Beautiful, pure, a dying breed

01.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed. He's small in size but big in heart and he always sleeps on the right side of the bed. He scolds me for being too serious and I scold him for eating his steak too rare.

He's flipping through my fashion magazines with one bare foot propped up on the coffee table. They tell him pointless things that he thinks are very important, like how faded jeans are in and that he's a summer, although he always liked autumn best.

"See?" he said to me last Fall as he pulled off a red oak leaf off a branch. He pulled it harder than he needed to, the entire tree shaking with his force. "Things are most beautiful when they are almost gone."

He says the same thing about melting icicles and fireworks and sand castles. And because I love him so, I don't tell him that the reason he's so beautiful is because he's almost gone.


02.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed, and sleeps on a mattress with no bed frame. He lives alone at eighteen, his house a mess of old pizza boxes and fashion magazines he orders for me. He holds his cigarettes the cool way like in old movies, limply between his index and middle finger to form a peace sign. His fingers scream false hope. I watch him from the kitchen, knowing his bloom is ending although he's still young. His sixteenth birthday and driver's licence marked his midpoint.

I think back to the days when he was young when we'd share double popsicles on the piazza of his duplex. When I was too weak to break them in half so he'd always break them for me, giving me the slightly bigger one. When he was the strongest man in the world and not just a dying breed.

"Do you love her?" I ask with runny-red eyes, turned away so he can't see me. He blows smoke rings absentmindedly.

"Do you love her?" I ask again, more sternly this time. My voice cracks a little. He puts the cigarette and fashion magazine down on the coffee table.

"Yeah," he says hesitantly but surely. "Yeah, I really do."

"You better," I scold. "You know what horrible things love can do to a girl's heart."

"Yeah," he repeats. "I do."

I want to say "So do I," but I don't because I wouldn't dare kill off a dying breed.


03.
He's beautiful, pure, a dying breed, and he's getting married today. I'm the only one he reads his self-written vows to before the wedding.

I am sitting on the edge of the bed as he reads his pretty words that aren't for me. As he reads, I notice his enlarged Adam's apple and his five-o-clock shadow and suddenly he looks so grown up to me. I grip the sheets, watching my knuckles turn white. There is a long silence after he finishes until my sob breaks it.

"You promised..." I begin. "You said you'll never grow up."

He smiles like a bee stung him. "I guess I lied."

I know he knows the words I'm about to say and I know he knows that I know so the words slip out easily between my lips.

"You know, I always hoped that... we would get married." I inform. He sighs, letting out a lungful of hot air.

"You know I can't marry imaginary friends." he says decisively yet softly, to make it easier for me. My heart drops. He promised he would never call me that.

"Why can't I be real like you? Like her?" I ask icily.

He walks to the window and opens the blinds and closes them, sending a signal to the heavens to swallow him up. There's no answer and he turns back to me.

"I don't know," he says, rubbing his temples. "But sometimes that's all I want." He leans into me to brush away my imaginary tears, but his hand just goes through me and through the empty air.


04.
It's because we're so close that we don't have to speak sometimes. He knows me so well that I don't even have to tell him that I don't like his wife, and I know him so well that he doesn't even have to tell me he's going to die soon.  I don't remember when he figured that out, and I don't remember telling him, so I just play the stopwatch to his death as he sleeps with his wife on the bed I used to sleep in, the bed we used to pretend was an island in his sea of a room, the bed we used to lie in and hold each other in fear during thunderstorms.

There is a thunderstorm tonight. His wife is out of town. I stare at his bed hopefully. He sleeps peacefully, his chest rising in time with his breath, his face turned away from me.


05.
He rarely talks to me anymore, the only time he does is when he drinks too much and his wife scolds him for hallucinating. He is starting to drink less and I'm happy because alcohol is unhealthy but sad because he's starting to forget me.


06.
He dies when he is 32. His wife is 29. She is still young; young enough to get remarried and that is exactly what she does 2 months after his funeral. I am not like her. I do not forget pain like she does. That is because I am too much like him. He never forgot pain.

This is exactly what I was afraid of. This is exactly what I was afraid of when he grew taller and grew facial hair and broke his voice, while I remained exactly the same since 25 years ago, the little girl who longed for the only thing she couldn't have. While he took more and more steps toward his too-early end, I watched helplessly as he drew closer and closer to his death. Once again, I have been left behind. I am alone.

She left his apartment ages ago to live at her new boyfriend's house. A big, fancy, stucco-finished mansion which she was so excited to live in that she didn't bother packing. I open the freezer door and I bite back a cry when I see one-half of a double popsicle, waiting to be eaten by someone who will never come back.


07.
One day I will find a new boy. One who is beautiful, pure, but not dying.