The last dregs of hot air escaped his lungs like a bag pipe lost in the contraction of an overzealous player, hard pressed to mediate in a sea of sound. His aroused thinning lips moved into a state of rosy condolence, waving a dying colour of parting. His clasp weakened and revealed a disgruntled and already decrepit pair of hands, lacking in any sense of human apparition and visually irritated by the overexerted primal desire to survive. The passionate, fiery light of a prevalent future absent in his sinking eyes, no longer a beautiful hazel but a matted clary sage. His previous foetal cognition had long since passed and his entire body relaxed from its natural curve, weakening all sense of muscular tension. Laying on one side, looking beyond the person sitting beside him with a look of soothed disbelief, his eyes alone told the end of a story. No one was left.

​

The struggled attempts made to drag out life was met with a soothing warmth not too dissimilar to the caress of a mother. To a boy clothed in the silks of afterlife, it felt like no more than the stealthy breeze of slumber with which he embraced with familiarity. The presence and the memory of the people in the room left the grasp of his conscious like the muscles in his hands lost their grip on the bedding covering his depleting complexion, a complexion already greyed from the days of constant alien care.  When he was alive, his resentment for such external care ballooned exponentially into a growth of its own, producing such a xenophobic anguish that paralleled the hatred for his own inability to relinquish the nurses’ wasted efforts in supporting a boy too far gone to experience his gratitude. Bathing had been a particular correspondent to his deflated ego. It was a luxury to take an hour (or perhaps more) out of a draining day to recuperate in the revitalising waters of a fleetingly fizzy bath bomb and relaxing salts.  However, it ended up becoming a time of sheepish apologies, a time that could not end any sooner. A time where he wished most of all that he would absorb the water’s cleansing warmth and grow, besting the depressed state of his beaten wishful thoughts and rise proudly as if the winds of a second chance grasped him by the arms and raised him once more, to give life one last chance.

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He thought to himself, after contemplating whether fighting this hard for this long was truly the only positive outlook, and came to realise the terms of tranquillity in letting life end. Living to see another day was a beautiful reason for fighting, but beyond the fairy tale notion of superhuman will power, what else is there to help you believe that you might make it? These existential thoughts plagued his mind further and left him wondering if every bead of painfully blistering sweat he clenched through was truly worth the days, weeks of suffering he would have mistakenly given himself. He realised (may it have been the prolonged time this particular hospital visit took or perhaps the harmful nature of the ‘you’ll be better in no time’ remarks the nurses spoke through faded pain) that this recent visit was going to be his last. Soon his body would perish in the flames of memory that lovingly embraced his departure, suppressing the notion that they could have done something different, something sooner to prevent their own sorrow. What was left would be spread far and wide, happily taken in by the soil of what was soon to grow.

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There was nothing left for him to hold onto. 

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He exhausted his primal lust for survival and became internally peaceful with the realisation that he would no longer stand tall amongst those his heart rests most fondly. He no longer had a body to staple his sickened and rooted hope to, freeing him from the weight of arbitrary dreams, wishing for an alternate outcome. Instead he felt simmering excitement for the simplicity that he might get the chance to see those who have already left for the end. He somehow knew that burning the attachment he had for the body as well as the life he had been robbed of was truly the just way in fulfilling the qualifications of tranquillity, a state of calmness for what may lie ahead. 

​

He no longer felt weighted but rather he felt weightless, lifted by the winds of a calming afternoon, soothing to the touch. The breeze comforted him and restored his child-like sense of gleeful ambiguity. The wind was cooling, and it brought him back to the days of his childhood, running and rolling through the parks’ grassy land, staining his knees and catching the potent smell of the freshly cut lawns. All of these memories felt vivid as a lucid dream. These fond memories left him feeling nostalgic in more ways than one. 

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He felt as if he could live in these meadows forever, forget about his next journey and instead sit down where his worries were swept away by the swift entrance of an afternoon breeze. Perhaps a few more minutes?