Around the time of my recurrence, my parents received a call from one of my old college friends. She was moving to my hometown, and was hoping -- if I still lived there -- to reconnect with me. She left her phone number with my father and asked him to pass it along to me if I was interested in touching base.

I hadn't communicated with her for about ten years, so she of course knew nothing of my recent circumstances. The last time we spoke, we had both just completed our first year of graduate school, and our lives were awash with coursework, the frustrations that accompany instructing undergraduates with little teaching experience or training, new boyfriends, and a burgeoning adulthood filled with the promise of long and happy lives.

When she contacted my parents six months ago, I was reeling from the news that my cancer had returned -- both in terms of its repercussions for my immediate future and its repercussions for my long-term prognosis. As a result, I didn't, and I couldn't, return her call. I was, to put it mildly, not interested in having the difficult, surreal, and absurd conversation that would necessarily lead me to say, in so many words, "well, during the last decade I completed graduate school, moved home, found a career, got married to the boy I met right before I finished college -- you remember him, don't you? -- bought a house and, then, right when we were trying to conceive our first child, got ovarian cancer. How about you?"

But as time passed, and as I adjusted at least somewhat to the realities of recurrent disease, I began to revisit the idea of calling her back. So when she contacted my parents just a few weeks ago to say that she had arrived in town permanently, I decided to pick up the phone. She was at one time a very good friend, after all. Besides, even though I had become more accustomed to life with recurrent cancer, I didn't intend to tell her my recent history. Not yet, anyway. There would be no harm in simply connecting with her, seeing how things went and, if we ultimately became better friends than the virtual strangers we are today, eventually easing the grip on my privacy and telling her about what had happened over the last couple of years.

I knew, of course, that there was a chance she had children, and I was prepared for that. What I didn't anticipate, and I'm not quite sure why, was that there was also a chance that she'd be pregnant, which she was -- about twelve weeks along, and with her first.

I am not by nature a competitive person. If I've excelled at anything or achieved accolades, I've done so mostly due to native talent, or to my own internally motivated interests, curiosities, and drive. I also don't believe that the bearing of children represents some sort of contest among women. I do not judge people by their decision to have or not have kids. The mere fact and reality of someone's fertility does not make her any nobler than her childless peers, and so I did not feel that in this strange, intimate class reunion she had somehow one-upped me by becoming pregnant and standing poised, as she is in her fecundity, on the brink of motherhood.

However, despite my desire to keep the existence of my disease to myself, I nevertheless wished -- with the full force of my lungs and my heart -- to declare that I, too, wanted to be a mother, but that circumstances had, perhaps permanently, gotten in the way. My longing to tell the story of my cancer and all it has taken from me was fueled by a yearning to more accurately paint for her a picture of myself, to backfill the unspoken gaps of the intervening years that would reveal, more than any shiny list of successive life events, the contour, shading, and outline of a long-lost college friend -- gaps that, in their vast emptiness, speak volumes, and in speaking say, "you may not be able to tell by looking at the surface, but this is the person I truly am; this is the person I was supposed to be."

But instead, I remained reticent. I listened to her talk about her plans for her baby, and her decision to be a stay-at-home mom. With her newness to the area and knowing no other parent in town, when she hinted naively about how lovely it would be if I eventually decided to have children, I exhaled slowly the breath I had been holding, and let the entry point for my confessions pass us by.

I talked, then, about my job and my dog, my house, my wedding, and the finer points of our now shared city. And the smile in my voice never faltered.