Work Text:
I spent weeks in that goddamned hospital waiting for you to die.
You were lucid still for the first few days. Angry, mostly. Angry at the doctors for being incompetent, angry at the nurses for being rude, angry at me for not doing anything to fix it.
I know how much you hated hearing this, but I didn’t blame you. I still don’t.
You couldn’t keep up the anger for long this time, though. It was like your entire soul burned out overnight, and when I woke up, you were just a husk. You were still there, barely, but you weren’t you anymore. You weren’t the woman I met ten years ago getting drunk and singing Laura Jane Grace. You weren’t the woman who crashed on my couch in the middle of a snowstorm and then never left. You weren’t the woman who had torn me a new asshole every day for years until we got the diagnosis and it finally all made sense. You were just a body, abandoned, uninhabited, waiting for someone to come by and paint a big X over your door.
For the longest time, though, nobody came.
I don’t know what your last words were. It’s a mercy, really. They wouldn’t have meant anything even if I did. I heard your last words a year ago. Longer, maybe. Everything since then was noise.
Is that rude of me to say? I hope it isn’t. I guess it doesn’t matter, since you’re not around to hear it.
I loved you, you know. God, I hated what happened to you, I hated every moment of living with it, but I’ve never stopped loving you.
But it took you so goddamned long to die.
I hated that hospital. I ate and slept and shat and dreamed nothing but that hospital for an entire goddamned month. I’m not mad at you for it. How the hell could I blame you for dying? But I hated it so goddamn much.
I don’t know what I’d expected to feel when it finally happened. Relief? Guilt, maybe?
Truth is, I didn’t feel shit.
I know. That wouldn’t surprise you, would it?
Whatever you think it means, you’re wrong.
I know how much you hated this ritual. With love - fuck you. I grew my hair out for you because I knew you loved it, and because I loved seeing how much you loved it. I kept it for you until the very end. But you’re gone now, and I don’t ever want to hear that again from anybody else.
And so I take the clippers, and I cut off my hair, and I let myself cry for the first time in as long as I can remember.