"...would you cry at my funeral?"

Dear Liam,

You made looking back miserable, but I am sorry, all the same.

When I was four, I watched a chipmunk run under our car. I heard a thump. This was my first introduction to Death.

When I was five, my bird died. I didn’t know how, only that when the sun rose, he fell. I buried him in my backyard; my brother dug the hole for me. That was the year I drew on my walls, spending many grueling hours attempting to clear the long scratches of color.

When I was seven, my great-aunt died. I didn’t know the woman, having only met her once. She smelled of cigars and roses—not sweet roses, but dying ones that dull in color as soon as Winter plucks them up with her thieving hands. She had this sour smile that seemed to cause her more pain than joy as her face writhed in disgust. I never liked her. That was the year I experienced my first crush. He had green eyes, tan, sun-kissed skin, and hair that looked brown in normal light but gold when the sun hit it.

When I was fifteen, entering my sophomore year, the year I went camping for the first time, my grandpa died. He had cancer. Not to say he acted as though he did—he didn’t. He had a deep, jovial smile, which wrinkled his eyes at the corners. Whenever grandma made brownies, he would share the leftover batter. Whenever it was warm outside—it scarcely wasn’t, as we lived in Vegas—he would throw on his hot pink rubber duckie trunks which my brother and I had bought him for his birthday many years before, and come outside with us on the slip-and-slide. He liked baloney sandwiches, for some God-awful reason, and ice in his milk.

When I was seventeen and my brother twenty-three, my Mom died. She had cancer, too. It was a perpetual pattern in our family. She had always joked about it—we were so white, of course, we got skin cancer as often as we did. That was the year my brother was supposed to graduate and head off to Cambridge. He was smart like that and ready to go. Then Mom died. I wasn’t mad, but I was because it wasn’t her time. Anthony took me in—him and his wife and their son—on account of our father’s absence. It was with them that I cried at Mom’s funeral—on her grave we placed tulips—, with them that I graduated, with them that I packed up for college, with them that I had my twenty-first and got insanely drunk, with them that I fell for the love of my life—I didn’t know that then.

When I was twenty-five and my brother was thirty-one, I died. Not quite so suddenly though. I already knew it was coming. I knew for a while.

I was 15 when I first felt sick. I coughed up blood occasionally, but that was normal—everyone did so now and then. I never said anything. When I turned sixteen, I began losing weight—I began a diet that year, though, which was the reason I later won a beauty pageant. I was 17 when my skin began looking different. That probably wasn't right. Anthony took me to the doctor.

To say I was shocked would be a lie. I wasn’t. Nor was I scared. I was scared of spiders and heights, but not Death. Death always came—he was relentless and prideful. I wouldn’t fool him.

Anthony cried. I had never seen him cry, not at Grandpa’s funeral and not at Mom’s. I didn’t see why this was different. My funeral would simply be another he didn’t cry at. When I turned eighteen I decided to go on chemo. I lost my hair. The cancer left. When fall came around my twenties, it was good as new, not as long as before, and no longer blonde, but there, darker—like a sunset, Anthony had always said. A while after this, life was normal and for the first time, I followed the same sequential growth as everyone else. For the first time, I could wear the rose-colored glasses and not be afraid that when I tore them off, I would be dying, that when I tore them off, I would see my sickened, frail body, that when I tore them off, my brother would be crying, not laughing. I worked harder than I ever had before, pushing myself as though I had begun a new life.

It was then, that I met you.

It was a Tuesday and I was doing homework on my balcony. The air was crisp, smelling of rain despite it never having rained. Clouds loomed overhead the distant mountains, capping their sharp tops. I was watching that bird that always came around, hopping from roof to roof, singing its somehow random but perfectly harmonious song.

Then, everything went silent. The buzzing of the hummingbird’s wings, the chirping of another bird in the distance, the wind’s breath, whistling through the tree tops and rushing behind my ear.

The moment was perfect.

“Hey” The silence is broken, “Ma’am—excuse me uh, ma’am?” I looked around, the ground was far too great a shattering distance for your voice to have come from there and no one was in my room, “Over here” You had called out. I looked out, at your building. There you sat, your long, autumn hair, overgrown and unkempt as it was dancing in ornate curls about your face, a lazy, sanguine smile upon your lips, Great Expectations in your right hand. Your deep, brown eyes didn’t once leave my face, not when the breeze had caught upon you, gripping to you with desperation, moving as though it sought to knock you down, watch you fall to the wretched ground, watch your blood stain the white concrete. You never moved.

