Five Days Left
Three years ago tonight, your breathing was loud. Distinct. Labored—like a man twice your size, but you were underweight, your face—a gaunt warning of what was coming. Icy hands. Numb feet. There was no fooling me.

We were both in denial. Your reassurances gave me absolution. I should have done something. Why didn’t I do something?! You moved like a man on a deadline— racing the clock, telling the stories you’d never told, saying yes to everything except yourself. I liked my life. I liked myself. I knew who I was. After caring for my mom while she died, watching my sister starve to death, twelve years of college, a lifetime of making movies— I needed rest. I had just begun to breathe again when you fucking died, and the center of my universe collapsed in on me.

The tumor on my tongue kept going away and coming back with unbearable searing pain I waited until I could take no more. Protip: don’t do that. I despair, but try to deny bitterness. I claw my way up the walls of the abyss. Again. I keep my head above the deluge— just barely. I am of two minds: one wants to surrender, to let go, to sink into eternal silence. The other is my wiring— fused with stubborn light. Whether I want to or not, I fight. I rise. I endure.

I need to recover. I need more time in my cocoon. Everything in me is scorched. My nervous system, a live wire. Even my sleep is exhausting— dreams full of pursuit and loss, running from something, searching for you, protecting others from unseen malevolence. This started as a note about your dying and my doing nothing, but it became a self-pity party post. Every year, in the days before your death, my body remembers. My stomach knots. Time slows. Dread drips through me like IV fluid. It feels as though, on some plane of existence, you perpetually die, and only here, in this thin version of reality, do I know it’s coming and can do nothing to stop it. Somewhere out there, we only have five more days.
Sometimes I hear this song and it feels like a message from him to me.


Yes. All this. All of it. 🖤💔
saying yes to everything but yourself