Notes

"You have one day left to live." The doctor said, yesterday.

...............

I was in a science lecture.

The walls seemed to drip with sweat, their thin coats of paint cracking, peeling away at the ends. It wasn't great. Never was.

The school was never a memorable place.

Forget AC, they gave up on electric fans a couple years back. Windows were opened, and a somewhat cool wind ambled into the classroom. It was a well-needed breeze, too, the only thing that could contain a room of fifty cooped-up, fidgety, teenagers learning nothing.

You couldn't blame us. For the first time in a long time the weather outside was more tempting than sudden progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy.

Whatever that was.

.................

I opened my eyes when the hand hit my face.

She squealed, rather superficially, I thought.

"Oh. Em. Geeeeeeee! I am so so so so sorry! Holy Horan! I can't believe it! Guys, hey guys look! I was going for the fly but I ended up hitting her face! It wasn't on purpose, I swear! Oh no am I a bad person? Please tell me I'm not a bad person. Pleeeaaasssseeee...."

Stephanie Th at her finest. Need someone who constantly shrieks, copies everything, and loves attention? You've got yourself a match made in hell!

I wouldn't remember her at all. Nope, not a single bit of her.

"Simoneeee!!!! Simone you saw me, didn't you? See? You know I didn't hit her. Look! Look! Everyone! I have a witness! Simone knows! You're a liar, X, I didn't touch your face at all! I was going for the fly, you..."

She was cut off by the teacher.

Old, gray, and probably depressed, Mr. Torres was the most expected person to be teaching high school science. We were all driven off by the heat, but he probably had it worse, looking...

"Miss. X? I was asking a question, was I not?"

I remember frantically flipping through the textbook, cutting my finger on a broken page.

"Yeah... Uh... A sudden brain shut down can be caused from a multitude of uh... ways, but in rare cases um... they can, in rare cases, be cured from a same-type donor trans....."

But that was when my throat closed off, the room spun, and everything faded away.

...................

See, it's absolutely hilarious how fickle and small a life could be. How we see the dirt road ahead of us twist and turn, narrowly missing an obstacle, or running out of gas a few times, only to realize we were taking the plane the whole time. How we swim in the deepest waters, searching for treasure, and only give up when we discover it's quicksand. How we let a tall balding man in a white coat tell us something very rare has happened to our bodies, and all of a sudden shut off everything inside of us.

How strange.

That's how I wasted 2 months and 30 days of my life, driving a crashing plane, struggling to breathe in liquid sand, repeating the doctor's life sentence, trying my best to pretend it was a dream.

Three months. Three months. Three months.

Three months before my brain would go out like a star and leave me out in its dust. Three months before all the passing strangers speak my name. Three months to live. It sure sounded dream-like.

But thank the lord I woke up on my last day.

...............................

1. Feeling

My disease didn't come in waves. In fact, most of the time, even today, I felt fine. It was like the sky before a firework. Quiet, peaceful even, until a deafening crack fills the space. But I couldn't stand there waiting. I was going to make the most of the night before it filled with artificial flames.

And that's how I found myself standing at the edge of a cliff, completely unrestrained, staring at the crystal water beneath me.

Y sat down at the edge of the rock. "Please tell me you're joking."
I shook my head. "Live a little, Y. "
"Forget living! You're taking a perfectly good 24 hours and cutting it off into 2! I am your health representative, which means I make all your doctoral decisions for a day or more, you never know! What if you land wrong? What if there's stuff in the water? Look! The sign says "Beware The Fish!"

I turned around. Covered in poster paper and duct tape, the old tree stump read those exact words. A homemade token of persuasion. But of course, as unpredictable as he was, I saw only the narrow glint of sunlight in his dusty amber eyes as he jumped anyways, pulling me down with him.

The water rose around us in a splash, cool and clear. It seeped into our clothes, our hair matted, our breathing heavy, but I had never felt so beautiful.

Y was the one who filled the gaps between our silence, the one who let my words finally spill. If there was one thing in the uncertainty of it all, it would be that I would never love anyone more than him.

But as we walked back onto the cliff, I wondered if I would have the strength to tell him.
.................
2. Revenge

I've always hated winter. Any time the winds grew cold and trees lost their leaves, I would be brought back to that night.

That Christmas night.

I stood outside of the home, clinging on to her hand. Snowflakes landed in my hair. My discount spring coat was soaked and freezing. A few beaten-down letters still hung from the building's roof.

State Care.

