they were 26 and i had met them four years before. two years of friendship with them first but they called me their and their partner’s platonic husband within six months of meeting me. Covid hit and I didn’t see them for a year, either of them, but my feelings had gotten deeper and stranger and I told them both as much and they felt the same.

we weren’t partners then but we were Something, special, content with that. ignore the part where they drove me crazy half the time. that isn’t what the story is about.

at the end of that year we found out they had cancer. for the next twelve months they got worse then better, and then suddenly so much worse. a skeletal child in the hospital bed. i quote: first, do no harm. there’s nothing more we can do.

it was terminal and so we used partner and husband to make it easier for the hospice nurses and my wife’s family to understand. i would sit by their side in the quiet when everyone else had left. they would hold my hand even though the strokes had made them touch averse. i would call them baby, darling, dear one,

and wish i was anywhere else. even though i loved them. maybe because i loved them. i wanted to go. reality made my brain turn to static.

a few days after i last saw them they were dying, then in the early morning light with my hand in theirs they were dead and i was someone else, or i had already been someone else for some time by then, and i haven’t come back. do you understand? i can’t come back.

there are waters so deep that surfacing will kill you.

i’m told that my wife died of cancer. that i held their hand through the death rattle. i wasn’t there and they weren’t my wife; more like a dear friend i knew once but have since mostly forgotten about. maybe we met online and lost contact, or we were childhood friends and i moved away. i still think they’re in their old apartments, both of them, whenever i pass either street; we are both stuck in time. sometimes i can’t stop crying. i remember them and that they’re gone and that it hurts and i am there on a spring morning in April, holding their hand until the fingers stiffen, which happens faster than you think. and i am him again. the one whose wife died and left him buried in the hospice grounds.

if you pass by there in the spring you will find me. i’m still sitting by the pond outside.

hello.

i heard someone died a few years ago, but i don’t remember much about it.