Lingering

Smoke settling around a campfire, brought to her lips by a trembling hand. Her skin white and pallid, untouched by sun for nearly a decade. A decade since she was told it would be her last year to say goodbye. First had been her parents. Her mother had come and sat on the arm of her chair crying while her father stood up and paced in the corner. She could tell they were angry they hadn’t been told three months before, when the short stone faced doctor had first laid out and described the pictures on the desk in front of her and Brian. We could have done something. Helped out somehow. They could have done nothing, said the face of stone.

Then were Brian’s parents, who had been easier to manage in their grief. Unspoken thoughts about his life after hers did not need to be said aloud. Then Lucia and Rob, over wine on the patio after dinner, while their children played inside. Lucia had grabbed her arm and said all the right things. You’re going to beat this. Anything you need, just tell us. What do doctors know anyway.

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Smoke rushed through her throat and burned out her nose as she pulled another drag from her third cigarette. The stone face doctor had known quite a lot. He had known her bones would feel brittle and splintered. That the nausea would come and never leave, only managed by a slew of pills that scorched her heart and squeezed her bladder dry. But he had not known everything, and he was wrong about her dying. At least for a while. First a year passed, and he gave her the same stone face as before. Then another came and went and she could sense the frustration - or was it embarrassment - in his eyes, when her withering body returned to his office. Year after year she returned, a few pounds lighter, with a few more ailments. But stone faced doctor’s message never changed.

Now Brian was the only goodbye left to bid.

He asked all sorts of silly things over the last ten years. Was there some place she would like to go? Something to see? He even asked if there was someone she’d like to fuck one night last month, under the stars in West Virginia where they had gone to say the real goodbye. The one before the final farewell, where they could spend in three whole days the luxury of “still weeks away”.

But in truth there wasn’t. There was no place to go, thing to see, person to explore. All of those hopes, those dreams, lived in tomorrow. A tomorrow that she couldn’t take part in. All she could do was lie here and linger, in the the life she had managed to live thus far. This was the only thing she would have asked for. An hour alone alone on the patio while Brian slept inside. She would let him stay there, and then wake him up as the sun rose to lay locked in each others arms for hours. Then she would tell him. That she could feel times final embers flaking from her bones and what the stone faced doctor had said was coming true at last.

She would think more of all those things tomorrow. For now, looking out over the neighbors houses bathed in blue dawn, there was still plenty of time left for her to die. Another cigarette, it was getting harder to breath. Songs of sex and passion from filthy city sparrows filled the morning air. An infants cry blocks away. It pleased her to think that none of them would remember these few moments. She’d had ten more years of life and all it gave her was more time die. More memories for the living to use up in their grief and discard inside a photo album. But this moment would never be remembered, witnessed only by beasts with no sense of time.

If she could only pierce through that veil and seize them, while they taunted her remains, and scream that she was gone already she is gone already you missed it you missed it all of you missed it there is nothing left to see.

If they truly wished to see her, they would have had to find her here, while the floating ash of her cigarette still lingers in the air.