“Hey—what are you doing? Do you have a death wish? It’s 20 floors to the ground you—”

“I’m aware,” you said. Your voice was so calm, one of pure ease, matching the buoyant look on your face. “What’s your name?”. I had never feared death. Right now, however, you brought the fear, which I thought to be a nonexistent one in me, to life. It breathed with one anguished, ragged breath, as though this entire time it were simply choking, dying within me.

“What’s yours?”

“I asked first.” He says, a slight jeer in his voice.

“First is the worst, second is the best,” I reply. He smiles, slow and sweet.

“Alright.” He pauses, “I’m Liam.”

“Hm,” I stand, forcing my shaking body to bear my weight, “Goodbye, Liam.”

“Wait!” He exclaims, desperately, as I turn away. I glimpse back, the smile on his face gone.

“Yes?”

“Please, tell me your name.”

“And if I don’t wish to?”

“Well, I’ll be grieved.” He says, his voice taunting.

“Annalise.” His smile, one of pure optimism and light, widens.

“Well, Annalise, will you go out with me?”

Everything beyond that had seemed to pass in a blaring, speeding whir, as though Time, himself, were late, as though he had somewhere spectacularly important to be. I never realized how incredibly beholden I was to you. It was your fearless, flamboyant disposition that made me fear death. As you struck within me that perpetual fear, materialized, alongside it, the desire. The hope. I never once wanted life so much as in those moments. The moments when you read to me as I fell asleep because what better way to fall asleep than to a good book? The moments, when snow fell in abounding sheets, layering the ground in a coat of pallid white, and you insisted that my hot chocolate be made with milk, not water—for to do so with water was the “most disgraceful of disgraceful disgraces”. The moments when, however fatigued you may be, you would help me, to whatever hour of the night so that, in the morning, I was prepared for my exam.

Growth occurs from the moment of birth till your forties. I had yet to turn so much as thirty and I was already dying.

You watched as my body withered, as my skin hugged tightly about my bones, as my face grew pale. As the crimson red stained the hand which I coughed in. As, during a time in which I should be growing, I was, again, dying. You simply didn’t know it was again. You wouldn’t cry at my funeral either, though. What reason had you to? If you’d only ever seen me die, you’d never know how I would’ve lived.

I got used to the hospital visits, to the needles, to the medication, to that sickening smell of death and illness all about me, pervading my very soul—the smell which one could never entirely explain. I got used to getting carried, to having doors opened for me, to watching your eyebrows. The way they would curve, twisting your face in this grieving look of anger, before, giving in, falling back in place, again the bushes above your eyes, in one depressed fourth of a second. For minutes at a time, you would simply stare. At first, I thought it was internally judging, wondering—asking of yourself what you had gotten yourself caught in, then you would take my hand, and I would realize that they were sorrowful gazes of longing. You seemed to wither with me, as though my dying, would be the death of you as well. I urged you to leave, to go elsewhere, that you needn’t pain yourself for my sake. I was fine. I would be fine.

It was when you cried that I realized: I was dying. I was truly, actually, genuinely dying. You had lifted me from the car, carried me up the stairs to our apartment, and settled me down on our bed, wrapping the sheets tightly about me, tucking me in, as though I were again six. It was eighty degrees out, yet I had been freezing. It was then, looking down at me, your hand pressed to my sullen, sunken cheek, that you fell to your knees. Your head fell in my lap, and you had cried—sobbed large, despairing tears.

It was as though I were already dead and everyone was already mourning.

Today, I looked up at you from the white folds of the hospital blankets. You are sleeping on the chair, resting your head on your hand, your hair falling in tangled masses about your face.

I hate you, yet I love you. You make me want to live and make me want to cry, to scream. To call out at the sky, shaking my fists, asking why this had happened. Had I truly deserved this? You had made me miserable and yet, at the same time, one of the happiest people to have ever lived. I’m sorry for when you wake up.

I imagine your face, the way it’ll blotch with tears, the way it’ll writhe with a thousand emotions—anger and sorrow and disbelief. You’ll stand there, staring uncertain whether or not I’m dead because I look so alive but my chest isn’t moving with that rhythm of life.

Yet, despite all of this, I found myself pondering: would you cry at my funeral?

-Love, Annalise