.⋆♱ She kept saying his name like it would do something. Like if she said it enough times the universe would get tired of hearing it and give him back.
.⋆♱ "Stay awake," he told her, and she laughed, actually laughed, which was somehow worse than anything else. "You're going to have to give me a better reason than that," she said. He couldn't think of one fast enough. He's never forgiven himself for that.
.⋆♱ The machines made a sound and everyone in the room knew what it meant and nobody moved for a long time. His mother was the first one to reach him. She smoothed his hair back the way she used to when he was small and said, very quietly, there you go, baby. There you go.
.⋆♱ "Does it hurt?" she asked. He thought about lying. He'd been lying to her for months, what was one more. "No," he said. She looked at him for a long moment. "You were always terrible at that," she said softly, and held his hand tighter, and didn't let go.
.⋆♱ Nobody tells you that death smells like something. That it has a texture, a sound, a particular quality of light. She'd read about it in books and none of them got it right. None of them mentioned that the hardest part is the moment the room goes quiet and you realize you've been waiting for them to say something and they're not going to.
.⋆♱ "I need you to listen to me," she said, grip fierce on his collar, "you do not get to do this, you do not get to leave me here, I swear to god —" He put his hand over hers. Just that. Just his hand over hers. She stopped talking. She pressed her forehead to his and she stopped talking.
.⋆♱ He'd planned what he was going to say. Had it all worked out, all the important things, all the things that had been sitting unsaid between them for years. But when it came to it she was so small in that bed and she looked at him with so much love and everything he'd planned dissolved. "Hi," he said. "Hi," she said back.
.⋆♱ "Tell me something good," she said. Her voice was going thin, stretched out at the edges. He looked around the room—the bad lighting, the cold floor, the blood that was both of theirs now. "Remember that summer," he started, "the one where the car broke down and we had to sleep in that terrible motel—" "The one with the broken fan," she said, and almost smiled. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that one." He kept talking until she stopped hearing him.
.⋆♱ She had six missed calls from him on her phone. Six. She'd been in a meeting. She'd looked at the screen and thought I'll call him back after. She thinks about that a lot now. The specific weight of after.
.⋆♱ He left a voicemail the night before. Just rambling, nothing important, hey call me back when you get this, I found that restaurant you wanted to try. She has it still. She has listened to it one hundred and fourteen times. She knows because she counted.
.⋆♱ "You're going to be okay," she told him, which was a lie, and he knew it was a lie, and he loved her enough to pretend he believed her. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I know."
.⋆♱ He made it to the door. She needs people to know that. He almost made it.
.⋆♱ "You're going to forget me," she said. "You're going to forget what I sound like and then what I smell like and then it'll be little things, the small stuff —" "Stop," he said. "I won't." But he has. Pieces of her. And he hates himself every time he reaches for something and finds it gone.
.⋆♱ They found him with his book still open. Page 247. She bought the same edition, read to 246, put it down. She doesn't know why. She thinks she's waiting for something. Permission, maybe. She doesn't know who she's waiting to get it from.
.⋆♱ "It's not supposed to go like this," he said, mostly to himself, kneeling on the ground with hands that couldn't do anything useful anymore. "I know," she said. "I know." She was talking to him but she was also talking to the sky, to whatever was up there, to anything that might be listening.
.⋆♱ She was fine and then she found his handwriting on a grocery list stuck to the back of a drawer and she sat on the kitchen floor for a very long time.
.⋆♱ "Don't cry," he said, which was rich coming from him. "You're crying," she pointed out. "I'm allowed," he said, "I'm the one dying." She laughed. She hated that she laughed.
