If someone were to ask just who "she" was, I wouldn't be able to answer, as I hadn't the slightest clue. A hallucination? Some kind of angel? For the past five years, I would greet each morning with the last warm fingers of a dream clinging to my mind. I'd roll on my side, and lying next to me would be a girl of my age, but with beauty unmatched by anyone else on the planet. With liquid smooth skin as soft as ripe fruit, a complexion shade like that of molten bronze and silver mixed together, and bright blue eyes that held unparalleled kindness and warmth, the very sight of her was like a religious experience. Her most predominant feature was her hair, an elegant crimson that could remove all fear of blood from anyone's soul. Groups of strands would stick together and then curl towards the end like a tongue of fire, granting her a tempered and yet untamable mane that hung down to her thighs.
Along with the face of a goddess, she had a figure that made a mockery of the word "perfection". Her glassy-smooth legs seemed to stretch her miles, coming to an end at a full but taut rear end with the shaven entrance to her gates of paradise just barely visible under the folds of the cotton sheet. Her midsection was like that of a bikini model's, with a concave dip on either side from her perfect slenderness. Cliché as the term was, she certainly had an hourglass figure. Last but not least, even though she looked only eighteen, she had D-Cup breasts that looked as soft as water balloons but firm and lively.
Every day, I would wake up with her beside me, lying in bed naked as if we had spent half of the previous night making sweet, passionate love. Each time, she would appear to almost be faintly glowing, and coupled with her flawless beauty, I was surely justified in calling her an angel. Lying there, I would watch as her eyes opened like the rising sun, letting me stare into her beautiful blues. Staring right back at me with endless love, she would smile, hum, and fall back to sleep. Even while knowing how it would end, I would always reach out and try to touch her, desperate to feel some sort of proof that she was real, but always, she would fade away before I could even stroke her hair.
Suffice to say, I was almost haunted by this "dream". This girl, this figment of my imagination, was the light of my life and the reason why I went to bed each night and plowed through each day. I had never heard her voice, never touched her, never been able to speak to her, and I didn't even know her name... yet I loved her. She was my secret, the one aspect of my life that I would never speak of, no matter what. When she first started to appear, I even obsessed over her. I would draw her every night on a sketchpad hidden under my bed, remembering her visage with crystal clarity and moving my hand with skill that I would never accept as my own, mirroring her image with graphite and paper with such closeness that I would hold no doubts as to being possessed.
Ironically, she was actually the only dream I would ever have. I would meet her each morning in a half-awake state, but through the night, my mind's eye would see nothing but an endless expansion of darkness, in which I would hover aimlessly until waking up. The only variance from the black sky was a single speck of light in the distance, a twinkling star almost completely out of sight, then I would wake up to find the girl beside me. I often wondered if she was that star. She certainly fit the role. She was the light of my life, a light I desperately needed, one of the last few reasons why I was still alive. Being able to wake up and see her each morning, even if for less than a minute, she supplied me with enough will power to endure the life I didn't want. But I have her, I'll always have her, and the day she disappears is the day I lose that final reason not to end it all.
But she wasn't here today. I didn't expect her to, seeing as how I found myself waking up in the hospital. A bright light had shone through my eyelids, stabbing my already sore brain. I could hear the beeping of a heart monitor nearby. My mind was a jumbled mess from the cocktail of drugs being pumped into me from the IV bags at my side, but I delved into my consciousness in search of answers. I remembered sitting in class... 6th period. Senior Biology was half finished... but there was something wrong. I remembered that my hands had been trembling, even more than usual. My skin was being pricked with invisible needles like all my limbs had fallen asleep, but I couldn't remember if it had come suddenly or if it had built over time. I remembered the first dagger stabbing me in the back of the neck. I remembered falling out of my chair, roaring in agony as I collapsed to the floor.
But it wasn't the lights or the beeping that had woken me up. It was the pain burning ceaselessly throughout my body. In the single moment from when I woke up, I went from being fine to feeling like I was in the burn ward, charred from head to toe. My muscles all felt like they were being pierced with hot nails, my organs twisted into knots. I leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited on the floor. My heart monitor was sending a digital scream, bringing in a nurse.
"Kill me!" I screamed as the pain intensified.
I sat on the hospital bed with my worried parents, facing Dr. Turner, a blonde woman in her early thirties. I had an IV bag of morphine hanging next to me, trying to suppress the chronic pain that was ravaging my body. I was receiving the maximum amount possible, but even then, all of my skin felt like a blistering sunburn and my insides faired no better.
"What you experienced in class was a seizure, caused by multiple tumors in your brain, focused on two specific areas. It may be possible for us to kill them with a heavy dose of radiation and chemotherapy, but with how small and numerous these tumors are, the chances are slim. It's a completely new form of cancer, and we aren't sure what its long-term effects are."
My parents started to cry, but I was completely calm. "Is it deadly? What the hell is going on with me?"
"Not in the traditional sense, but we just aren't completely sure." She held up an x-ray of my brain and pointed to a light spot. "That is the largest group of tumors and we imagine the oldest. However, whether they have grown over time or have always been there is a mystery. They are attached to your limbic system. Specifically, they are growing from the part of your brain that produces the chemical serotonin, as well as other chemicals that control mood. It appears that they aren't growing any further, but—"
"Let me guess, they're basically smothering that part of my brain down and starving me of those chemicals?"
