I woke up to the same disoriented reality I fell asleep to. I checked my phone for messages, but there weren't any. I sat up in my bed, my body oddly sore. What happened yesterday was still a fantasy. A fictional book that I'd never want to read.
I walked downstairs in my pajamas. My parents were sitting at the kitchen counter, a third cup of black coffee sitting on the opposite side of the table. They gave me a look of sympathy. I shrugged back.
"It's okay," my dad said. "And we don't want to smother you. If you want things to go back to normal here, that's exactly what we will do."
"Thanks," I said. "I think I could use some normal."
I sat down to drink my coffee as I heard a knock at the door. My mom started walking but, in hopes of it being Emma, I said I'd answer it.
I opened the door to her fist about to knock again. She looked taken aback by me being there. The bags under her eyes begged her to fall asleep and her hair was a nest of tangles. Her eyes were slightly red and she was still wearing the clothes she wore the day before. I hated it that she still looked beautiful.
"Emma, what are you doing here?" I began.
She fidgeted with a paper in her hands. "I stayed up all night if you couldn't tell by, well, everything about me." She waved her arms up and down her body.
"Here, come in," I said as I stepped to the right of the door. She followed me inside and into the kitchen.
My parents must have heard her because they were already next to each other, standing with sorry looks in their eyes.
My mom spoke up when we entered. "It's so good to have you here, Emma. Can we get you anything to eat or drink?" It looked like she was watching a puppy die.
"No, Ms. Taylor, but thank you for asking."
"Oh, please, Ms. Taylor is what they call me at work. You can call me Susan."
Emma smiled as I opened the door to the basement. "We'll be down here if you need us," I said.
We walked downstairs and sat down on my couch. I toyed with the cracked leather and she unfolded the paper in her hands.
Sorry about them," I said. "Ever since I told my parents, they've been a non-stop pity party."
"Oh please. This is a cold slap in the face compared to what my parents are doing. It's insane. But I am here for a different reason."
"What's up?"
She turned around the paper and on it was a list. I quickly glanced over it.
"So the doctor said that I had, more or less, a month or two left. She said that I could get chemotherapy for it to help me live a bit longer but cancer has spread too far for much else. And, because of the circumstances, the chemo would be very intense."
"Are you going to do it?"
"Well long story short, no. It would knock almost all ability out of me and I wouldn't be able to do half of the things on this list."
I looked at the list again. "So this is a bucket list."
"Kind of. The doctor said I had probably twenty to thirty days until cancer started making damn sure I was bedridden. So, this is everything I want to do before then."
I took a look at the list. It only had fifteen things on it. Fifteen.
1. Go on a Camping trip
2. Go Skydiving
3. Go to the mountains
4. Feel like I'm tiny
5. Feel like I'm huge
6. Go on a road trip
7. Makeout with Israel Taylor (a lot)
8. Laugh so hard I cry
9. Cry so hard I laugh
10. Believe in Something (the something with a capital S)
11. Be alone
12. Retire
13. Do something every day that I've never done before
14. Do yoga or some shit like that
15. Meet my parents
I reread each item on the list before I handed it back to her. She looked at me like she was waiting for my reaction.
"I love it," I said finally.
"Good because I sort of planned all of it out. It's going to be a twenty-day trip that I'm taking. I already told my parents about it and they agreed to it as long as I call them every day and they get to fly to wherever I am every three days." She laughed a bit. "They wanted to follow me in their car but I said that I needed to do some of this without them."
A bowling ball dropped in my stomach at the thought of losing her for that long. I decided to stay supportive. "I think it's amazing. I bet it'll be really fun."
"Well I'm glad you think that because I also really wanted your okay for it."
"No, I mean it would be so selfish of me to tell you to stay. You should definitely go."
My jaw felt like it broke under the pressure of those words.
"Oh no, not like that. I meant to say I needed your okay for it because, well, I want you to come with me."
"What?" I had to make sure I heard her correctly. "You want me to come?"
She smiled. "I wouldn't go if someone wasn't with me. And I'd ask my parents, but I want it to be you"
I ran my hands through my hair. "That's crazy... Uh, I mean, absolutely yes, I'll go, but Emma, this is crazy."
She laughed. "Well, that's what I'm going for."
I looked back at the list. "One question, though. Why is Retire already crossed off? I didn't even know you had a job."
"I don't. I dropped out of school this morning."
My jaw dropped but I picked it up quickly. "Just like that?"
"Yup. Made the call this morning. Weirdly enough, they don't argue much once you say that you have a month to live."
We laughed and sat on the couch for a minute.
"There is one thing we need to do, though." She said.
"What?" I asked.
"Tell Stew."
My jaw fell when she said it. I had forgotten entirely about Stew. He was predictable in just about every situation, but I had no idea how he would respond to this.
I called him to ask if he wanted to hang out, but I forgot that it was only Tuesday and some people still have school. The call went to voicemail after two or three rings and I hoped I didn't just get his phone taken away from him.
We decided to leave the house and drive around. I wasn't sure where we were going, but I was excited for it to just be us again.
We talked about normal things on our way around town. It was fun in a weird way, kind of like having a picnic in the middle of a tornado. We ended up in a park behind an elementary school. We got out and made our way across the wood chips to a swing set on the other side of the playground.
I reached out and loosely grabbed onto her hand. She squeezed harder onto mine.
"How are you feeling, really?" I started.
"I don't know, it changes about a thousand times a day. It's confusing. I don't know how to put my thoughts into words anymore. It's like my brain broke down as some sort of safety mechanism in my body. The more I think about everything, the more it creeps into reality, and I'm not ready to accept that yet."
