And shake toward you

Alaa Hasan

For a long time, the feeling of pain remained a very personal sensation, much like illness, and like many other emotions. Even until recently, cancer was something very distant from my mind and thoughts, as if it existed on another planet other than the one we live on, or as if there was a spell inhabiting my body to protect me from it. I didn't pay attention to awareness campaigns that fill the world in, for example,  in the month of October. I felt I was far removed from it all. I would quickly dismiss news of those afflicted, until this disease struck two of my relatives with whom I shared the same spatial and temporal domain for many years, my first cousins.