The weeks following Augustus's death had been the hardest that I'd ever been forced to suffer. I felt betrayed by the world, misery filling my every breath. I blamed whatever there was to blame, though I knew it was pointless and it wasn't going to bring him back. I was mad at the world. I knew it was no wish-granting factory, of course I knew that. But I thought that maybe, just maybe, it'd let one good thing creep into my life. And it did. That one good thing was a boy by the name of Augustus Waters. But here's the thing about life. It never lets the best things stay for long.
I never truly accepted the fact that Augustus was really dead. I pretended for the longest time that we were still in Amsterdam, lying in bed, not moving. I pretended that this was nothing more than a terrible, horrid nightmare that I'd eventually wake up from. I kept telling myself that he was still in remission. His body wasn't full of cancer. We were going to live out the rest of our days together. We were going to get married and, although I wasn't foolish enough to believe that we'd grow old together, I still let mself believe that maybe we'd at least grow up a little bit more together.
But we would never get that future. He was buried six feet below ground now. He was lying in a caskeet, wearing the suit he'd once worn to Oranjee on that night when we first drank from starlight. He was lying there in the dirt with a pack of cigarettes. They'd always been nothing than a metaphor. He stuck the killing thing between his teeth but didn't give it the power to do its killing. He never let it do its killing, never given it that power. But somehow he'd managed to go on and die on me anyways.
Unfair. Always unfair. Everything in the life of a cancer kid was unfair, of course. I'd gotten used to the world and its hatred of my very existence. It took away the one good thing in my life. It took my Augustus Waters. And he was never coming back to me. He wasn't my prince charming, never had been, but he was my best friend and, if true love was real like Isaac always had believed, he was that too. But now he wasn't coming home on a white horse. All I had left was those letters that he'd sent.
After I got those letters, I bawled for days without end. I printed them out, reading the sloppy handwriting over and over until the ink was so smeared from my tears and the paper was so wrinkled that it was illegible. I'd received the original copy in the mail a couple of days later. I read the words again, having each one memorized. I tried to get the scent of him from the paper, praying that maybe just some of it had lingered, but it just smelled like paper and ink.
The pain stayed fresh for a few weeks, still stinging in my mind, like the universe had just ripped off a giant bandaid from my heart and it was still stinging. It kept demanding my attention, every minute filled with its nagging until it finally got its way and the pain was finally felt. But after awhile, it dulled and things in my life returned to the way they'd been before Augustus Waters had entered my life. But instead of being content with this daily depression as I had been before, there was nothing that would fill the void that Augustus had left in my life.
Lucky enough for me, the pain didn't last very long.
Pain sort of just vanishes when you die. Sure, you feel it at first, but it fades to black and you fall into this lovely little void for awhile. No pain is felt, no emotion, no thought. Just void and oblivion, everything that Augustus Waters had told me he feared on the night that we met. Lucky for him, it doesn't last for very long.
The oblivion finally faded and I woke up. I woke up on the grass, the soft patch of green surrounding me, the scent suffocating. The sky was the most gorgeous, beautiful, surreal shade of blue that I had ever seen in my life. Augustus Waters had been right, as usual. There was definitely something out there. And it was most definitely a Capital S Something.
Let me back up for you, okay? It'd been a normal Thursday post-Augustus afternoon. I was finally getting used to not being Hazel Grace anymore and just being Hazel Lancaster. Dad was at work, as usual. Mom had run to the store because we were running low on anything that I would eat. I had been scheduled to have my lungs drained of cancer-water in two days and I wasn't looking forward to it all that much. I'd just been sitting on the couch, America's Next Top Model playing in the background as I reread Prince of Dawn for the 30th time since Gus had died.
