I have stage four cancer – there will be no cure, but death isn’t necessarily imminent: this is how it feels to live in the long middle

When you are cured, the world cheers; when you are dying, it mourns. But when you are simply maintaining, the world is at a loss

Mornings begin with a silent inventory, conducted in the dark before the curtains are drawn: can I breathe easily today? The question is stripped of all poetic veneer. When you have stage four lung cancer, breath is no longer a background process; it is a finite currency I must spend with the caution of a miser. It dictates the architecture of my day, the borders of my energy and the very cadence of my speech.

I am not a “survivor” in the triumphalist sense of the word, nor am I imminently dying. I occupy the long middle – a rarely charted territory where the body remains fragile, treatment constant, and life does not so much move forward as stubbornly persist.