotherapy, believing the chemo was doing it's job. But 2 days after my 17th birthday, they found another tumour in my hip. The chemo hadn't worked, only slowed down the growth. Then the bad news came. I was terminal. They couldn't save me, my condition was too far along. You'd think at the age of 17 I'd be distraught, I mean I was going to die god knows when, but I wasn't. I wasn't afraid of dying, I had suffered for so long, I was ready. But then, after all of this, they told me they'd found a drug that would suppress the tumour growth, I could live for ages, so long as the medication continued to work.

You're probably reading this thinking my story is about my cancer, about how I struggle until the end of life and then die peacefully in my sleep with my friends and family surrounding my hospital bed. Well, that's not the case. This story isn't about my cancer, nor is it about my death. It's about a boy, a boy who made me see that what defines me, what defines us, isn't ourselves. We are defined by the people around us. This boy, this oh so wonderful boy, the only boy that saw me for me and not my cancer, is the reason I'm writing this story. You see, there's a time when one person comes along in your life and completely turns it upside down, for better or for worse. But no matter what, this person changes you. This boy changed me, and I had no idea of his name. That's what makes it even more wonderful. The allusive boy with no name that came into my life for a bear few minutes changed my life completely, isn't it magical?

So this is my story, like I said it would be cuter if I wasn't cancer ridden. It's not a typical love story, where girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy live happily ever after. But it's my story, and I am privileged to have been loved by the only person in the world who sees me as Aria, not Aria "the girl with cancer".

Luke was his name. Luke Hemmings. And these are my letters to him.