I read this on Friday afternoon, and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend: Rachel Dorn’s Dealbreakers in X-Ray Magazine about dating while incurably ill. It’s structured like a series of short confessionals rather than a story, and it’s immediately engrossing. Here’s how it starts:

Would you date a dying girl I type in the message box. My thumb hovers over the send button. I hit delete.

What are ur dealbreakers I type instead.

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We don’t say terminal anymore, Janessa, my support group leader, says on one of our monthly Zoom calls. We say incurable. Because, you know, people can live a long time with this now. What doesn’t need to be said is that not all of us will.

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In the months after I find out I have an incurable heart and lung disease, I spend a lot of time thinking about a man. All my journal entries mention him. I spend pages dissecting our FaceTime calls, the look he gives me when I say I have to go, his insistence that I call him right back, trying to mine for proof that he really loves me. That I am still lovable, despite this. 

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When I met T, a few months before I got sick, I Googled his name. The first result was a missing person report from several years earlier, accompanied by a thumbnail photo of him smiling in a black sweatshirt. Last seen in the Pine Bluff area on October 31st, the caption said, anyone with information about his whereabouts please contact the Pine Bluff Police Department. I took a screenshot and sent it to my friend: is this a red flag

It’s a quick read. I was tempted to include more quotes but you should go read it now.

It’s not entirely clear what it is — until the end I was hoping it was fiction and fearing it was memoir, much like the Amy DeBellis piece from a couple of weeks ago. At the end is the label ‘Creative Nonfiction’, which was just shattering. There are lots of moments in that story that could be describing someone I love, in a way that had never occurred to me before.

And just like DeBellis’ piece, it’s a wildly eye-opening view of the world from a perspective that’s not often considered. I love pieces like this, and I could have read 100 pages of it.

It’s a doozy of an essay. It’s honest, blunt, and moving. I hope there is a lot more to come from Rachel.

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