It was a beautiful and terrible day.
Maybe it was the tired snow still blanketing a 517 indifference. Maybe it was the lingering resentments leftover from the before times. But there was an intrusive sense that something in the long loneliness of this winter had shifted. And I didn’t know which direction to expect next.
After a period of dormancy, we connected again. Schedules aligned unexpectedly, demanding impulsive investment. Her state or mine, the details didn’t matter. We had to capture the moment. So I took the hit and made the run south along the frozen expanse of familiar roads.
We walked. Hand in hand across the barrenness of an open field. Wind kissed exposed skin, turning it red amongst a background of more durable greys.
Behind us the sun collapsed into an early twilight. Shadows cast longer against the snow. Breath caught frozen in heavy exhalations of December.
I asked her the question. She answered initially with a silence loud enough that I will remember it forever. Because it was more honest than texted jargon intended to postpone explanation.
When she spoke, the words hit me like a flood. A verbal tsunami of emotion and clarification. She described the symptoms. And the resulting appointments. The invasive scans and the investigations pointing towards a terminal confirmation.
She cried when she told me.
She cried harder when I pulled her close. I imagined her heartbeat against my chest when leather clad arms enveloped her. Because I refused to accept the idea of a world not having that heartbeat included.
I will never forget how her hair smelled nuzzled in that embrace.
Held in my arms, she confessed to having read everything I have ever written. Even the jumbled garbage scribbled out during the confusion of my salad days. Back when I was a wordy fuck, struggling to figure out how to break language to make it better fit my voice.
It admittedly seemed a strange time to be discussing my catalog of work. There were other, more pressing, matters to explore. But she soon made the point. Connected the dots. All because she asked a favour. A favour that is going to change things.
For keeps.
She said more than anyone else in her life, she trusted me to do it correctly. Out of everyone she has ever met on this weird blue marble, I alone seemingly possess the skills and experience required to find the beauty in what promises to be a terrible situation. And if we are lucky, maybe even a little bit of the humour, too.
Because it’s always there.
More than having a hand to hold, or a familiar face for company, she explained just how important documenting the totality of experience is to her as she finishes her journey. And the comfort she finds in knowing that long after that last breath, the story of her will live on in the words she was asking me to write.
Standing cursed with awareness of our mutual mortality, I became collateral damage. Tasked with being a witness to a transformation I would give anything to avoid, I absorbed the moment for what it represented. Burdened with the pressure of trying to capture on the page a story which I never imagined myself writing, I inwardly hesitated.
But I made her that promise.
And for the first time that beautiful and terrible day, she smiled.
