In This World (Harry Styles)

38

(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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If I abandoned love, I'd be a man without dreams

I'd rather be out there staring death right between its eyes now

And I can still hear the sound of you crying through the night

There in the opera house with no one else for miles

Opera House - Cigarettes After Sex

GRAY

For the past three years since I'd first found out about the intracranial tumor overtaking an alarming portion of my brain, I'd resigned to the idea of dying and rejoining my son on the other side. That is, as long as a Buster Keaton-esque trap door didn't drop open beneath me at the Pearly Gates, plunging me straight into hell first.

I'd awakened each morning since my diagnosis, too frightened to tell anyone, less they think it was some sort of karmic justice for all the fucked-up things I'd been guilty of since I was a homewrecking teen. Christ, gifting my mother the opportunity to tell me how much I deserved my new fate after what I'd done to my son seemed the perfect incentive to forgo mentioning it to anyone. Ever.

After living a while in quiet desperation, as Thoreau had so astutely illustrated, I'd planned to take the coward's way out, quite literally blowing my head off in the guestroom bathtub, all the while trusting the cleaning lady would find me before the vermin made a meal of my bloating carcass. That'd show me, right? Crickey, it was a horrifically cruel thing to subject her to now that I look back on it, but at the time, she'd been the only one I had left in the world. In the way of a maternal or familial support system, in any case. So I knew she'd take the proper steps necessary to see that I was buried and that my family was informed.

One phone call had put a halt to my scheme, and imbued me with such hope, I'd driven all the live-long night to acquire that escape, and hold it between my hands, bearing zero intention of ever letting it go again. Of ever letting him go, for that matter. And by the time we'd fallen for one another, my options then became: live with him for as long as I could, absorbing his love and spirit until my heart finally buggered out, or have the bloody surgery and risk losing him entirely if it left life-altering damage. Decisions, decisions.

Well, for me, that had been an easy choice. A true no-brainer; no pun intended. As someone who'd been utterly determined to off myself in the most vicious way possible the day before I met him, deciding to live for the next two or three years maximum until the tumor killed me was easy, as long as I'd get to keep ahold of him and all our memories until my last breath. Alternatively, the notion of medical intervention that might hypothetically lead to grave memory loss, or living with drastic changes in my personality, was not something I was not willing to hazard, even if it had the potential to spare my life. I'd repeatedly told myself at the time--and it still rang true today--that experiencing a few blissful years at his side and in his good graces tremendously outweighed a lifetime of health and wealth and a future where I'd be unable to recognize him, or ever recall any of our memories. For me, definitively, that would be hell.

Since the day I was diagnosed, I'd had this strange recurring dream. Nearly every night the same. I'd find myself driving the old boat out over an unlit stretch of water. And I just kept on in that way, so dreadfully alone, until the fuel ran out and the engine shut down. Left adrift in immoveable darkness. It had made me so miserable I scarcely wanted to sleep. I was certain it was a premonition of my own death, so I was powerless to change course.