I've been searching
For the happiness
I once found in you
It was the middle of the night, and for once Newt's exhaustion didn't let him sleep. He had watched Thomas sleep for a while, and wondered how that had been so romanticized in movies. It was honestly a little bit creepy. He scrolled on his phone for a little bit, and he found himself looking at the prices of airfare to New Zealand. Relatively speaking, the prices weren't bad. He looked at Thomas again, and then he looked at his oxygen bag. Maybe he could still go, now that he was dying. Maybe he could ditch the oxygen for a couple hours flight. He knew his doctors wouldn't allow it though.
He locked his phone and laid it flat on his chest. He could see the sun starting to rise from the rays of light streaming through the window. He pushed himself up and slung his bag over his shoulder. There was a field of wildflowers near his house, he used to walk to it often enough and he wanted to do nothing more now than that. He kissed Thomas on the forehead and threw on a jacket and his shoes. He could already see the flowers now, maybe they were in full bloom or maybe they were already dying as the cool of winter started to set in.
His heart was racing as he rode down the elevator. He felt like he was a teenager that was sneaking out of his parents house. But he was an adult, an adult that somehow required 24 hour supervision, but an adult nonetheless. When he stepped out of his apartment building, the chill of the air immediately took his breath away. It felt like he was breathing in shards of ice. He pulled his hood over his head to block the wind and he pushed on. He was determined, if not anything else.
He could already see the field in front of him, an endless wave of wildflowers swaying in the wind. He wanted to make it there. He wanted to see them for himself, but the breath in his lungs wasn't taking him there. It wasn't enough. He looked around for a place to sit down so he could catch his breath and spotted a bench about twenty yards ahead. There were the beginnings of icicles starting to form and dangle from the arm rest. He could see small clouds of his breath forming in front of his face, and at the same time he was sweating. All of his nerves and anxieties were building up because if he didn't make it to that bench, then he would collapse in the middle of the sidewalk. Then someone would call another ambulance for him, and that was something he really didn't want to do again.
Finally, when he made it to the bench, he gripped the back of it like his life depended on it. And in a way, maybe it did. He sat down to catch his breath, and warmed his fingertips with a hot breath. He looked down the street one way, and then the other way. Nobody was out yet of course, being so early in the morning. Maybe nobody would have called an ambulance for him and he would have frozen to death in the side walk, but he heard that wasn't a bad way to go anyway.
He waited longer than he thought before he finally caught his breath and his vision cleared again. He was so close to the park where the wildflowers grew he could taste it. He could practically smell them already.
When he finally made it inside the park and found a bench, he was huffing and puffing like an old man. He rested his back on the cold wood and took in his surroundings. It was utterly disappointing. The flowers that lined the road were the only ones that hadn't seemed to die from the frost. He was looking at shriveled, brown, dying flowers that were slowly withering away into nothing. Disappointment overwhelmed his feeling of triumph as he gazed at the dead field. His hopes that some of them had survived the frost were diminished, and now all that was left of him was the painful stabbing in his lungs at every breath. How was he going to make it back home? His fingers were already red from the cold, and his hands were tinted a dull blue. He shoved his hands in his pockets and watched.
The world was a lifeless abyss after summer. Winter drew life from the earth just as it did the air from his lungs. Why couldn't he see the beauty of it all anymore? It had been so long since he had done anything he truly enjoyed that he was finding each day harder and harder to get through. This would be one of his last days where he would get to be alone. Not that he needed to be. This was already pushing his physical limits, and the cost of his little adventure may be a finger or a toe.
