She looked out the hospital window, through the flecks and cracks that stained the glass, at the rows upon rows of brick houses. They were lined up like titles on a bookcase - uniform, stationary, but each contributing something different to the chattering city: a chapter, a character. An ending.
But she was too far away to appreciate these small individualities. From where she was standing, the houses were nothing more than brick and cement. And the hospital was nothing more than a cage. She turned from the window, directing her attention back to the boy in the bed with a hollow smile.
Her brother tried to smile back, but his face was circled with worry and an overwhelming fatigue that practically radiated from him, clinging to every inch of his skin, etched in every line of his face. That inescapable misery that smelt so potent in this room: she hated it. It sagged from the ceiling and pushed the walls in on her, trying to squeeze her out - but she never let it. She had been ignoring it for days, from the comfort of a window-side chair.
She looked bitterly at his bedside table, where crowds of cards jostled for space, shouldering and tripping over each other, some even falling to the ground below where they were stepped on, discarded, swept beneath the bed. Scrawling handwriting and useless wishes were closed inside the sticky paper, messages that neither sibling had yet brought themselves to read.
Why should they appreciate those cards? They were unwanted pity sealed in envelopes and decorated with bows. They were empty apologies shoved down the throat of a letterbox. They were the phantom voices of the people who didn't bother to show up.
But she was here. And she hoped that that was all he needed.
His head lay weakly on a deflated pillow, his eyes sunken marbles that rattled when he moved and silently pleaded with her to stay. And although the sight of him, swaddled in pain and coughing up his hope, made something inside of her itch with horror, she would stay.
Because there was a chance it could keep him going, bring him comfort and distraction, if only for a few days longer. Because she wanted to love him as much as possible, before the cards and the window and the sagging ceiling became too much, suffocating them both, and pulling him into an unbreakable slumber.
Because she would rather see him sealed between the hospital's disinfected sheets, than laying in a box on her father's shoulder, sealed too tightly between flowers and grief.