Almost
She was once a runner. She had the energy to move, to stretch, to push every single bit of herself to the very limit. Her heart would pound, and her lungs would fill so achingly full of air with each breath. She can remember the smooth, sleek lines of her muscles. She can remember the tight turn of her thighs and her arms. She can remember how good it felt to whisk around a room, laughing, talking, heels clattering against the floor. She can remember how good it felt to whisk around a block, legs stretching and stretching, lunging across the ground. The soft noise of pavement meeting shoe and the way everything around her dropped into stillness. The swell of her chest and the way it spurred her to move faster, faster.
Now, she still finds her heart pounding, lungs eating every bit of air that they can catch, but instead of running she’s tying her shoe or making a cup of coffee or shifting her position on the couch. Now, her heart pounds, the sound roaring through her ears when she stands up to get out of bed in the morning. She can feel her pulse pumping through her fingers and shooting through her muscles and tearing into her joints. She finds herself breathless, the kind where she’s sipping through a straw and the straw is the size of a pinhead and she’s sucking and sucking, but nothing comes in. Her lungs are constantly hungry; her body is starving itself from the inside out.
Some nights, she dreams that her skin is falling away and melting into the sea and taking the rest of her with it to float across the waves. Or, she dreams that her bones are shattering into a million tiny fragments of glitter, and she scoops it all into her hands and swallows. Or, she dreams that she is wearing the light of the stars and the moon as a cloak around her body. She can feel their silky smoothness against her skin, deep into her muscles. In her dream, she looks into the mirror and instead of her failing body, all she sees is the beauty of the moon herself reflected where her face should be. That one is by far her favorite.
But really, most nights, she lies awake listening to the soft voice of the woman residing in her (collapsing) lung cavity, her (weakening) bones. She listens to the sad lilt of her words, the way they echo off the soft flaps of her muscles. She listens to how sorry she is that the whole thing is happening. She cries and lets the tears dry in her hair, lets them drop into little lakes at the edges of her pillow. The voice of the woman makes her think of honey or sticky lavender sugar that you can’t wait to lap up with your tongue. It’s the only time of the day when she is still when she is quiet. The only time where she can delve deep into her own heart and swim in its erratic current without anger. A time where she can chart out the shifting rhythms of her breath, every tingle or itch, every sharp shooting satellite of pain without judgment. It’s the only time she feels like someone understands.
There are some benefits to dying. Her memory has become soft and pliable. Malleable. It’s like someone has taken the doughy bits of her brain and stretched them farther and farther until all it resembles is long ropey chords, paper-thin and fragile. Every thought is slippery and impossible to hold onto for too long. Most of them slip down the backside of her brain and are swallowed up by her spine, though she pretends that’s not the case. The truth is dying has made her nicer. Easier to please. Finally, able to live in the moment. She forgets when her husband doesn’t clean up the way he promised he would. She forgets that the day before her sister snapped at her on the phone. She’s forgotten bigger things too, like how it felt when the doctor told her she would never carry a child or the sickening after punch of learning about the disease that she’s now “living” with.
She can almost forget how much she misses running. She can almost forget the smell of rain on the hot pavement after a long day at work. She can almost forget that her husband will outlive her by more years than she will be granted on earth. Almost.
