Unravelling

In my kitchen, I have a smart-assistant screen that displays pictures from an online photo album. Quiet and unassuming, it does what it’s told, and most days when I happen to glance at it, the pictures evoke happy memories.  Many pictures go unnoticed.  A few refuse to.

Some pictures stop me cold; they feel like a jolt to a different reality.  There is one picture in particular that causes me to stop and stare at the screen. 
She is sitting. Hair is down.  White shirt and pale shorts.  Her knees show that unmistakable awkwardness that belongs to seven-year-olds: long and thin legs, bulbous patella, and not quite hers yet. She is smiling so big in this photo, unguarded that way children do - her teeth a mixture of baby and adult teeth, her two front teeth dominate the smile, proud and oversized, like they plan to carry the expression solely on their own.  

She asked me to take her picture.
She wanted to show her friends a picture of her sitting in a wheelchair. 
What you can’t see in the picture is the story that is unfolding outside the frame.   The redness in my eyes.  The fear that was on the tip of my tongue—the knots in my stomach.  The booming sound my heart felt like it was making. 
This picture symbolises the day our lives changed, the day her childhood ended, the day when ‘we can never go back’ became a reality.  Seeing this picture, I can feel the fear that I carried with me for the next three years.  Each morning, I woke up with my heart in my throat - and each night I lay with worrying about the horrors of the next day.  And in between, I plastered a smile on my face to hide it.  

That picture was taken 20 minutes after I had been told my daughter had cancer.  

It was 20 minutes after we were instructed to leave and to go to a different hospital the next day. 

It was 20 minutes after I stopped asking questions that all got the same answer; “We don’t know.” 
This was the day when our sweet little life unravelled, and I was shown the dirty underbelly of everything I took for granted.  

This was the last picture I would take of her while she was still a child inside.