Second Chances

I’m in awe of the beauty that leaks into my ears. It’s so beautiful that I don’t brush away the tears that trickle down my face. The cold fingers brush my face like a breath of winter kissing my tear stained face. I look up and see his smiling face straining to talk.

“How long have you been in here?” he asks, obviously struggling with the words that come out of his mouth. I could see he was trying so hard to talk, his eyes reflected his pain, the struggle to survive. It hurt me equally to see him dwell on pain, to feed on torture for mere survival. Instantly I placed my shivering index finger on his icy blue tinted lips.

He was so cold, too cold.

“Since yesterday, I told you I would never leave you,” I reminded him.

He nods with a sympathetic pout set in his lips. Suddenly, he notices the melody of a voice and piano intertwining into a familiar graceful tune. With recognition he gives a skeptical look, asking Why are you listening to me singing?

And to that I had one simple answer. I leaned forward, touching his face with my fingers lending him the much needed warmth through my fingers. I caress my hands over his face, feeling the contours of his nose, lips, his jaw structure and how his frozen landscape of a face should be as familiar as my own home town, but instead I feel like I’m exploring the frozen foreign barren land of Antarctica for the first time.

I let my lips linger on his own lips, just enough time for the heat from my mouth to seep into his body. He said he was cold without me. I knew I was a flame, a burning inferno without him. I never believed that we should be together, and I never believed we could help each other, but love never lies. There he was, a frozen ice sculpture, needing my love, and my warmth. He was imperfect, the wires and tubes drowning his gaunt and malnourished body on a white washed hospital bed.

But to me he was still my Andrew, singing to me from his grand piano with an ever fluorescent smile tattooed on his face.

“Do you love me?” his quiet strained voice rattled my brain. I opened my eyes to see his almost empty eyes staring back at me with so much intensity I wanted to break our gaze. And then the question he asked started to register in my mind.
Did I love him?

I stared at him in confusion and I tried to decipher what this question would eventually lead to, a dark tunnel sealed forever or a pathway to the sun.

“What? What are you talking about Andrew?” I asked, but my mouth started to falter as the intent of his question became as clear as crystal glass in my mind.

“Katie, do you love me?” he squeezed my hand tighter and I wasn’t working on stifling my sobs anymore. I was more worried that I was going to fall apart into a thousand pieces.

“Of course I do, but no, no, no. Andrew, no, please no, don’t you dare do this to me,” I pleaded, my heart imploding in my chest and my tears exploding into a fit of waterworks.

”Katie, don’t cry,” he said in a calm voice that strongly accentuated my hysterical cries.

“I’ll take it back! All of it! The night of the accident, the day you were diagnosed with leukemia, everything! I’ll die instead of you, just anything but this,” I cried, grasping his arms and burying my face in his shoulder.

“You would die for me?” Andrew inquired.

I looked at him my tears still dripped down as I nodded a certain and so sure yes.

“That would leave me without you Katie, love. What world would that leave me in? Undedicated songs written with no purpose, no beautiful Katie to kiss me goodnight and to greet me in the morning is the kind of world I would live without you. I would have no one to love. But you, Katie, will move on. Your gorgeous, you’ll get a new love to write you songs and sing you to sleep, you’ll move on better than I ever will,” he voice was near faint but I could hear the strength and trueness of his words.

I didn’t protest, I was too weak for that. I still shook my head, waiting for this nightmare to end.

“Don’t leave me Andrew, please don’t,” I whimpered laying my forehead onto his chest.
“Why not?” I could almost hear the smile in his voice.

I still said the words, knowing it would lead to me eventual doom but I had so much to owe Andrew, I would at least give him this.

“Because I love you Andrew, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” my tears were now the Nile River streaming all over my face.

With his lips, he kissed my wet face and kissed my lips with the salty taste still lingering in his mouth. He slowly broke away from me, placed his lips near my ear and whispered quietly,

“That’s all I needed to hear, I love you more, Katie,”

I shook my head and placed my lips on his, hoping that it would somehow save him. I prayed harder and harder.

Please stay, Please stay I repeated in my mind.
But the heart meter was slowing, the frequency getting lower and lower. Panicking, my heart started to race, letting my lips linger on his, but I started to feel him slip away. I wanted him to come back, so bad.

“Stay with me a little longer,” I begged, murmuring into his face.

I kissed him one last time, hoping that a miracle would rain down on us, but I had no such luck and I head the long, dreaded beep almost drowning out my sanity.

I broke from his lips, knowing he was beyond saving now. I unlaced my fingers from his lifeless ones, and I collapsed to the ground. My mind didn’t register a thing as the paramedics surrounded Andrew making last minute efforts to save him.

One of them tried to console me, but his well intentions were obsolete to me. The only thing that I did register was that I was in a cold black room all by myself and alone and trapped forever. And Andrew was nowhere in sight.

It wasn’t a world I didn’t want to get used to.