Something is dying…

“I’m dying,” you told me with a look of mournful resignation. You shrugged your shoulders nonchalantly.

I felt my heart stop beating and drop into my stomach. The air slipped from my lungs and I was filled with a tremulous ache at the core of me, reaching to the tips of every limb.

“It’s cancer. It’s bad. The doctor said stage 4,” you said with a small sigh. Glassy eyes behind smudged round specs stared at me and your fingers threaded their way through your end-of-day afro.

Some prehistoric instinct grabbed my gut to force an inhale because the rest of me had already given up. It felt like breathing through shards of glass and I shrieked.

“What? Whaaat?!” I felt the hot tears fall on my chest, bared in a low-top in the stifling summer air, before I even knew I was crying.

And then I lost the plot. You leaned against the wall, sitting on the bed, with your hands folded in your lap while I sobbed so hard the bed shook.

Eventually you told me your doctor said you might have four months left. Then you told me that was two months ago. But there you sat in front of me seeming basically fine.

I had just found you.

I had just found you.

I’d been searching for you and I’d just found you.

I didn’t know my heart could break like that.

You had so much more to show me though.

I didn’t know yet, that you were more than likely lying, or at least exaggerating. I didn’t know yet all the new pains you’d show me. I didn’t know yet, that when you sneered like a coyote and said something to make me laugh, that was likely as true as you would ever be.

“I’m not going anywhere. The man upstairs doesn’t want me and the man downstairs doesn’t want the competition,” you told me dozens of times with that canine grin. I think you were trying to cheer me up but I also think you spoke an uncanny truth.

You know, deep down, the devilish deeds you’ve done and how they’re piling up.

I saw them haunt you. I saw the fear flash in your face.

Fear of owning the truth and fear of continuing the lies do battle behind your tight lips and green eyes and you keep demolishing souls in the meantime.