Holes Essay

[Calfu Baransky]

Oneyear ago, Matthew Buff, a leukemia survivor, was fine-tuning his college applications. Today, he is a busy freshman at Emory University majoring in biology on a pre-med track. Matthew's personal goal is to become a pediatric oncologist focused on genetic research. The following is his college admissions essay.

A round piece of silicone wrapped in a metal ring about the size of a quarter. If you tip it slightly, at just the right angle, where it catches the light, you would see hundreds of tiny holes covering the entirety of its surface. A miniature vacated battlefield of a war once won. It may not look like much to most people, but this tiny piece of plastic riddled with needle holes called a port or port-a-cath, helped to save my life and is now my visual inspiration to help others.

In the beginning, each hole could have easily represented another round of chemotherapy, spinal tap, blood transfusion, hospitalization, surgery or enrollment into a new study to treat my leukemia. They could also represent another day unable to attend school, each time being isolated from friends, and too many middle-of-the-night trips to the emergency room that would ultimately lead to another round of pokes, tests and abruptly waking to the beeping alarm of my IV pole early the next morning.

However, as my body has recuperated over the past five years since completing cancer treatment, the meaning of each hole has also transformed. Each hole now represents a lesson learned, a person met through my experience and the opportunity to make impactful change or people affected by catastrophic illness.

My current objective is to build my college education with a concentration in biology and life sciences with the goal to become a research oncologist. Beyond my academic interest in those areas, I believe shifting my experiences from patient or receiver of care, to student of science with the intent to deliver care, will provide me the knowledge and holistic perspective to begin to develop the passion and endurance necessary to make a life-long commitment to healing through medicine.

Written by Matthew Buff

Matthew was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in March 2009. Now six years beyond treatment, he is a college student working towards his goal of becoming a pediatric oncologist focused on genetic research.

Many childhood cancer survivors rely on survivorship clinics in order to make sure their cancer stays away and address the late-effects of their cancer treatment. Your donation supports the researchers who make these clinics possible for survivors like Matthew.

It was not true cruelty, of course. My clients paid seventy-five dollars an hour to enact their disempowerment. The sex industry is a service industry and I served humiliation to order. But the pageant of it was the key. To spit in an unwilling face was inconceivable to me and still is. But at a man who had paid for it?

They knelt at my feet. They crawled naked across gleaming wood floors. They begged to touch me, begged for forgiveness. I refused. I leaned over their plaintive faces and gathered the wet in my mouth. I spat. Their hard flinch, eyes clenched. The shock of it radiated through my body, then settled, then swelled into something else.

It was the thrill of transgression, I said. Of occupying a male space of power. It was the exhilaration of doing the thing I would never do, was forbidden to do by my culture and by my conscience. I believed my own explanations, though now it is easy to poke holes in them.

Alex was a grade ahead of me and a foot taller. He had a wide mouth, tapered brown eyes, and a laugh that brayed clouds in the chill of fall mornings at our bus stop. He wore the same shirt for four out of five school days and I thought he was beautiful. I had known Alex for years but that recorded swim is the first clear memory I have of him. A few months later, he spat on me for the first time.

The start of fifth grade marked more change than the location of my bus stop. My parents had separated that summer. And my body, that once reliable vessel, began to transform. But what emerged from it was no happy magic, no abracadabra. It went kaboom. And this new body was harder to disappear.

Before puberty, I was a strong, brown child who moved through the world and toward other people without hesitance or self-consciousness. I read hungrily and kept lists of all the words I wanted to look up in a notebook with a red velvet cover. I still have the notebook. Ersatz, it reads. Entropy. Mnemonic. Morass. Corpulent. Hoary. I was smart and strong and my power lay in these things alone. My parents loved me well and mirrored these strengths back to me.

One autumn afternoon, Alex invited me and my little brother to his house to play soccer. I was not a soccer player, but I dragged my little brother down the road and up that dirt driveway to where Alex and his cousin kicked the ball back and forth across the patchy grass. The sky hung low over his dusty yard and silvery clouds ripened overhead. At eleven, I could still win a race against the boys on my baseball team. Even holding my T-shirt tented in front of my chest, I could win. They still called me Mrs. Babe Ruth. But Alex was a year older than me and twice as big. And he did not let me win.

