Faulty---> mgc

seize

I  A M  S O  S O R R Y  F O R  N O T  U P D A T I N G

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Jade and I glance at each other because we both know what the expression means. The sad smile but hopeful eyes. It's the type of expression you'd show towards a homeless man, or a young child that doesn't know any better when the child rams it's hand in the door multiple times. A pitiful expression. We both know.

The doctor dressed up in a white lab coat and stethoscope around his neck sits in a rolling chair and takes out a clipboard with many papers clung to it. The papers right now, personally, have no meaning to me, but their contents may be.

"So," the doctor starts out, flipping through the pages with no aim, seemingly, "it says here that you have fainted suddenly?"

Jade glances at me, and I squeeze her hand lightly as if to say, 'Go on, tell him.'

"Um, well, y-yeah..." she trails off, and I lightly tap my temple to her shoulder to say, 'See?'

The doctor nods and rolls closer, not by much, only an inch, but the suspense of the situation makes me a little more anxious than usual.

"My crew and I have done some tests with you to see what might have caused such a sudden...um...unconsciousness," he says, with a questioning tone at the end of the sentence. "And we have discovered something that may upset you, but you must stay calm."

My breath has gone ragged from all of the suspense and anxiousness radiating off of Jade and myself.

"Can you just fucking tell us? It would be really helpful to both me and your patient," I say sharply, regretting it only a little bit after it. The only reason being Jade slapping my forearm lightly as a punishment.

The doctor nods and rushes out, "Jade, we have found cancer in the lower right part of your right lung."

The time around us in this room seems to have stopped. Everyone outside this room is completely fine, patients and doctors passing the door, unknowing of what has been told to us. The doctor's face returns back to the sad smile and it looks like his face has frozen into position. My head whips around to look at Jade, but her reaction must have been delayed because her face is the same as it was before the information was disclosed. We all seem to be looking at each other, waiting for some other person to give some type of signal that shows that one of us comprehended something.

"I...uh...I need a second, doctor. Could you...?" she trails off again, gesturing at the door, trying to usher the doctor out the door from her bed.

The doctor's head shakes up and down vigorously, repeating 'yes, yes' over and over again as he leaves.

Once the door has closed, a second passes. Then two. And then finally Jade says something.

"Michael," she says, so softly I lean a little towards her to catch whatever she has to say to me next, "I...I don't know what just happened, but I'm really hoping I'm still unconscious and that I'll be completely fine when I wake up."

"Jade," and I pause to think of what to say next, but I don't know what to say. I thankfully don't because she starts to speak again.

"I know why." That's all that's said. I reach my hand over to her opposite shoulder of me and pull her in for a hug. She rests her head on my shoulder and we sit there for another second before I speak again, trying to contain the quietness of the room.

"Did you just say...you know why?" I whisper, resting my face in her hair. It smells of her regular lavender shampoo and hospital.

Jade sighs and lifts her head to look at me for the first time since the news. Her blue eyes consume my green ones and I read hers, the sadness so evident that it takes hardly a second to know what she is thinking.

She takes her eyes off of mine and to her lap, as if it was hard to look into them. "When I was back at the orphanage," she started off, and swallowed audibly before continuing, "I wasn't...completely alone. I had...associates." She was taking time with her words, and I was letting her take time, because her taking time from me was nothing.

"These...associates...were absolute trouble, and I would hang out with them all the time because I thought they understood me. I thought they knew how it felt to be all alone—which they did—and how to take care of this emptiness. They dealt with this emptiness in the wrong ways, and I thought it was right. I didn't know better.

"I became a heavy smoker. Of everything. Anything and everything you could smoke, I did smoke. They would smoke, so I thought that's how you dealt with the loneliness and emptiness. I thought, and I guess they thought too, that the smoke would fill up this loneliness, but, after all, it is just a gas." She was rushing her words now, as if she had this bottled up for so long, which I'm guessing she had. All these words are crashing down like a tsunami and she can't stop it anymore.

"When I finally got out of there, that wretched place, I had basically no money. Only enough to get me by. I knew I had to save up and had it all planned out on what I would spend what amount of money on what. The only thing I didn't plan on buying was a pack of cigarettes. It was a kind of forced ceasing of smoking, but it worked. I stopped smoking," she paused, and then continued, "but I guess all of that has caught up to me now."

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I  A M  S O  S O R R Y  B U T  I V E  H A D  T H I S  P L A N N E D  S I N C E  T H E 

B E G I N N I N G

I've been John Green af lately so excuse all of this emotional shit