this is mine

To me, his death looks like him--but not like him. Not like the him in the hospital bed, but like the him I met when I was nineteen. The him I fell in love with. The him I’m still a little in love with, if I’m ever honest with myself. 

I sit, and I talk to the him in front of me, the him I’m trying my hardest to hold onto and let go of in the same twisted and tangled breath. He tells me about his son. He’s only eight months old. We construct an elaborate plan for the baby’s life--the places he’ll go. The things he’ll do. 

It’s just after we’ve decided that, after he wins an Academy Award, his little man will make an excellent astronaut someday, that he goes quiet, and I have to fight the urge to fill even the smallest silence. 

But finally, I can’t take it, and I ask, “What?” Because he’s looking at me in a way that makes me want to ask him to stop and beg him not to at the same time.

“You really loved me, didn’t you?”

When he asks, the words echo from the corner. The shadow wearing his face moves his lips at the same time, making me wonder if it’s my friend that’s asking or his death.

Either way--both are waiting for an answer.

“Yes,” I say softly. “Very much.”

He nods as though I’ve just confirmed something he’s been turning over in his mind for too long. 

“And I...” he stops and looks down. “I really hurt you.” There is no question this time.

“Yes,” I say again. “You did.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to...I never wanted to hurt you.” 

The apology is twenty years too late, but it manages to land just the same. It slips beneath my skin and gently takes the hand of the broken girl who still lives at the back of my heart. It kisses her forehead and lets her tears fall where they may.

My tears stay firmly stuck in my eyes as I force myself to nod. “I know.”

He looks up again, and all I want is for time to stop. Just one minute, I think. I just need one minute. So I can remember the exact curve of his lips and the slope of his nose and remember every fleck of blue and gold in his green eyes. 

But time does not stop, and in the corner, his death shakes his head with a look that tells me I should know better than to ask.

“I never understood why you ever talked to me again,” he says after another long silence has swayed gently between us.

“I’m a glutton for punishment,” I say with a vain hope to make him laugh. The best I get is a smile that lifts just one corner of his mouth. “And maybe because...I don’t know. Because love is like matter. At least to me.” He looks up again as I roll my shoulder in a shrug. “It can’t be created or destroyed, it just...changes shape and form.” 

He nods again. “What shape will it take next, I wonder,” he muses quietly. Even though we both know it only has one more shape to take. 

It will take the shape of the hole his death is about to carve inside of me. 

He reaches across to take my hand, curling his fingers around mine like I’m the one who’s breakable. Like I’m the thing that is precious. “I’ll miss you.”

I shake my head and wonder how it’s possible that I’m still breathing with my lungs filled with broken glass. “You don’t know that.”

“No,” he says firmly and squeezes my hand just once so I’ll look up at him. “I will. I always miss you when you’re not around.”

And then the room is too small, and the air is too thin, and my heart is too broken, and all I want is to scream at that thing in the corner that it can have someone else instead. Even someone else I love, if it must. Surely there are other people it can look like? Other people it can take and be satisfied with? 

Not this one. The words form as a whisper on the tip of my tongue. Please, just let me keep this one a little longer.

But I know I can’t ask for that. I know that at this point, his death will be a mercy when it finally pulls him from this fragile and failing body. So I don’t ask to keep him. I don’t ask for him to stay. Instead, I say, “Did you watch Station Eleven?”

The question surprises him, but he nods with a little furrow in his brow. “Couple times,” he says. His voice is hoarse, and for a moment, he sounds like he did when he was twenty-two. When we’d get high together and stay up too late in the basement of that house a block off campus. Or when he’d wake up before me and press his lips to the shell of my ear, telling me dumb jokes just to tickle me with the buzzing vibration from the sound. “Why?”

I swallow. “There’s a line that’s been haunting me ever since I heard it. Like it’s been floating around waiting for the right place and time where it might just fit perfectly.”

His lips twitch again. “What is it?”

“I’ve found you nine times before. Maybe ten. I find you, because I know you. And--”

“And I know you, because we’re the same,” he finishes quietly, saving me just before my voice can catch. 

My throat is aching in the way it only does when it’s fighting a sob as I nod. “Yeah,” I say, letting him squeeze my hand again. “Don’t miss me,” I say finally. “Just...find me again.”

His thumb brushes the tops of his knuckles. “I will,” he agrees. “I’ll find you.”

In the corner, for just a moment, I could swear that the green eyes of his death looked glassy. But then Death blinks and kindly looks away.