Dead.

Dead.

Dead!

Dead-face.

It doesn’t mean much when you finally hear it.

It was an empty phrase when I was standing at his bedside, watching the flatline, the high-pitched whining sound drilling itself through the bone of my skull, embedding itself in my brain until I realized that I would probably hear it forever. The nurse was staring at the indents and scuff marks marring the tranquil off-white of the flecked linoleum tiles like she was waiting for an outburst from me, and I was staring numbly at the heart monitor and that fucking line, imagining that my own heartbeat had done the same thing. It was a few minutes later, when I still hadn’t moved or screamed or maybe even taken a breath, that she coughed slightly to get my attention and quietly murmured “He’s dead.”

It surprised me later, when I bothered to analyze the situation to pieces, that she had used the word ‘dead,’ not ‘gone’ or ‘passed’ or some other fucking euphemism, and I had to respect her for the courage to tell me what had really happened: he wasn’t moving away, he hadn’t left the room, no, my boyfriend was fucking stone cold dead right there on the pressurized mattress in front of me, the one they’d imported from a neighboring hospital when the bed sores on his hips had started eating through to the bone. He wasn’t coming back this time with a ragged gasp and some whitish vomit spilling over his cracked lips.

Dead only has one meaning.

Forever.

The nurse had to touch my arm before I even blinked; nervously, like she was waiting for me to explode into a thousand neon broken hearts right there in the hospital room, all the little razor-sharp pieces of bone and muscle shimmering in the air and floating down to coat the cold floor, white walls, waxy corpse on the bed like so much candy-colored confetti.

I turned my head like a mannequin and nodded to show her that I understood, I just needed a few minutes to figure out how I felt about it.

At least an explosion would have proved that I’d cared.

But it was hard to ignore that death, however permanent and dark and frightening and forever it was, also meant an end to everything that I had seen him go through for the past fucking lifetime… all the needles, wires, plugs, pumps, scalpels, tubes, bags… I lost track of everything they did by the end. There was a time when he was afraid of needles– I remember telling this to an old man in the hospital cafeteria one day after a grueling six-hour stay at his sterilized, death-scented bedside, a man who reminded me of my father for reasons that I couldn’t place– there was a time when he was afraid of those fucking things, and I wasn’t, and then, slowly, I started having goddamn nightmares about needles; all those tattoos and suddenly I was screaming about them in my sleep, but he just lay there on that fucking bed of dead skin and didn’t even flinch as they slid hundreds of silver syringes in and out, in and out, over and over and over and he never made a sound. There wasn’t even fear in his hazel eyes.

I was through with yelling at the doctors, through with even a hoarse whisper asking why there wasn’t more that they could do, because I had finally realized, sitting behind a fake plant in the downstairs visiting area, watching a parade of wraithlike patients blur by, that the doctors weren’t any better than I was; they felt fucking hopeless too, because they were tired and they had seen too much, and terminal cancer wasn’t anything new. I knew they had tried, and I knew that when they said they were sorry, they meant it, and that was going to have to be good enough, even when my heart was bleeding in a tempera crimson puddle on the disinfected linoleum.

Everything causes cancer, this woman told me once in the hallway, her voice forceful even though her shoulderblades above the unflattering neckline of her hospital gown were millimeters from breaking skin and her eyes were dull with pain beneath the brim of the baseball cap she refused to take off. Everything causes cancer. If you’ve got a god, ask him why everything on his fucking earth causes cancer. Her laugh was as sharp and unforgiving as the IV needle in her arm.

When he and I heard that she was dead, I remember hoping that she’d found something better; that she’d gotten an answer, but I was beginning to doubt more every day that God had any more fucking idea than we did, or that he even cared.

“I don’t want to go without you,” he’d whispered breathlessly, one hand tangled tightly in my hair, when we saw her boyfriend just crumple instantly in the hallway outside, curling in the fetal position on the sticky tile, his whole body convulsing with painful sobs that sounded like each one was tearing a hole through the wall of his throat. None of the nurses could even find the right textbook words to remind him that his behavior was inappropriate in a public building; they just let him cry his bloodshot eyes out onto the floor until late into the evening, when he finally staggered to his feet, silent and hollow as a ghost now, and left, very quietly. I don’t know what happened to him, but I couldn’t force myself to shake the image of his lips wrapped around the barrel of a gun.

