John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is a great book. Either because of Augustus Waters bloody happy perspective towards life or because of Isaac’s cuteness. I will not mention Hazel Grace (kinda doing it now am I not?) because there is no way to summon up how much of a role model she should be to every teenager.

For those who have never dealt with cancer, and by this I mean dealing with having cancer, with someone who has cancer or with a friend with a family member with cancer, TFIOS is just another teenager-made up phrases-cute things book/movie. But really, this book just kind of summons up what dealing with cancer is. Of course not everyone asks the Genies to go to Amsterdam meet Peter Van Houten and realize he’s just a drunk man who had to watch his daughter fight against cancer but, in a way, this may be the metaphorical way, just like for Gus is the (no)smoking, to show that even in the middle of such things as cancer, good things can happen.

I am thankful for not having cancer and sincerely hope I’ll never have, but in the last few months my life and perspective around this matter has deeply changed and changed me. If I went back a year, in a Christmas Carol way, I would probably see myself joking about cancer and now, a year later I can’t even hear one the more say them.

I think when real life strikes us we lose the ability to laugh upon certain things. I’m a strong believer that we joke about the things we fear the most mainly because laughter is a kind of defensive system. But there’s this point in life when reality gets to us and not even laughter can take the fear away.

A family member of my closest friend discovered she had cancer back in January, only six days after the year started. At the beggining I could really tell him “Well, don’t worry everything will be alright, you just have to be really strong and be there to help and give strenght” but as the time gone by this just became harder to say, or at list to say and believe it. Four months after this happened they found a treatment that could work and so they did everything to pay it and did the treatment and things went really well, the cancer started to fall away and everyone thought that it was it. A few more chemo treatments and we would have won against the cancer.

You know, our body is a blithering idiot. 206 bones and a infinity of muscles, organs and whatsoever we have but, for some reason, in some people, our body just thinks “Bah, that’s not enough, I wanna grow bigger, so let me create more cells around me.”, and this is what cancer is, our body wanting to be bigger. When this happens we just create more cells and they spread to places where they shouldn’t, like our head or our lungs, and there is no stop to it. No cure besides slowly killing ourselves in the hope that we will get better before completly die. And when this doesn’t work?

The treatment, that at the beggining was perfectly working, failed. The person found out that his body wanted to get even more bigger and started attacking the lungs. A little bit as Hazel, is it not?

But then again, everyone has his Amsterdam moment. Longer or shorter this moments exist and when they are over, the fault is really on our stars. As Hazel, and Peter, pointed out there are different infinities and now I quote the book directly,

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities”.

But, in my opinion, which honestly would be a close Augustus Waters opinion because we are much alike, except for the outstanding happiness towards negative things, there is one endless infinity (I thought on writing infinite infinity, but it was so confusing). Pain, eventhough “it demands to be felt”, is the greatest infinity that we’ll live during this “body growth”. Obviously the person with cancer really feels the pain in it but the other people feel it too. I might not be a relative but as I pointed out this guy is one my closest friends so when I feel that he is pain because of what his relative is going through, I feel the second biggest infinity… helplessness.

These are the two biggest infinities when it comes to cancer, pain and helplessness. The feeling of not being able to help a friend is… It comes to a time where we say things and we just try to believe in them so the other believes it too, but we can’t believe it. I may say “Come on, everything is going to get better” but how can I believe it if I can’t be sure of that?

Every day it gets harder to find an Amsterdam or a joyful Gus. One day we just turn out to be what Augustus Waters was in the end, humans.

We just have to live everyday as if it was a party, a really great party, where we throw eggs to people we don’t like, where we drink stars, where we listen to swedish hip hop just because of the feeling and not because of what they’re saying. Not everything in life can have a meaning, otherwise life would be meaningless, some things, like pain, just have to be felt but pain has not to be the only thing we feel.