we depend (I depend) on you • jayvik

Jayce - Year Twenty-Six

In the spring, Steb cuts your hair.

An earlier trip to the hospital reveals how much your lung condition has worsened under our noses. An intense bout of medication, administered in an attempt to freeze the progression, leaves you lame with exhaustion and pushes you to your limits. You haven't put on an ounce of weight in the past year, so after a few weeks of it, your hair starts to fall out. It's slow at first, then begins to thin at the sides when you pull at it, and we know it's time for it to go.

The underside of it near your nape had already turned white – as if it had lost its color overnight – and the more Steb buzzes, the greyer it is revealed beneath the soft, older strands of chestnut brown.

We try to laugh and keep the room light as it falls down around your shoulders and onto the floor. It's only a haircut, afterall, and neither of us have ever known you to have hair so short. It's uneven and choppy from the careless cuts of the kitchen scissors, and it looks wild and silly. By the time he goes over your head with the clippers, it's buzzed short, but the thinner areas are less noticeable like this. They're not gone, just not as stark next to where your hair is still healthy and full.

While Steb brushes away the little hairs stuck to your skin with a dry, clean towel, I do my best to gather all of the hair into a pile for disposing. By the time I finish and get a good look at you, you look like a different man. You look impossibly smaller without your hair, but your cheeks don't look as hollow and your eyes aren't as dull from the shadow. There's a sadness in them, of course there is, because I know how much cutting your hair feels like laying down – like giving up part of the control you've tried so hard to keep your hands around. But it is not your hair that dictates your strength, Viktor. It is your heart. Your will . Your soul. Without your hair, you are still you. And you are as beautiful as the day I met you.

Steb sniffles softly as he wipes a single tear from where it falls down your cheek. You don't have enough energy to cry any more than that. He kisses the crown of your head, and you clutch at the hem of his shirt so that even when he pulls away, he'll stay close.

Then your eyes flick downward to where I'm still sweeping at the tufts and strands, and you toe a clump of brown toward the pile. I set down the brush in my claw and wrap it around your thigh instead, squeezing lightly. It's the best I can do – my special version of an embrace. Your other hand wraps warm around the extension of it, Steb's on top of yours... Then we are all close, together in the middle of the washroom, and you are laying down somewhere in the pile of your hair, but we are laying down in the middle of it alongside you.

∘ ∘ ∘

In the fall, you take a tumble.

It's mid-morning and I'm with Lyra in the kitchen, watching her fingerpaint the last of the flowers in the bed outside of the window. Steb is at work for the day and you are in your room. When I left you earlier that morning, you were reading a book on magic and miracles. You said you would be fine while I was gone.

You must've had to go to the washroom, but I hadn't heard you if you'd called for me. I didn't even hear you get up, but when I found you, you were just beyond the foot of the bed and you'd lost control of your bladder. I was there in an instant at your side, and we tried so hard to get you up, but you'd hit the floor too hard and your bones were too sore. Already your skin was blooming with bruise from your ribs to your knees, black and blue and green. I told you to wait – that I would be gone for only a moment so that I could send a signal for Steb – but you reached for me and told me to stop.

It didn't make sense to me then. It still doesn't.

I assured you it would only be a short time, but you reached again. You begged me – you didn't want him to know. You didn't want him to know how foolish you'd been, getting up by yourself when you know you need someone to assist you. You asked me not to tell him, to come back and do my very best to get you up on my own, and although I knew it wasn't right, and that I wasn't gentle on your body, I did just that.

I shouldn't have, but I did.

I closed the door so the child wouldn't see you on the floor, and I used everything I had to get you into a new change of clothes, freshened up, and back into the bed.

You were beyond embarrassed. You were humiliated, but we agreed silently to not speak of it.

Steb didn't hear of it, but that day was the last time you ever stood on your feet by yourself again.

He found out eventually. And he wasn't happy about it. But we could've never kept that secret forever, not with how you'd lost all confidence in yourself and your body, and how the bruising refused to fade. You trembled now whenever it was time to get up, as if you were scared to fall again, and you only asked for help when it was nearly too late.

Steb was upset. He was disappointed, and it pulled a brief rift in our family for a while until he pulled me aside one night and asked me why I kept it from him – the fall. He asked me why I didn't tell him. And I didn't have an answer for him, because I didn't know why I did it either. It wasn't a good enough reply, and it only upset him more.

It's been months since it happened, and I still blame myself for it all. I wonder often about if I had been there – if I'd heard you when it happened – if things would be different.

Viktor, I am so sorry . I failed you that day, and I have never forgiven myself for it. I don't expect you to forgive me, nor do I want you to. Please lay all of your guilt, your anger, your grief on me. Put it all on me and never think twice. I will take it. All of it. If it helps ease your mental anguish even slightly, oh , I will take it.

I know I lied for you that day, but Viktor – I don't know if I could ever lie like that again.

It's torn me apart from the inside, but please , never forgive me.

∘ ∘ ∘

It was true that you never walked again. You never stood. And because of that, we needed to make some changes.

We can no longer consider our home accessible, and you continue to refuse the wheelchair – you won't even allow us to pull it from where it's folded up in the closet. You also can't be carried all the time from place to place. Your body is becoming too fragile, and Steb is getting older. It's becoming increasingly difficult for him to carry you, especially now that he's starting to have some muscular issues of his own.

We don't have the money to buy a big, fancy chair – we owe too much already – but I'm not sure you would accept it anyway. I offered to create a schematic of one fit to your desires, but stopped immediately when I realized that our days of building prototypes and projects are far over. We don't have many options left... We'd long since run out of those.

∘ ∘ ∘

You don't like it, but we're forced to pull the wheelchair out of the closet. It's another thing you're angry at me for, but I accepted your anger long ago. I take the blame. I live with it, and I'm okay with it. It hurts me terribly, but such is the price of love.

∘ ∘ ∘

We've had quite the year, haven't we, Viktor?

But that's life, I suppose. Unpredictable, strange in its rhythm, and relentless in its pace.

After everything we endure as a family, it becomes painfully clear how much time you miss with your daughter. She's grown so much, already becoming a little lady in her own right. You say it feels like you've lived a thousand years in just this one, and only a fraction of them have been spent with her. It isn't your fault, but still, you insist something has to change.

So we begin documenting more and creating new memories. Her life, her milestones, the quiet, fleeting magic of everyday moments... We create memories every single day, sorting them into weeks and months for future navigation. I start recording the small, happy fragments of our mornings and evenings to be re-lived later, simply for the joy of remembering. For the gift of reminiscing.

You tell me often that this is my most important job – preserving these moments with Lyra. So I do it with care. I log each new word, every hop, every skip, every mispronounced phrase with the precision of an engineer and the tenderness of a father.

You don't want me to miss a thing. And I won't. I promise.

I do all of it – every bit – for you. Just in case one day you need to keep seeing the world through me. I will be your eyes. You can count on me.

∘ ∘ ∘