and like the wind

He clutched the stems of the melancholie souls in a deathly grip, waiting anxiously for the potbellied owner of the flower shop to finish business with the boy in the late twenties and his order of a 2 dozen roses. Quite pretty they were, the rose flowers, with their red petals dank from the morning dew. Far auspicious a blossom than the ones he was currently gripping, like his life very much depended on it.

He'd thought these flowers, the melancholie souls, were quite apt for the occasion he was getting them for, because you see, Dariel was not acquiring these for some college sweetheart or as a prop for the coming valentines day. Instead, they were for his wife, stage IV cancer, limping through her final days on IV tubes. He had wanted something more felicitous as a final farewell, something along the likes of marigold, or a bunch of tulips, instead of a pretty symbol of sorrow, but decided against it at the very last moment. For the past 6 months, they've pretended to be a happy couple, ignoring death waiting by the door, fantasized being surrounded by vanilla scented candles and not the sterile odor of the hospital, and as Brayleigh's pragmatic soul would have it, she wanted her last few weeks to be free of the veils of deception and as she called it, free of that "happy little bubble".

So there was Dariel, buying Melancholie Souls for his dying wife, instead of being by her side in her last moments.

***

The flowers arranged neatly in a vase next to Brayleigh's bedside table seemed to mock Dariel as he sat with the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He'd decided to write a letter to her, something short and sweet to send her off in the next life with little to no regrets. He'd write it down the most prettily and read it out while holding her hand and yes, it would be the most perfect of goodbyes. There was no clean way to enter the deeply folded sections of the heart, so he just picked the pen up, and he poised it over the sheets he'd borrowed from the hospital reception and surprisingly, came up blank.

'How the hell do you even say goodbye?' he wondered absently, then after a brief pause, started writing.

"How the hell do you even say goodbye?" Dariel wrote, the ink bleeding and staining his fingers. "... goodbye to someone for whom you baked cupcakes and banana breads for on Sunday's, whose love felt like the ocean and I, the most romantic of shipwrecks, the waves keeping the bits and pieces of me forever afloat.

Perhaps, forever is an overstatement. The ocean waves has to calm and settle someday, and when they did, I could feel those pieces of mine slowly sinking. Naw, scratch that. Sinking rapidly. Too damn fast for me to find a piece of wood to stay afloat in an expanse of water that's only ever going to be you. My love was such, that I'd always known I'd never get tied to another girl as long as I lived. 'What if I die?' you had asked. 'Even then', I had declared. "

Dariel paused and frowned at the incessant poetic rambling that seemed to crawl over the page like ants on a lost mission. His thoughts seemed to go astray like the wind, blowing in all directions, distracting him from the job he was trying to accomplish. So he took a deep breath, composed himself, and tried writing further,

"So, believe me when I say that this is the hardest thing I've ever done. Yes, asking you out as a horny teen does not top the list, although it comes a close second. The first time we kissed? Stars above, it felt good (I know they advised you against falling in love with a writer, who'll immortalize you in their PTSD and make you their muse, but you consoled yourself thinking; 'well, at least he'll write beautiful odes to the mole under my left eye and one liner's to our first kisses' but look at me, describing the synching of our lips and our heart as 'good').

It wasn't perfect in any way though, our kiss. We fumbled over a solid minute on the correct way to tilt the mouth so they would just 'slide' over one another efficiently, before finally settling on an owl's-curious-head-tilted pose, with nose bumping and teeth clashing. Yes it wasn't perfect, but first timers are never meant to be anything but memorable. And they sure were, considering the fact that the taste of your strawberry lip-gloss is still afresh in my mind, as vivid as if I held you in my arms just yesterday-"

***

I stopped again, crinkling up the paper in my apparent frustration. What I meant to write was a "short and sweet" goodbye, not this thing I was putting down, whatever it was. A reminiscent poem?

I tried to bring my emotions under check and considered what I was going to put down next. That I'm sorry you have to go. I'm sorry that we aged a lot sooner than we had hoped. That I love you, Bray. I'd tell you how you was the first person my poetry held in her palms with such intensity, memorizing and forging free verses to the curve of your lashes and soliloquys to the cupid's bow of your lips and I? I just listened and wrote them. We 'd made that promise, Bray, remember?....

and just like that, my thoughts drifted again, like an aimless wind changing directions without any afterthought,

"remember how we said that when sickness will consume the best of us, when one would be lying on a hospital bed like such, the other would find the courage for the last kiss. They'd sneak in some frosted cupcakes on Sunday's and maybe Tuesday's too. The banana bread will be half cooked and the chamomile tea a little too bitter, but we'd gulp it down like ambrosia itself.

At that time, it felt like such a faraway vow, you know, a speculation for the hobbling phase of life, but the day we woke up with a greyed hair that moved when we moved, was the day that genuinely scared me. You see, for all my love drenched poems of bravado, I'm a coward, especially in the matters of heart. Especially in the thoughts of losing you. Maybe that's why I've tiptoed around the sleeping form of this goodbye letter that I'm trying to write.

'To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence'' wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and if that's that case, I'd happily unlatch my soul from this mortal body and spend the rest of my life as an empty husk. After you're gone, I'd go on with my everyday life as usual; folding the clothes on Wednesday's (on autopilot), washing the dishes on Saturday's, but never again will a cupcake be baked. Unless it'll be your death anniversary, and on that day I'll sit by the fireplace like we used to each evening, and write elegy's to what we were before, and what I was right now, a dead man's poem.

Only on those days will I allow myself to feel even a miniscule amount of grief that my soul is battering with right now, because if it would have been any more, I would find myself very tempted indeed to carry through the desire of stopping my heart when your own does."

Not able to go any further with the opaque wall of tears obscuring my vision, I set the weeping pen aside and neatly folded the page in half and rose, to find the monitor beside your bed going "beep, beep, beep"

the air in the room shifts, stills. I become acutely aware of hope departing, leaving the door half open for death to come wander in. Confused, I scream at hope to stop, to be by your bedside a little longer, just enough so I could hold your hand one last time and read out this letter, just enough to-

"beeeeeeeeeeeeep..."

"beeeeeep..."

"beeeep..."

-static-

***

In the end, Dariel stood in that hospital room, floor scattered with broken promises and withered melancholies, clutching the goodbye letter like his life depended on it, and to say half the truth, it did.

In the end, he didn't have the courage for the last kiss. In the end, hope arrived exactly when hope is supposed to. And hope left exactly when hope must, and just like the wind, Brayleigh was gone.

----