Please Stop Breathing

I’ll say it again, and maybe this time I can get up.

Maybe this time I can stand.

“Goodbye.”

I caress you a million last times. Each time my hand runs up through your hair, it’ll be the last time. The last feeling you have of me, and of this place if you can feel it at all, and maybe I still think you’re hearing all of this, laying there, that you’re still with me yet and we’re just almost there. I say goodbye many last times, and maybe the last one you do hear from me will be the one that matters, the best one.

The one that works.

I shimmy up the blanket around your neck, all soft and fuzzy scratchy on your skin, I’m sure. Here’s some warmth for the last bits, some comfort in the comfort—far away.

It helps me pull away my hand from yours and to look away when I see that hand hang where I held it, and when I don’t feel your living grip on my slipping hand the way it once did. It helps me start to cover you up.

Do you need darkness?

Is that what you need?

I’ll cover your eyes with the blanket for a time, give you rest, and I’ll come back to check on you.

Somehow, I can’t imagine you’ll be gone by then, either. But when it’s supposed to feel like time, time to say goodbye, it always seems like a risk, a chance, and running away. Now that I can stand, and can walk, I feel like I’m running away, and all this time on my knees has only been my kneeling at the starting line, too afraid to take off.

I wonder that you could have felt those caresses forever, on and on into darkness, and that helps me pull my other hand away. It helps me quit lifting at your head and neck the way I did some time ago when I was still trying to move you to a comfort of the living, not this hanging place of careless bones.

I pull the blanket over the side of your face, nestled into its softness.

No, I don’t know when you’ll die, when you’ve died, or why I don’t know—I should—I owed that much to you, to know death better to give you comfort in it—to know brightly when you’re here, to dig my fingers like forever into your neck—to know easily when you’re gone, to dig my fingers into mine—

To cover you and carry you away.