No One to Ask

Every doctor's form has the same blank line,

waiting for a history I don't have.

Family history of heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes.

I check "unknown" so many times

the page starts to look like a life

nobody bothered to write down.

Other people call their mothers.

Ask did Grandpa have this too?

Ask how old was she when it started?

They get an answer.

I get silence dressed up as a checkbox.

I walk through my life

listening to my own body

like it's a language I was never taught to read.

Every ache, I wonder if it's mine

or something older than me,

something passed down

from people I'll never get to ask.

I am scared of what I don't know

in a way most people never have to be.

Not scared of illness alone —

scared of being blindsided by it,

scared of hearing a diagnosis

and having no warning,

no pattern, no one who could have said

watch for this, it runs in the family

because I don't know what runs in mine.

I built my whole medical history

out of guesses and question marks,

out of doesn't apply and not sure,

out of hoping my body will be kind to me

since it never came with instructions.

I think about my daughter sometimes,

and how she'll have an answer I never did —

how she'll know her own history

because I am finally the first line of it.

But for me, the fear stays quiet and constant,

a small shadow I carry into every appointment,

into every form,

into every year I get older

without a map,

just hoping

that whatever I inherited

without warning,

I inherited enough strength, too,

to meet it without one.