Of course, I didn't have enough time to know what that meant before a scraggled-looking woman opened the door. I wondered where her family was, working on Christmas eve.

"Name?" She said, looking down at a disappointing pile of papers.
"Teresa. Last name Shaer."
Teresa, who would never, ever in hell, deserve to be called mom.
But maybe, just today, she would get a call.
................................
The pay phone went cold and clammy in the midnight air. I dialed from the page of a ripped up contact list, the names yellow and fading. I didn't have much of a chance of reaching her.

The tone went once, twice, three times, without ring, until suddenly the motive was replaced by a cough.

"Hello?" I tried. The phone line crackled. There was some kind of fight in the background.

"Who is this?" Her voice was rough and cracked, hardened from the years of Benson and Hedges. She sounded... well, tired, bored, nothing left of the screaming woman in flesh that I once knew.

"Uh... X. It's me. Your-" but I faltered. She coughed again.

"I don't know why you're calling or what you want, but all I can tell ya' is that I aint' knowing no X."

The line went flat.

And next thing I know, I was back at home, back in his arms, sobbing. "She's nothing on you, you know that, right?" He asked.

But this woman, through the screaming and crying, through the scary boyfriends, through the day she left me, a burden, and not a present... This woman was still in my blood. And I may have wasted a few bits of desperate air, but I wanted her to know. I wanted to...say goodbye.

Y interrupted my thoughts. "Sometimes it's okay to give something up. So she does emcompass 50% of your genes, you're still made different from your experiences. And maybe, just sometimes, we can let our burning bridges fall, and build new ones in their place. Don't count the days. Count the times a teacher tells you something you'll remember. Count the times your friends bring you to tears of laughter. Count the times you've loved somebody. Count the stars that you see every night you have. But never, ever, count the days until you go."

When I woke up, he was gone, and it was written all over my arm in Sharpie. But the sun, small and light, almost uncovered itself from the clouds.
................................

I sat in the hospital bed, TV blaring, next to me all of the memories I've ever collected. All small stuffed bunny I stole from the convenience store. A slip of paper, with X written in fancy calligraphy the day the fosters took me in. A dog collar, from Rusty, our massive St. Bernard who lived for 30 years. A celing tile, knocked down from the school. A small pebble from our adventure in the day. A polaroid picture. The words on my arm. All these would be left for Y.

I would tell him last, I decided, so that the last words ever spoken on my tongue would be love. So I could leave this world with the opposite of what I had been brought in with. I was peaceful. I was ready.

Except...

Nurses and doctors seemed to swarm around my unit, the opposite of the procedure for a patient in hospice. Machines were everywhere, beeping as they hooked me up. And Y? Y was nowhere to be seen.

A frantic-looking woman spoke with me. "See, this transplant focuses on... another chance to live... 70% success. For you, at least."

A chance to live? My mind swirled. After all that breaking down, a chance to rebuild it all? A chance, another chance to fix the holes I left? Before I knew what I was in for, a messy signature scrawled across the page.

That was it. I would tell him right after I healed. I would say those defining words, and we could make another world together.

More talking.
More machine groans.
And once again, it all faded away.

In my dreams, I was flying, leaving a city burned to ash. The air was cool and felt good on my skin. But something felt wrong. My head became overwhelmed with a feeling, that nagging rope at your chest when you know you've lost something but not what. I could feel the tugging in my gut, begging me to return to the town on fire.

I didn't.

And a wave of clean, fresh water swept over me until I opened my eyes.
......................
I woke up in a white room, clean, smelling like something from a past life. It was all stark and new, and breathtakingly unfamilliar. I was surrounded with people around me, wearing their white uniforms, holding their white sheets of paper, standing their white... shoes?... on the white marble floor.

"Retrograde amnesia on patient 1, end of life on donor," whisperered one of them.

Another turned to face me. "We're sorry. We did all we could to save him. Y gave his life for you, risking it all as the only matching transplant."

"What... Who's that?" I asked, and all their faces fell.
......................
I learned about him after my release, stories of how this Y gave his life for mine as quickly as the magi to the babe. How of all gifts, his was one that would last me forever.

But as wise as the sacrifices was, we were the foolish.

Because now, I would be living a life of despair, yearning for a love I had never met. I would be reaching out for the marker stains on my arm, knowing only that what once was prose, became code. I would be looking upon objects of my past, the very ones that once held me to him, only to lose their meaning somewhere in the midst of it.

I got what I wanted: A fresh start.

But I would forever be counting down the days until I could reunite with a boy from my memory.