Eat that! he sneered, and spat into the cloud of dust kicked up by our feet. He sauntered back to his side of our makeshift field and swiped his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt, baring his flat stomach, ridged with muscle.

It was not fun. It was a humiliation. It was a mystery. It was a punishment, though I did not know for what. And the instinct in me to hide it so strong that I lied in my diary. I wanted no record of that wreck.

The Titanic was named after the Greek Titans, an order of divine beings that preceded the Olympic deities. I loved Greek mythology as a girl, and among my favorite gods was Mnemosyne, a Titaness and the mother of the Muses. According to fourth century BC Greek texts, the dead were given a choice to drink either from the river Lethe, which would erase their memories of the life before reincarnation, or to drink from the river Mnemosyne, and carry those memories with them into the next life. In his Aeneid, Virgil wrote that the dead could not achieve reincarnation without forgetting. At the age of twelve, I had made my choice.

The second time, I spat back. Over a period of weeks, he spat in my hair, my face, my books, my backpack. I rarely got him back, but I always tried. Once, I dodged him well enough to board the bus behind him, unscathed. At the last minute, as I stepped onto the bus, he bounded back down the aisle and hocked a great wad of mucus onto my cheek.

I felt him behind me before I heard him. I flinched so hard and my despair came so fast and strong that I did not have time to steel myself before the tears fell. I pushed out a single, gasped, fuck you, but could not form words after that. He followed silently, watching me in profile. I raised my book between our faces to block his view. He pushed it down.

After that day, Alex let me be. I read my books at the bus stop. But I understood something new. That he had wanted something from me and hated me for it. That there was nothing I could have given or withheld or done to change that. In the year that followed, I came to better understand the lessons about my female body, the ones that tell us punishment is a reward, that disempowerment is power. I quit baseball. And when one of the boys I used to play with wanted to put his hands inside my clothes, I did not stop him. Perhaps to let him win was the better way, after all.

There was a difference between my body in the world and my body at home. At eleven, I soaked in the bath, a damp book in one hand, the other lazily exploring the tender handfuls of my breasts and new bloom of my hips, the soft pocket of my sex. The first time I slid on my back to the bottom of the tub, propped my heels on the wall aside the faucet and let that hot water pummel me, I understood that to crack my own hull was a glory, a power summoned instead of submerged. Alone, I was both ship and sea, and I felt no shame, only the cascade of pleasure, my body shuddering against the smooth porcelain.

Alone in my bedroom, my body was miles deeper than I had ever fathomed. Under my hands, it quaked from floor to tidal swell. The world was more enormous than I had known, its power crushing. But I was also enormous, I found, a seething world of which men knew so little.

I want you, they said over and over. You cannot have me, I replied every time. Please, they insisted. No, I said. Like Charybdis chained to the ocean floor, I spat the sea into their eyes and roared. No. No. No. No. No. Inside those two letters stretched a fifty-foot microcosm, a world over which I had been treading water for decades. I had not known how tired I was until I stopped. And then, I grew strong. What more perfect a redemption could I have designed? I did not have to understand it to enjoy it. And when I did understand, I felt as I imagine Ballard must have when he glimpsed his Titanic for the first time.

They say that to love someone else, you have to love yourself first. But this is not true. Being loved, the relentless care of my family, my lovers, my friends, has sewn me back together. Sometimes the warmth of a mouth that loves me is enough to break me open, to unravel all that careful control. I am shocked and so relieved to find that I am still soft inside. That I can give my body to a lover and still keep it for myself. And it is that lost girl whom they love, too, whether I can or not.

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The IB Extended Essay in Astrophysics is a 4,000-word research paper that students in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program must complete as part of their diploma requirements. It allows students to explore a topic of interest in depth and demonstrate their skills in research, analysis, and critical thinking.

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