The Yellow World (2 page)

I hope this book will link us as yellow ones. If you have any suggestions, wishes, or you are looking for anything, you’ll find me at
alberte​spinosa​[email protected]​yahoo.​es
.

—Albert Espinosa

July–September 2014

Don’t hold the knife in your left hand
.

Don’t put your elbows on the table
.

Fold your napkin properly
.

That’s the beginning
.

—Gabriel Celaya

Well, I was born from cancer. I like the word
cancer
. I even like the word
tumor
. It might sound creepy but it’s just that my life has been connected to these two words. And I’ve never felt anything horrible about saying
cancer
or
tumor
or
osteosarcoma
. I grew up with these words and I like to say them out loud, to shout them at the top of my voice. I think that until you say them, make them part of your life, then it’s difficult for you to accept them.

That’s why I need to speak about cancer in this first chapter, because later in the book I’m going to explain the lessons that cancer taught me to survive my life. So I’ll start off by talking about it and how it affected me.

I was fourteen years old when I had to go to the hospital for the first time. I had an osteosarcoma in my left leg. I left school, left my home, and started my life in the hospital.

I had cancer for ten years, from the ages of fourteen to twenty-four. This doesn’t mean that I spent ten years in the hospital but that for ten years I was going to various different
hospitals to get treated for four cancers: leg, leg (same leg both times), lung, and liver.

En route I left behind one leg, one lung, and a chunk of my liver. But I have to say that, at the time, I was happy when I had cancer. I remember it as one of the best times of my life.

It might be a shock to see these two words next to each other:
happy
and
cancer
. But that’s how it was. The cancer might have taken material things away from me, but it taught me lots of other things that I would never have found out by myself.

What can cancer give you? I think the list is endless: You find out who you are, you find out what sort of people you live with, you discover your limits … above all you lose your fear of death. Maybe this last is the most valuable thing.

One day I was cured. I was twenty-four and they told me that I didn’t have to go back to the hospital. I was scared stiff. It was weird. The thing I knew how to do best of all was to fight against cancer and now they told me that I was cured. This weirdness, this stupor, lasted for six hours, then I went mad with joy; not to go back to the hospital, not to have any more X-rays (I think I’d had more than two hundred and fifty), no more blood tests, no more tests of any kind. It was a dream come true. It was completely unbelievable.

I thought that in a few months I’d forget all about cancer. I’d have a “normal life.” Cancer would just be a stage I’d gone through. But instead (I’ve never forgotten it), something strange happened. I never imagined how much the lessons of cancer would help me in my daily life.

It’s the great gift that cancer has given me: lessons (you
have to call them something, although maybe I prefer the word
discoveries
) that help my life to be easier, happier.

What I will explain in this book is nothing more than how to apply to your day-to-day life the lessons I learned from cancer. Yes, exactly, now that I think of it, that’s what this book could be called:
How to Use Cancer to Get Through Life
. Maybe that’ll end up being the book’s subtitle. It sounds odd, it sounds just the opposite of most of the books that get written about cancer, but that’s just how it is. Life is paradoxical (I love contradictions). I want to make it clear that this book is a collection of everything I learned from cancer and also of the discoveries that my friends who were also fighting this illness showed me.

Well, that’s the story of cancer and me up till now. I like how I’ve summed it up; I’m happy with it. The story has begun. Now let’s carry on with the yellow world.

This is something you’ve probably been asking yourself ever since you bought this yellow book (at least, I imagine it as being yellow; we’ll see what happens when it gets published—maybe the cover will end up being red, or orange, or a kind of brownish gray).

The yellow world is the name I’ve given to a way of living, of seeing life, of nourishing yourself with the lessons that you learn from good moments as well as bad ones. The yellow world is made out of discoveries, above all, yellow discoveries, which are those that give it its name. But don’t worry; we’ll get there in a bit. No hurry.

What I can tell you from the beginning is that this is a universe with no rules. Most worlds are controlled by a set of rules, but the yellow world has no rules. I don’t like rules, so I wouldn’t like my world to have them. It’d be a bit odd. And I don’t think that rules are necessary; they’re useless, they exist just to be jumped over, gotten around, bypassed. I don’t think that anything they tell you is sacred actually is. I
don’t think that anything they tell you is correct actually is. Everything has a flip side; everything can be seen from lots of different points of view.

I have always believed that the yellow world is the world we actually live in. The world we see in movies, the world of cinema, is one created out of false ideas, and we end up thinking that the world is really like that. They show you what love is like, and then you fall in love and it’s not like it is in the movies. They show you what sex is like, and then you have sex and it’s also not like how it is in the movies. They even show you what breakups are like. How many times have people met their boyfriend or girlfriend in a bar and tried to break up like they do in the movies? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because on film they can get it over and done with in five minutes, but it actually takes you six hours and in the end you don’t break up but promise to get married or have a child.

