A Fight

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

~Kenji Miyazawa

Two years.
It's been two years since we heard the fateful word...leukemia.
That word that would encompass our lives.
The word that is so small, yet so strong.
We have had to watch our small little girl fight back against some things a grown person would have faltered under.
She doesn't look like the same girl anymore.
That girl is long gone.
Never to be seen again.
The girl we have now is different, wiser, tougher.
She's lost the innocence of youth because she's had to bear so much.
She's had to feel her body fight against itself.
To feel it fight with a hate and a determination all together.
To hate the drugs that have been pumped into her daily for the past two years and to be determined to not let the cancer win.
I'll forever miss that girl that I used to know.
The girl with pigtail braids and long bangs that always hung in her eyes.

But as fate saw fit, this is who she's supposed to be.
A girl who embraces her short hair and who lives each day as if it were a gift.
And it is a gift.
And she's a gift to us.
She's our Christmas morning present every day she wakes up in her bed with a breath still in her body.
Ready to keep on traversing this life even though it's been full of potholes.
But, it's her journey.
And we embrace the girl she's yet to be.