“She can’t be dying. She just can’t.” I looked up at her, begging her wordlessly to tell me that all of this was just a vile joke. “I can’t lose her,” I cried out. “I can’t fucking lose her, Mom.”
“I know, darling. I know,” she cooed as she stroked my hair.
“I love her,” I choked out. “And now I am going to lose her.”
“She’s still here. You can still make memories with her.”
“But I don’t want only memories!” I blasted out. “I wanted to have forever with her.”
I wanted to have everything with her, but life had other plans.
15
NOAH
Life was justa series of fleeting moments; touches missed, happy little smiles, and painful tears. Some of them turned into memories that stayed with us forever, while others tended to fall into an abyss of dark onyx. But the worst part were the memories you had completely forgotten about, slamming into you full force, suddenly reminding you of those beautiful moments that somehow slipped away from you.
Moments that you took for granted because you didn’t really know how important they were at the time they were happening.
And I took a lot of them for granted. I allowed myself to forget the beautiful sunny days when nothing else existed but Sophie and I, sitting beneath that tree, arguing over who was going to use the swing next. I always let her, because seeing that happiness on her face was enough to take me through the rest of those bleak days.
I allowed myself to forget about the crickets singing at night, while she sat there at her window, staring at the sky, trying to whisper so that our parents wouldn’t find out that both of us stayed up after midnight on a school night. I forgot about that time she held my hand when her rabbit died, seeking comfort from me. That was the moment I knew—I would’ve walked through fire to make her happy, to make her smile.
Yet all I did over the last three months was make her cry. I made so many promises. I made so many plans, and all of them shattered like a house of cards as soon as those words left my mother’s mouth.
Cancer.
Glioblastoma.
Terminal.
Terminal.
Terminal.
I gripped the steering wheel, my heart beating in the rhythm of the pouring rain as I drove through the streets of Boston, heading toward her. Words had the power to soothe and the power to hurt, but the ones I heard a couple of hours ago felt like a razor blade over my heart.
The end was never something any of us wanted to hear, and these tears falling down my cheeks fell for nothing. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop time, just to make the future I dreamed of come true.
I couldn’t go back in time to tell her how much I loved her. Even if I could, all of this would still hurt the same. The outcome would still be the same even if I did things differently. It would still shatter my soul, even though I tried telling myself that it would’ve been better not knowing her at all.
But every single time those thoughts entered my mind, another sharp claw dragged over the left chamber of my heart, leaving a bloody trail behind. Guilt crept through my veins, because how could I think like that?
No matter what—pain, love, eternity, or just a blip in time—I would still choose her. If I had to go through the same thing over and over again, I would still choose to know her, to meet her, to love her.
As I parked in front of Boston Memorial Hospital, with my heart in my throat, and my soul lost somewhere in the past, I stared at the stark white facade and the darkening streaks from the top of the building, rain coloring it gray with its touch.
The hardest thing I ever had to do was to get up from that floor and accept that my mom was telling the truth. Wasn’t that fucked up, huh? Sophie was barely eighteen years old, barely old enough to learn how to drive. She still hadn’t seen anything.
She wouldn’t get to live her life.
She would never get to have kids.
She would never get to travel all over the world like she always wanted to.
She would never become an Olympic champion.
And I… I would never get to hold her hand throughout it all. I just… I had no idea what I felt.