I think I was just seeing myself.

“Promise me you’ll stay strong,” my boyfriend had whispered too, some other dimly remembered day of wires and monitors and intravenous fluids and the click click click of the machine that dispensed the sticky mixture of sugar and chemicals they were tube-feeding him, now that he couldn’t really eat. “Come on, baby, promise.”

I didn’t promise.

I’m not sure if my silence brought him to tired tears that time or not, but it doesn’t matter. There were other times, and his sobs sounded like twisted hiccups because there wasn’t enough room for them past the decay in his chest.

It didn’t even look like lung cancer any more. To me, it looked like fucking AIDS. His whole body was just shutting down; everything except for his skeleton was just collapsing, caving in on itself, betraying him with the sickening parade of tubes and wires meant to replace all of the functions that his body would no longer complete. It wasn’t what I thought of when I thought of cancer; this dry, dusty shell of the man that I had loved lying motionless on the bed between shuddering ventilator breaths without a single faint echo of everything that we’d shared; the tender kisses chasing away my fear of the future, the torrid, erotic nights when his body would move in perfect rhythm with mine, the laughter and hugs and big dreams for a whole fucking life together. I had always pictured cancer as the pale, wide-eyed kids from the hospital billboards, small bodies wasted by chemotherapy but faces still forcing their smiles, still holding on to the hope of another day, another week, another birthday.

Why him? Why me? was all I could think. No matter how many crying relatives and withered patients walked by outside his hospital room, I always felt like we were the only ones. And I couldn’t understand, even throughout all of the hundreds of explanations offered by the people I knew or perfect hospital strangers, why it had to be him.

I knew who fucking deserved it; I could have made God a list twenty fucking pages long, full of blackened names and faces which it wouldn’t bother me to see sinking in and wasting away. Like the fat bastard with the dark sweat stains on his beige shirt and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, yelling faggot at me out the window of his car on my long, miserable walk home from the hospital... I wanted to see him choke on that fucking cancer stick. God, I wished he would get fucking cancer; I was dying in that moment to see him lying with a tube down his carcinogen-coated throat on some miserable, over-sterilized hospital bed somewhere, gasping out the last excruciating breaths from his black tar lungs, nicotine-stained fingers wound into the scratchy fiber of the sheets with pain.

It sounded sick, but it was what I wanted to witness. And kicking trash along the cracked city concrete, throat still raw and choked with unshed tears that had just barely begun to dissipate after I’d left my fucking boyfriend alone in his prison of a hospital bed, coughing up old ash and death and bloody denial onto the bed sheets, there was no doubt in my mind that this disgusting, self-righteous asshole deserved it.

But not him- not ever him. He was too young, too reckless, to beautiful to be turned into that empty fucking shell of a human being, choking out my name like a hopeless amen when I couldn’t even hear him over the frantic beeping of the monitors spitting shrill warnings at me, making sure I knew that I’d better admit the sinner I was before God gave up and ripped away the one thing that I truly cared about.

I didn’t understand why he had to lose as much as I did; why did my sins have to damn both of us? Why tear his life away from him like that, when he never deserved it, never wanted it, never breathed the words “I want to die” into my skin at night and tortured me with apathy like I tortured him. Maybe there was a time when he was tossing his life away, but it had been another fucking eternity– he wasn’t drinking when he got sick; he wasn’t a Xanax zombie spilling his guts and his beer and his whole hopeless legacy… I was the one who cried at night and begged him and God and anyone else who would listen for death or a coma; anything to assuage the guilt and the hate and the fine fucking line between not caring and caring, feeling , far too deeply. He just listened or something like it, holding me tight through it all and reminding me that he loved me; that really, I was just living for him.

When he told me he was dying, that it wasn’t asthma or pneumonia or any of the oh-so-believable candy-coated lies I had been painting all over my face from the beginning, I blamed the angels; twisted my fingers into the front of his t-shirt and let the words claw their way raggedly out of my throat, screaming that they could have taken me instead. He stood there and let me shake his body, which was still lying to everyone, still healthy on the outside when he wasn’t coughing up his decaying lungs, setting the pattern for our remaining future together. He always just let me push him around, past resisting my pills-and-alcohol outbursts, watching with those bright hazel eyes that still held life in them as I spat profanity and choked up questions that we both knew perfectly well he couldn’t answer. I was just trying to get them out before he did.

By the time they told him that the treatments hadn’t worked, the anger had faded. The intense resentment and hatred which had packed my chest full like an attack on my heart during all of those one-sided arguments and brought all of that force to my bitter words were trickling slowly out of my body like thinning blood, but as days passed and the fluorescent hospital lights slowly began to bake me into an anemic ghost, I was left stripped and hollow-veined. Afternoons crawled by, lying apathetic on the dusty hardwood floor of my bedroom and concentrating on every breath just as he lay and choked on the tubes with each exhalation in a sterile white wasteland hospital miles away. We had shared the same heart once–maybe–but we couldn’t have been more detached in those routine hours, as he watched the ceiling and I watched my eyes blur with the same unfeeling tears of exhaustion and hopelessness that he had once kissed away at night.

And from there I just watched him die.

Dead.

Dead-face.

Fireworks and little mini confetti mannequins exploding all over the room.

I didn’t know what his last words were because I hadn’t thought to listen hard enough in the beginning, and at the end, his morphine-induced slur made everything that squeezed by his pale split lips unintelligible and incoherent. And after they put the ventilator in, talking was hopeless.

I would like to think the last thing he told me was “I forgive you.”

/I forgive you for not dying instead of me. For being the apathetic zombie holding his breath at the side of my bed because everything smells like it’s rotting. For never having the fucking answers, and for screaming the questions at me as if I was expected to. For staring at my ice-cold passed away-gone-left the room-dead corpse lying motionless on the bed without even a whimper. I forgive you because I fucking love you, baby./

Dead!

After leaving his dead skin-and-disinfectant-laced bedside for the last time, I went down to the hospital café, lay my head down on the cool plastic surface of the table and cried. The rusty sobs came slowly at first, caught raggedly in my shuddering chest like I was coughing up bullets, and then everything spilled over at once, my tears and my heart and my guts lying in a raspberry-and-ashes puddle on the tile floor. I cried for him, for myself, for everyone in the whole fucking hospital, the decaying ghost lives and the new ones; until my raw lungs hurt as badly as I imagined his might have, until I thought I would vomit. The tears were coming hot like acid for every cigarette I had ever smoked, for all the cigarettes I would still smoke. I hadn’t learned anything, I had only lost.

The realization hurt, but as I lay there slumped forward on the tabletop, the pain that had been lodged firmly in my chest for what felt like forever slowly began to loosen. The absolute horror of the reality that he was dead, but more awful still, that I wasn’t, relaxed to a dull throb, and the neon broken-heart confetti started to settle around me as my tears slowed to only a silent trickle of water and salt from worn-out bloodshot eyes. There was a bloody, gaping hole ripped out in my chest; my whole body was aching much deeper than the bone with the overwhelming intensity of loss, but suddenly, desperately, there was an intangible hope in the air; the hope that maybe, things would really be alright.

After a while, a thin woman with the same pain in her eyes that I knew mine had held for a fucking lifetime sat down across from me, a plastic fruit cup sliding precariously on the plastic tray she was gripping in her white-knuckled, trembling fingers. I wondered vaguely if I should tell her something; remind her to value every moment, to always say “I-love-you,” but I realized that nothing would make a difference. It fucking hurts, and it will never be okay, never right up until the moment that monitor flatlines and everyone waits for you to explode.

I watched her watch me, and slowly, a trickle of sympathy accompanied the dull pain in her eyes. “Cancer?” she said, like the word no longer held meaning; I remembered that we were in the cancer wing, after all, and nodded.

“Dead,” I whispered hoarsely.

She nodded back. “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to tell her something that would still have meaning later on, when she was the one crying into the unforgiving plastic of the tabletop, mind racing as I searched hopelessly for the right words.

Dead.

Dead-face.

Forever.

“I hope forever is beautiful.”

The End.