I would've told her that everything is going to be okay but I'm not sure there's a possibility for those words anymore. They fell into the same shredded void as it's not you, it's me and I'll be praying for you. Death doesn't care about cliche's.
"It's almost comforting in a way." She said.
"Comforting?"
"Yeah. I mean, my entire life was hectic. When I was a kid, it was like life forced me into a passenger seat without a seatbelt on while it drove 90 down a crowded highway. I always knew that it made me more vulnerable to a crash. I always thought that my death would be more hectic than anything else. I thought it would be something that confused me.
"But this doesn't. I mean, I have the why me thoughts that everyone does, but for once I'm not uncertain of what's going to happen. It's clear-cut. I know when I'm going to die, I know how I'm going to die, and I even know where I'm going to die."
"Do you like that?"
"Well, no. It's a silver lining, and a pretty dull one at that. But it's still silver, I guess. I mean, we've always fantasized about what we'd do if we had a month to live but that's not a game anymore. It's just my life. I have a month and my life will be over. Then it's all about figuring out the rest."
I wanted to remind her that she may have more than just one month, but I figured it was pointless. She knew that. Instead, I looked at her hair as she blissfully swung back and forth. Easily rising and settling back on her shoulders.
"What do you mean 'figuring out the rest'?" I asked.
"I mean solving the question that has effectively plagued every single person on Earth since the beginning: what happens next."
I laughed. "In a month you'll be smarter than anyone stuck down here."
"And who knows, maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I'll just waste away to oblivion, not realizing how smart I just became."
"Do you know what you want to happen?"
"I know what I want, but if my life has taught me anything it's that what I want and what actually happens don't really follow each other's lead."
"Well then let's pretend for a bit."
"Well right after I die," she said, widening her eyes and motioning her hands. "I appear in a field full of golden retriever puppies that all want to snuggle with me."
She started laughing and so did I.
"Fair enough" I said.
"But for real, I want to see my life when I was a kid. I want to understand why my parents left me and what led them to it. I want to see what I was like. I have no pictures or videos from my childhood. I want to see why people treated me the way they did and what made them act like that in the first place.
"I want to be my own guardian angel and go back in time to comfort myself. I want to ask why my guardian angel seemed to take a vacation whenever things started to go bad." A tear fell from her cheek as she finished. "I don't know," she said softly. "I just want to understand."
I bent my head down to the ground and she rubbed her thumb over the back of my hand.
"I don't think it's a secret that I love music." I began. "At this point it's probably my biggest love... Except you."
"Good cover," she laughed.
I continued. "Music found a way into my life that doesn't just enhance it, it captures every little memory into a soundbite that lets me relive the feelings I had.
"But when I hear any song from the past three months, it doesn't matter what it was about. It doesn't matter if I was doing laundry, cleaning my room, driving a car, doing homework, or spending time with you. They're all about you, no matter what." I said. "It's only been you, and I wouldn't change that for anything."
She let go of my hand and slowly got off of her swing. She started walking away, feeling the wood chips underneath her feet as she glided on top of them. She turned her head back towards me and beckoned me to her. "Come on," she said.
We walked to her car and she got in. I cautiously climbed in the passenger side, unaware of what was happening.
She held up the aux cord in her hand. "Play something."
I took the cord and plugged in my phone. I started browsing through my music apps.
"It doesn't matter what it is." She said. "If you're going to remember me with music, I'm going to make damn sure my face is engraved in every single song you own."
I smiled and decided to start off strong. I flipped through my playlists, trying to find some songs that begged to have her coursing through every note. I pressed on a playlist called 'bust it out.'
"Oh damn Israel. We're starting with guns hot!" She yelled. Her shoulders started to shake with the beat.
She grabbed the steering wheel and swerved into the right turn lane. We blasted like a comet down a backroad, sparks flying in our trails.
I held onto the door for dear life, thinking she was trying to take me out with her. She kept driving until we got into the parking lot of an old building.
She parked the car in the middle of the lot and rolled down every window. The music flowed out of them, turning heads on the sidewalk. She jumped out of the car and ran around the hood over to me. I realized what she was doing and tried to lock the door so she couldn't get in.
She ran up to the window and grabbed my hand as it was still on the lock. "Come on. You aren't going to be able to back out of this one."
"I'm really not a dancing-in-the-street type of guy. I think the music moves best by itself."
"You can't tell the dying girl no, Israel. It's against the law."
She grabbed my hands and held them above her head as she spun under them. Her hair flew in the wind and the music followed her every footstep. I sat there mesmerized, slowly swaying my hips and shaking my shoulders along with the beat. She saw me moving along and exaggerated my every movement. She got close to me and took the lead on our steps. We did salsa along with some Spanish dance music. She gyrated on her feet as the beat of the drums controlled her.
I looked around to make sure nobody else was watching but she grabbed my cheeks and pulled them back into her eyes. "Nobody's here. Don't even worry about me. Just do what you would do if you were in the car alone or in the shower."
She put her hands over my eyes and tried to make me move my arms. I could tell she was still dancing around, so I decided to finally give in. The songs changed and so did we. I started moving my hips with the beat, shaking my arms and moving my chest. Any time a line dancing song came on, we would add our own twists, I would kneel down and air guitar in front of Emma as she played the drums in the background.
We kept moving through five, six, ten songs. The playlist started getting towards its end and she held her hand up to stop. She bent down and put her hands on her knees, breathing with her whole torso.
"Alright." She breathed. "I think we should head back into the car for some water."
I stopped in an instant and we walked back to her car. I smiled before I sat down on her leather seats knowing that those songs will forever be replaced by her name.
She started driving back to her house, the music pulsing more life into the air. She sang along to all of the parts she knew and hummed along to the rest. Her voice was the missing note that every song needed.
The missing note I needed.