It’s my turn to see you through,’ she whispers, coming back to me and wrapping me in her blanket as I lose my shit all over again. She holds me until I recover my Y chromosome.
But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?
And that’s when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I’m still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he’s in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.
And now I am here, as alone as I’ve ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it’s suppose to be. This is not how my life is suppose to turn out.
So, this is how it’s become? This is how I’ve become? A walking contradiction? I’m surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it’s like I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t know how to be a normal person anymore.
We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.
I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.
You dumb-ass,” I crooned, kissing her on the forehead. “You don’t share me. You own me.
But the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I’ll be in love with tomorrow.
I’m not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I’m not sure that I want to wake up.
Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I’m feeling things at last. I’m feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.
Life might take you down different roads. But each of you gets to decide which one to take.
It’s okay if you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. But that’s what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.
I do have a point to all this,” she continues. “There are like twenty people in that waiting room right now. Some of them are related to you. Some of them are not. But we’re all your family.” She stops now. Leans over me so that the wisps of her hair tickle my face. She kisses me on the forehead. “You still have a family,” she whispers.
But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I’ll get through today.
Whoever said that the past isn’t dead had it backward. It’s the future that’s already dead, already played out.
But that’s the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must’ve know I’d become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body.
There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You’ve ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can’t say any of that.
Sleep would be so welcome. A warm blanket of black to erase everything else. Sleep without dreams. I’ve heard people talk about the sleep of the dead. Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind. If that’s what dying is like, I wouldn’t mind that at all.
Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind.