I can hear the machines again. That dull, steady beeping, the hiss of the oxygen. It's strange how you can live in a hospital for so long that these sounds stop being scary and just… normal. Home, even. This bed, these white walls, the smell of bleach — they've been my whole world for ten years. Nineteen years old, and more than half of them stolen by this thing inside me.
Leukemia. Such an ugly word for something that sounds almost delicate. I remember when I was nine and the doctor sat my parents down. I didn't understand most of it — just that I was "sick" and it wasn't going away soon. I thought it would be like a fever. A week, maybe two. But weeks turned into months, months into years, and somewhere in the middle I forgot what it felt like to be normal.
The first years were the worst. My friends at school stopped calling. At first they came to visit, bringing toys and homework, smiling awkwardly when they saw the IV needles sticking out of my arms. But visits faded, one by one, until it was just me, my parents, and the nurses. People get tired of waiting for you to get better. They move on. And I was left behind, in a world of antiseptic and pity.
I think I would've gone crazy if not for Lily.
I still see her face if I close my eyes. Pale, thinner than the other kids, with soft brown hair that always looked like it hadn't been brushed. She had this quiet way of being in the room, like she was apologizing for taking up space. The kind of person you could almost miss if you weren't paying attention. But once you did, you couldn't look away.
She was already in the ward when I came in for one of my longer stays. I remember staring at her because she was sitting up in bed folding paper cranes from scraps of old magazines. Her hands shook, but she still managed to crease the wings carefully.
"Why do you keep making those?" I asked. My voice was harsher than I meant.
She glanced at me, startled. "Because… maybe if I make enough, something good will happen."
I laughed, even though it came out weak. "That's stupid."
Her eyes lowered, but she smiled a little. "Yeah. I know."
That was Lily. Fragile, soft-spoken, but stubborn in her own quiet way. She believed in things nobody else did — little rituals, small hopes. And even though I teased her for it, I think part of me needed her to believe, because I couldn't anymore.
We spent years together in that ward. Coming and going, sometimes not seeing each other for months, then ending up side by side again like fate was playing a cruel joke. We would talk at night when the nurses thought we were asleep, whispering in the dark.
"Do you ever wonder what it's like outside?" she once asked me.
"I know what it's like. I used to play soccer, remember? The sun burns your skin, you get dirt in your shoes, and sometimes you trip and scrape your knees. It's nothing special."
She smiled. "It sounds amazing."
It broke something in me. She had been sick for so long that scraped knees sounded like heaven to her.
We planned dumb things sometimes. "When we get out," I'd say, "we'll go to the beach. I'll build the ugliest sandcastle, and you'll laugh at it."
"And I'll collect seashells," she added softly, "until I fill a whole bucket."
We both knew we might never leave, but we said those things anyway, because pretending felt better than silence.
Then, last year, Lily was gone. Not from the illness. No, she made the choice herself. One day she was there, folding cranes with trembling fingers, and the next, the bed was empty. The nurses whispered, the doctors looked grim, and eventually someone told me she'd… she'd ended it. Suicide.
I wanted to be angry. I wanted to scream at her for leaving me here alone. But all I could do was stare at the corner where her bed had been and feel the air collapse in on itself.
She was the only one who understood me, the only one who didn't look at me like I was broken glass. And she couldn't take it anymore.
Sometimes, when the nights get quiet and the beeping slows in my ears, I talk to her anyway.
"Hey, Lily," I whisper. "You left me too soon, you know. But I get it. I really do."
I imagine her answering, in that soft, almost apologetic voice: "I'm sorry, Daniel. I was tired."
"Yeah," I'd tell her. "I'm tired too."
I don't blame her. If anything, I envy her. She got out first. She stopped hurting. And now I'm lying here, my body weaker every day, waiting for the same end.
The doctors don't say much anymore. Just "rest" and "be comfortable." I know what that means. There's no fight left in me, not really. My chest feels heavy, my veins like fire, my head too foggy. I don't even dream anymore — just flashes of memory, like old photographs fading at the edges.
I think about the cranes Lily used to fold. Hundreds of them, piled in a box by her bed. She said if she made a thousand, a wish would come true.
"What would you even wish for?" I asked her once.
She smiled faintly. "To not hurt anymore."
I told her it was dumb. Now I wish I'd helped her fold more. Maybe a thousand would have been enough. Maybe not.
I'm so tired. My eyelids are heavy, and every breath feels like it has to climb a mountain. I don't know how much longer I have, but I know it isn't days. Maybe hours. Maybe minutes.
If there's something after this, maybe I'll see her again. Maybe she'll be sitting on a beach somewhere, holding that bucket of seashells, waiting for me. Maybe she'll hand me one of her cranes and laugh at how badly I fold mine.
I close my eyes and whisper into the emptiness. "I'll see you soon, Lily."
And for the first time in years, the silence doesn't feel so lonely.