Chapter Text
【Chapter One: The Four Corners of Boom】
Boom's POV
They say rooms remember the people who live in them. But I don’t think this one does.
There are no echoes here—just silence, clinical and constant. The kind that seeps into your bones until you forget what laughter sounds like, until you start whispering to yourself not because you're scared of being heard, but because you're scared of not hearing anything at all.
This is my world: four corners.
One bed.
One oxygen machine.
One IV pole.
And one window with sunflower-printed curtains—the only thing in this room that wasn’t chosen by a doctor.
They let me pick the pattern when I turned fifteen. I chose sunflowers because I read somewhere that they always turn their faces to the sun. I thought maybe if I surrounded myself with them, I’d start turning toward the light too.
But the light never stayed long.
Today is my 8,395th day alive.
And the doctor says I have maybe 365 more.
I turn my head slowly, letting the pillow catch my cheek. Outside, the sky’s the color of dishwater. Gray and tired. The kind of sky that forgets it's allowed to be blue.
I don’t remember what a street smells like. I don’t remember the sound of traffic or the way summer heat feels on skin when you’re not burning up from a fever. My entire life has been lived through a sheet of glass, like one of those snow globes they used to sell downstairs in the hospital gift shop—except mine never shakes.
Just sits there. Still. Waiting.
Like me.
“Boom,” Nurse Mali calls from the door. Her voice is warm, like the sun through my curtains. She’s the only person who calls me by my nickname anymore. “You’re awake early again.”
“I never really sleep,” I reply, my voice low and dry.
She walks in with her usual cart of pills and a soft smile. She’s been with me since I was seven. I think she’s the only person who’s seen every version of me—boy, teenager, dying man—and never flinched.
“You need anything special today?” she asks, placing a tray beside me.
“Something that tastes like regret,” I joke. “And maybe something to make me forget what day it is.”
She pauses. Then gently brushes a strand of hair off my forehead. “You’re too young to talk like that.”
“I’m too young to die, too,” I say quietly. “But that’s never stopped anything.”
She doesn’t respond. She never does when I get like this. Instead, she sets a small sunflower in a cup of water on my bedside table. The petals are drooping slightly. Kind of like me.
I stare at it for a long time after she leaves.
A flower in a glass.
A boy in a room.
Both fading.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of person I would’ve become if I had lived outside these walls. Would I be funnier? Louder? Would I know how to flirt? Would I have fallen in love?
God, love.
That word is so foreign to me, it feels like fiction.
There are movies they let me watch sometimes, usually the kind with happily-ever-afters or corny meet-cutes in flower shops or bookstores. The kind where people find each other in the rain and kiss like the world isn’t falling apart.
I watch them because I want to feel something. Anything.
But all I ever feel is envy.
What would it be like to hold someone’s hand without wires tangled between your fingers? What would it be like to hear someone say your name not because they're checking your pulse, but because they want to whisper it into your neck?
I turn over, burying my face into the pillow to muffle the sound of my breath.
No one’s ever kissed me.
No one’s ever held me in the way people write poems about.
No one’s ever told me I was their reason to stay alive.
I’m just Boom.
Boom with the rare genetic disorder.
Boom who’s going to die before he turns twenty-four.
Boom who’s spent two decades pretending he's not already half-dead.
On the wall above my headboard, there’s a faded list I wrote when I was sixteen. Ten things I wanted to do before I die. I called it my "Boom Before Doom" list. A nurse snorted so hard when I told her that, she almost dropped my meds.
But I never finished the list. I only got to seven.
• See the ocean.
• Eat unhealthy delicious food for breakfast.
• Fall in love—even if it hurts.
• Dance in the rain.
• Kiss someone under fireworks.
• Drive through a sunflower field.
• Go somewhere without a hospital bracelet.
The rest?
I stopped writing because it felt stupid.
Because I knew it wouldn’t happen.
Because hope is dangerous, and I’ve learned to treat it like an infection—contain it, control it, cut it out before it spreads.
But sometimes—on quiet mornings like this, when the sky is soft and my heartbeat isn't loud in my ears—I pretend.
I close my eyes and imagine a different life.
I imagine running.
I imagine kissing someone under a sky so wide it hurts to look at.
I imagine turning 24, and then 25, and then 30, and not knowing when the end will come—only that it doesn’t have to be today.
But when I open my eyes, I’m still here.
Still in the four corners.
Still Boom.
Still waiting.
And the worst part is—I don’t even know what I’m waiting for anymore.
An end? A miracle? A reason?
Or maybe just… someone.
Someone to see me.
Someone to stay.
Someone to make these walls remember.
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