The Neverland Project ✎

━━ one

A flower petal fell into my cereal bowl this morning. I was eating at the kitchen table, surrounded by the bouquets of flowers that family and family friends had sent for Aurelia.

Delicately, I pulled the petal out of my food. It was a pale yellow colour and round. I could see the flower it had fallen from hanging over me. The cheery-coloured bouquet had come with a card bidding my sister to "get well soon" with a teddy bear holding a blue balloon.

She was still upstairs sleeping. That was what she did most of the time now. She'd given up on going to school, despite Mom's protests. We all knew there was no point in her going anymore.

My mom was at work already as well and our housekeeper, who doubled as Aurelia's babysitter, was coming over later today to take care of her. I was to wait for her to come and then leave for school once she got here. She would not be here for another half hour, leaving me alone with my sleeping sister.

The cornflakes in my bowl were slightly stale, and I had drowned them in milk to add to the taste, though it helped little. The food tasted bland. Something was never quite right with the meals I made.

Another petal fell into the bowl and a pushed it aside with my spoon to take another bite of cereal. This petal was from the same yellow flower as the previous one, taunting me with its bright colour.

The flowers that covered our kitchen table and dresser were the only colour in the house. Other than that, everything was grey, beige or some mixture of the two. It made for a miserable backdrop for living and something I swore I would never do in my house. I wanted a home full of life and colour, both things that were slowly being stolen away from my sister by the cancer that lived in her.

The dark brown walls seemed to close in on me as I rinsed my bowl out in the sink, watching the uneaten yellow chunks float down the drain. Water splashed over the edges of the bowl and onto my hands as I cleaned away the excess food. I slammed the dishwasher shut when it was inside and wiped down the counter with an old tartan dishcloth.

Something about this moment in time made me feel like crying. Maybe it was because I knew my sister would never fumble through a mundane school-day routine ever again. Maybe it was because I couldn't take care of her anymore and she was home alone with a babysitter all day. Maybe it was because she'd gotten progressively worse and had barely opened her eyes yesterday when I went to wake her up. The tears just seemed inevitable.

Ever since Aurelia's diagnosis, we'd kept a Kleenex box in every room. Mom had the habit of breaking down at random times in the day when she came across something of Aurelia's that ended up outside her room. A book, a stuffed animal, a beaded bracelet from one of her friends. Anything would set Mom off.

The soft sounds of my sister's laboured breathing floated down the stairs. This and the constant crying and nose sniffing had made for the perfect melancholic symphony that played twenty-four/seven. As much as the noise was almost always unbearable, I knew that the breathing meant Aurelia was still alive for now.

As long as the air was moving through her lungs, she was alive. Not that staying in bed all the time was really living life, but at least she wasn't dead.

At least not yet.

I choked back another round of tears as I shoved a bowl of leftover mac and cheese into the microwave, watching it spin around and around.

The watching of time as it passes is hypnotizing. I watched glassy-eyed as the time on the microwave counted down. With every second that passed, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread. Was this what Aurelia was going through? Forced to sit in bed and look at the time as the cancer pulled her life away from her. Was her clock just a countdown to the day when her last shaky breath would claw its way from her failing lungs and the pain would finally stop?