You sit to my right, absently bouncing your legs as always. You look so starkly out of place in this world, like a mole on creamy skin. You sit in silent for the first time since I've known you, apparently at a loss for words. To my left, amid year old O magazines and fake plastic trees are the regulars. They sit eithr in silence or weeping to themselves. Perhaps the most prominent figure in the landscape is an old woman combing out her hair.
     She is oxygen dependent and makes a sisnister wheezing with every breath she takes; every few strokes of her oily hair she take opens a tiny fissure in her tissue paper skin that starts to ooze a canary yellow puss I can smell across the room. It speaks loudly of over-due mayonnaise that has been ruminating in the sun. She cries the loudest and freest of in anyone in the office and for a moment I wonder if I hug will I be able to get the smell off my shirt.
     Beside her sits her husband. His eyes are dry and cold. I can tell by the look on his face he wishes his wife would quiet herself. He has no time left to listen to her weep; he may not suffer as she does, but he is still plagued by the hands of time. His back is humnched over in an unpleasent angle and his ashen skin hangs several times to large off his frame.  
     In the far corner sits a young woman, no older than thrity-five. She wears no wig; she is proud of her baldness and it makes her all the more beautiful. She sits humming to herself as she does a crossword; her son sits next to her, bored, eating French fries. Whenever he can get a way with it, he sneaks his hand up and rub his mother's head and makes a "whoosh!" sound while giggling fiercely.
     Her husband doesn't carry himself with the same ease she does. Every few seconds he reprimands his son for a variety of ridiculous things. Whether it be rubbing his mother's head or chewing to noisily, his son can do nothing right. Every time he scolds his son, his wife places a frail, bonyhand on his shoulder and murmurs, "I'm fine." After the sixth or seventh "I'm Fine" he dissolves into a puddle of tears.
     Next to the couple is a young man holding on to a chair with all his might. He is wearing a beanie that reads, "Fuck Cancer." He looks as though he just recieved a treatment; he sways, cltuching the side of his chair, sweating pouring down his face. He slumps over and seems to fall asleep for several minutes. When he ragins consciousness, he attempts to stand but can't; his eys unfocus and he vomits on the floor. The staff thingks nothing of it and offer him no other courtesy than calling a ride home for him.
     "Mr.--"
     You jump up and tow me out of the room. The nurse looks like she's had a headache for the past five years. She ushers us into a cramped exam room with a much courtesy she can allow people she suspects will be dead soon.
     You hop up on the big steel exam table and swing your feet back and forth like a child would. You suddenly become aware of the fact that you are still in your work clothes and pink up at the cheeks. You still haven't said one world since we entered the place.
     The room is small and the majority of the space is consumed by the exam table. The walls are just as cluttered; every free surface is dedicated to some disgustignly inspirational poster of some plain madical diagram of mutating cells. Perhaps the only legitimate piece of art in the room is a plain white poster reading. "My Oncologist Is My Homeboy."
     You continue to swing your feet back and forth like a pendulum counting out the minutes. You feverishly roll and unroll your tie as though there were some hidden message on it; for the first time in my life, I see you not as a man who is carved out of stone, but as a child who is terrified of experiencing this pain again. I see the hairless child crying night because he doesn't know if he'll wake up in the morning; I see the boy hiding in a pile of stuffed animals so he doesn't have to get stuck with another needle. I see the face of the man I love dissolving before me and disappearing into thin air.
     I can recll perfectly the days just weeks before when you took underground and snuck me into the cadaver lab and showed me your profession. "This one," you would say as you held someone's liver, "died of truama. See how all the organs are bruised and squishy?" You held their heart in your heands and said in perfect objectivity the weight, the cause of death, the age, and their name; then you cast it aside, purely an afterthought. It no longer beat; its purpose had dried up, just as it would as it lay detached from its body.
     I wondered how long it would be until you were riffled through by some med student; if he could look at your bones and say, "This one died of leukemia. See the central lines in his neck? That's where he got his chemo; a lot of good it did him." I wondered who would cast away that which I laid claim to, who would take away my heart.
     The doctor enters; he holds a clipboard and makes a few marks on it. After reading everything he makes a few thoughtful noises.
     As we wait for the doctor to reads us the news, I know that no matter what the outcome is, I'll be waiting here forever.