She nodded and pointed to another bright spot. "Yes, exactly. Now as for the chronic pain, these tumors on your brainstem are the source. The tumors are basically rooting down into your nervous system, causing continuous stimulation of pain receptors. They're basically acting as electrodes hooked up to your spinal column. It seems that until now, they haven't been large enough to trigger you continuous pain. You could almost say that the tumors have finally activated. What you're experiencing now, that pain is from the tumors simply existing. That seizure you had earlier was the tumors reaching the peak level of stimulation and maximum. That may have been a one-time thing or they could randomly occur from now on while on top of your current condition.
"So is there any way to lessen the extent of my pain?"
"Yes, with anti-convulsion medicine, pain killers, and maybe some antidepressants, we might be able to lessen the extent."
"By how much?"
"Well, at this point we can't quite be sure. With drugs, we can make it so that you won't black out if the seizures persist, make the pain tolerable, and maybe take away the edge of the depression so that you won't become suicidal."
'It's too late for that.' "So it won't kill me, but it will fill me with excruciating pain and make me incapable of happiness?"
"Yes," Dr. Turner said mournfully.
Not wanting to bother staying in the hospital, I asked to be discharged. Before leaving, we stopped off at the hospital pharmacy to pick up my meds. I was holding my hands out in the cold October air as we drove, hoping that the raw chill might ease the dull throbbing in my fingers. The pain pills were slowly kicking in, making it so that the sting was bearable, but already, the word "bearable" had gained a whole new meaning for me. The drive home was silent, for my parents were trying to keep back tears, but I was calm. That's the one good thing about being suicidal: the prospect of your own death actually brings you peace. Now I didn't have to feel guilty about killing myself. The effect it would have on my family was one of the only things keeping me from ending it all. Now I could just let the cancer do it for me.
In a way, it felt good to finally have an answer as to why I suffered from depression. I had been depressed for most of my eighteen years, even suicidal, completely in contrast to the comfortable middle-class life I lived in my hometown in Maine. I couldn't even count the number of antidepressants, forced therapy lessons, and thoughts of longing to just die. There are people starving all over the world, people suffering. It's a mystery to people like me why they just don't kill themselves. It is the only question I will leave behind. How do they have lives that make my horrors look pathetic, but they have the will to live that I lack? That was always an issue nagging in the back of my mind: being depressed without having a reason. It was that mixture of guilt for knowing that I should consider myself lucky but the inability to do so, and the feeling of helplessness from the knowledge that it meant that nothing could change how I felt, and that if I would wish for death in a comfortable life, then I would wish for death no matter what.
But now, I just don't care. I don't need to care. I may not have suffered as much as people in Africa or other hellholes like that, but... at least they are capable of feeling happiness. Compared to them, I'm broken, and these tumors are the proof. I have felt the bite of a blade to try and cancel out my inner pain with outer pain. I have felt my sanity ripped away by years of sadness. Depression is more than sadness. It is the inability to feel joy. It's a missing foundation, like a building with a sinkhole where its fourth cornerstone should be. No matter what you use to try and support the building, it'll fall away, and the building can never stand, until it too crumbles and falls into the pit. To live with depression is like running a marathon with one leg, and the only help you can get is people suggesting you buy a better pair of shoes.
But hopefully, I'll be dead soon and I won't have to feel pain or sadness anymore.
Coming home, I went straight upstairs and hid in my room. I just wanted to go to sleep; maybe it would ease my suffering. Downstairs, I could hear my parents telling my younger sister and brother the bad news.
I was completely in awe, hovering in empty space within my dream. Before me, roaring in limitless intensity was the single star I always saw when I slept. Before now, it had been little more than a single speck of light off in the distance, but now it was clearly in view, the size of the moon and nearly frightening, simply because I realized now that it was not simply a star. In actuality, it was a black hole, devouring a star from the inside out, sucking in the flames and gas of the celestial giant. I could see it as if the sun was a piece of fruit cut in half to reveal the core. Yet miraculously, the sun did not shrink or diminish in size. It seemed more like it was constantly regenerating. Cast around the eternally-dying star was a green oval-shaped nebula, about three times as large as the star itself, and making the whole thing resemble an eye with the black hole as the pupil.
"The eye of God..." I murmured.
While the star was beyond my human comprehension in terms of size, I could feel myself being pulled towards it through the strength of its gravity. Whether this was truly the eye of God, I could not be sure, but one thing I was certain of was that it was my death. No, this object within my dream would not kill me, but it was the symbol of my end. The closer my mind got to it, the closer my body got to death. At the beautiful sight, I could not help but smile hysterically. "I'm going to die, I'm finally going to die. Just a little longer and I will finally find peace."
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I found myself back in my bed. As always, the imaginary angel was lying beside me, clearly visible in the light of the morning sun. Beautiful, she was so beautiful. The two of us were less than a foot apart, yet it felt like a mile. Lying there, this gorgeous hallucination in front of me, I felt my pain disappear like the extinguishing of a candle. Repeating my morning ritual, I reached up and tried to touch her, desperate to experience the sensation of her skin against my own. As expected, she disappeared just as I was about to make contact, but something stopped me from retracting my arm and letting it fall. My eyes wide, my hand trembling, I scanned through the recorded sensations of that brief second, desperate to figure out if what I had sensed so briefly had been real.
It was faint, so faint that it was almost beyond the reach of my sensations, but it HAD been there. Warmth, that was what I felt, the air within the space that she always occupied was warmer, as if energized by her body heat. My rolled my hand around through the empty space she had left behind, running my fingers through the warm air as if her long crimson hair were brushing against my palm. I then held my hand up to my face, clutching some of the air from that space, and smelled it. Like the warmth, what I detected within that air was almost beyond my ability to sense, but it was there, an aroma so faint that I was actually working my mind into a headache trying to analyze it. Roses, that was what it was.