And I don’t believe in these labels that they say define various generations. I don’t think I’m part of Generation X, or Generation iPod, and I’m definitely not part of any metrosexual or übersexual generation.

What am I? Yellow (something individual that isn’t part of any collective). I’m yellow, I’m somebody’s yellow. But like I said, we’ll get there in a bit.

So, there aren’t any labels, any rules, any norms of behavior. I suppose you’re probably asking how I’m going to put this book, and this world, in order; how I’m going to get my thoughts straight. Well, I’m going to make a list. I believe in lists; I like lists. I’m an engineer; I became one because I like numbers, and if you like numbers then you like lists.

From here on in, everything you read is a big list. A list of concepts, a list of ideas, a list of feelings, a happy list. A list of discoveries that I made and that make up what I think of as my world.

They’re short discoveries that I set out in short chapters. They’re little elements that let us see the world in a different way. Don’t be afraid of living in the yellow world. All you have to do is believe in it.

I’ve got one maxim: Trust your dreams and they’ll come true.
Trust
and
true
are very similar words, and they are similar because they are actually close to each other, really very close. So close that if you do trust something, it will come true.

Trust it.…

And now we’ll go straight to the big section where I’ve put all these discoveries:
how to live
 … Here are the experiences of cancer related to life, which form the elements you can combine to create your yellow world.

It’s a list of twenty-three points that you should connect with lines, connect conceptually in your mind: Do this and a way of living will appear. A yellow world.

Every point, every discovery, is connected with one of the phrases I heard during my hospital life. They’re things people said to me while I was ill and that had such an effect on me that I’ve never forgotten them. They’re like extracts from a poem, or the beginnings of songs, sentiments that will always smell of chemotherapy, or bandages, or waiting for visits or roommates in their blue pajamas. Sometimes it’s words that show you the way. A few words can come together and
provoke an idea. Sometimes the most important phrases are those we give the least importance.

So come in, and trust this, a little. Believe what I’m saying, but keep your eyes open. Everything can be questioned, debated. The guy who’s telling you this is me, Albert. Agnostic. Apolitical. Yellow.

Tell me the square root of three thousand three hundred and thirteen
.

Where is Tanganyika? What year was Cervantes born?

I’ll give you an F if you talk to your classmate
.

That’s how it carries on
.

—Gabriel Celaya

Losses are positive. I know that’s a hard thing to believe, but losses are positive. We have to learn how to lose things. You need to know that whatever you win, sooner or later, you’ll end up losing.

In the hospital they taught us to accept loss, but rather than putting the emphasis on accepting, they put it on loss. Accepting something is only a matter of time; losing something is a question of principles.

Years ago, whenever someone died, his close family would go through a period of mourning: They would wear black,
suffer, and stay at home. The mourning period gave them time to think about the loss, to live for the loss.

We’ve gone from mourning to nothing. Now when someone dies they tell you in the funeral home that you’ve got to get over it. You break up with your partner and people tell you that you’ll be going out with someone else in a couple of weeks. But what about the mourning? Where’s the mourning gone, the thinking about the loss, about what loss means?

Cancer took a lot away from me: parts of my body, mobility, experiences, years of school … But what I felt most of all was probably the loss of my leg. I remember that the day before they cut it off my doctor said to me: “Give your leg a goodbye party. Invite all the people who have some connection to your leg and give it a great send-off. Hasn’t it supported you all your life? Well, support it now that it’s walking away.”

I was fifteen and I hadn’t organized a party to lose my virginity (I’d have liked that) but I was organizing a party to lose my leg. I remember as if it were only this morning how I phoned people who were connected with the leg (it was a bit tough, it wasn’t easy to get people to come). After going over things a lot in my head and talking about hundreds of things, I ended up saying to them: “I’m inviting you to the goodbye party for my leg; you don’t have to bring anything. And come on foot.” I thought it was important to mention that just to stop things from being awkward. Some genius decided to give us a sense of humor, the cure for all our worries.… A strange ability: to be able to turn everything upside down and laugh at it.

The people I invited to this strange party were those who
had had some kind of relationship with my leg: a goalkeeper who let in forty-five goals from me in one match (well, okay, only one, but I invited him anyway), a girl I played footsie with under the table, one of my uncles, who took me hiking (because of the cramps I’d gotten in my legs, and anyway I couldn’t think of many more people to invite), and a friend who had a dog that bit me when I was ten. The worst of it was that the dog came and tried to bite me again.

It was a great party. I think it was the best party I’ve ever given, and definitely the most original. Everyone was a bit shy at the beginning, but we started bit by bit to talk about the leg. Everyone told stories about it. They touched it one last time. It was a night I’ll never forget.