The Roses We Buried

Cancer

I will not kiss you
'Cause the hardest part of this
Is leaving you

- My Chemical Romance

She is gone and the world is all the lesser for it. Each colour looks duller than it had ever before. Every sound is far, far away, although everything seems so close to me. Maybe even too close.
Nothing seems to reach me as I sit in the entrance hall of the hospital. People are walking by. I watch them come and go. I watch them, the floor, the wall. I can't tell what I'm watching anymore.
I sit there and I think about her.

She left a hole in the world, which I'll never be able to fill again. Her absence will always haunt me. There is no such thing as closure. No healing over time. None of that. My legs support my upper body through my arms as I fold into myself. It hurts. Knowing that she's gone. It hurts.

There is a poem in my head. Repeating itself. Over and over again.

Your absence has gone through me
Like threat through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its colour.

W.S. Merwin had called it Separation. Death would be the more appropriate title.
There will be nothing I do not dyed in the colour of her thread. She was always a part of me and even her death can't change that.

I close my eyes to remember her.
Remember her eyes. Her nose. The smell of her hair. The way she turned around to look at me.

Her smile.

I hold on to her image. Fleeting as it is. One day it will be gone. Blurred by time, ripped by pain. I hold on to the memory of her as if it were my life. In some ways it is.

Her smile. I can't forget her smile. At least her smile. She has to leave me her smile. Her smile was the only thing that kept me going. Now what? What will help me in my sleepless nights, riddled with pain and sweat. What will get me through the next day?

In the end her smile had strained, it had lost its happiness and had become a functionality. I miss it. I miss it and it hurts. The world shouldn't have been ridden of it.

Suddenly I hear sobbing beside me. It pierces through me, louder than everything else. It rips me from my thoughts and I slightly turn my head. Next to me sits a girl. She looks so similar for a second I think it's her.

It isn't. Of course, it isn't.

She's pulling her knees towards her chest with her arms. I can see that she's trying to block out the world. I can see the same pain webbed inside of her. And I feel sympathy towards her. Somehow I can't stand her sadness. I want to tell her something. Something to cheer her up. To stop those tears of hers. But I'm at a lack for words.

For the first time in my life I don't know what to say.

***

I sit there and wish he hadn't gone. Hadn't passed away. Hadn't left me behind. I don't know how to cope without him. It is true, it was hard at the end, but not as hard as a world without him in it. Tears are running down my cheeks and I can't stop them.They just keep coming. Blurring my vision. Blurring the world around me.

It doesn't matter. A world without him isn't a world I want to see.

It hurts but the tears somehow help. It washes the pain out of me. Not that it will ever leave. At least his death had been peaceful. That's what the doctors said. Do I believe them?

There is a guy sitting next to me. I don't know when I notice him. I don't know if he starts staring at me or if I start staring at him. This also doesn't matter. My blurry vision lies on him and he looks similar. So similar to him it hurts.