Story of an unconscious murderer

We don’t have a choice on where or when we are born. Some are born rich while some are born poor. They say it doesn’t matter where or when we were born, what matters is how we grow up. How we educate ourselves, what we believe in and what we follow, determines what we will grow up to be. I, however, had little choice. No matter how much I wanted, I couldn’t be what I wanted to be. All because I was born a little different.

Let me take you through my life. I was born on 25th may 2008, on the upper arm of a young man named George. Ever since I was born, I was ignored. I was alone and nobody noticed me. I hated the loneliness. I wanted to be noticed. Of course I had others like me, but they never tried to socialize. All they cared about was their own survival. Even if it meant the death of those around them. My only friends were the tiny red discs, that would bring me food every now and then from the wines that spread around us. I was happy to know that those wines grew day after day; it just meant more interactions for me (and of course, more food). And then after about a year, my neighbours started to move. I don’t know what happened, but after that one day, more and more of them, started to migrate to a different place. I loved my land, and I’m sure they did too, so why were they leaving? I was curious. I wanted to move too. I wanted to see the world that would make my neighbours want to go there. But I stayed for the one little thing that I had wanted my whole life. George.

George ignored me, treated me like I was invisible, until 6th December 2010 when George went to the man in the white coat. That man told him about me, showed him where I was and for an instant, I was finally happy, hoping that now, after two and a half years, George would finally notice me, acknowledge my presence. And I was right; he did notice me after that. But it wasn’t how I had expected it to be. George was cold. He was mean to me. He would sometimes curse me and then cry. He would keep saying that I was killing him, which I never really understood why because I had never done anything bad in my life. I was just living, like every other cell around me.

But I was about to learn the harsh truth about myself. As my neighbors moved, I saw another neighborhood beside ours, one that I had never noticed before. It was open, widely spaced. They seemed so like us, yet so different. The cells there seemed happy and lived in harmony, and every family had a maximum of 2 kids (which I thought was pretty odd as everyone in our area had a minimum of 5). No wonder they attracted our attention. Since our neighborhood was sort of food, we decided to take help from our neighbors. We moved to their area and they were welcoming. We had a feast the day the head of that town invited us in. There was so much food, SO MUCH. I was sure we had enough to last 3 days. But by the end of the feast, I saw that NONE of the food was left. Our cells had eaten it ALL. In one sitting. It’s not like everyone ate too much, it was just, there were just too many of us. I also realized that the nice cells from the new neighborhood had little to non to eat. Our people were hoarding the buffet table. I found it pretty rude, but it was just me against trillions of my kind.

Months passed by after we had moved to the new neighborhood and I realized, I was happy. Then one day I was talking to a friend of mine from the new neighborhood and he told me that my people were eating all their food. I was a bit taken aback by what he said. ‘He’s my friend, how can he say that?’ I thought. But then I started to notice that the people from the new neighborhood were decreasing in number. The population of my people in that area had increased tremendously and now there wasn’t enough space for all of us there. My neighborhood was back to the way it was before. Cells trying to survive without caring about anyone or anything. Even the police couldn’t do anything about it since we were just normal citizens trying to survive. We weren’t actually killing anyone. And the nice cells of the new neighborhood were too weak to raise their voice against us or try to get rid of us, and so, they suffocated. Thousands died of starvation and suffocation. There was no room for us anymore. Desperate to find room for our growing population, we moved again. We found another nice neighborhood and were, once again, welcomed. I guess news doesn’t spread fast enough in that area. History repeated itself and we were once again, out of space.

It wasn’t until our 4th neighborhood that I began to notice the pattern. We would see a happy town, move there and the cells from that area would start dying at a tremendous rate. It happened again and again and I began to realize the problem. It was us. We were killing the people of every town we moved to. Maybe our people didn’t understand the concept of harmony and peace. I did. Or did i? I had been living a life, my kind of life, eating and giving birth. That was the norm in our town. That’s what we lived for. Our average life span was also higher than the rest of them. And so our numbers were higher. WAY higher. I had always thought that that was the way of life, that’s how everyone lives. But then I realized maybe something was wrong with the system. I decided to change my way of living. Live like the peaceful people of the surrounding areas lived. But it was impossible. I tried stopping procreation, but I just had too many receptors on my body. I tried to kill myself by starving, but I realized I didn’t need much food to survive. I would go on for days without eating, and still survive. I was the monster here, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

By the time I realized what I was, George was on a hospital bed, with no hair on his body, and pins sticking out of his skin. He was sleeping, since forever. He had machines all around him. The man and women in the white coats would come once in a while to check up on him. His mother would sit beside him and talk to him, sometimes sing and cry at the same time. It was difficult to watch.

And then one day, they took it all away. The machines, the pins, everything. I saw his mother crying on his chest. George wasn’t moving. Our food supply through the red discs had stopped. The nice cells, the ones that we didn’t kill, died of starvation. But we survived.

So here I am telling you my story before I die. To tell you of the cell that I am and the cell I could never be. I never intended to kill any of the nice cells. It just happened. I was born as a cancer cell, and I lived as one, even though I never wanted to, even though I tried.