Hazel Grace Lancaster Epilogue
"Mom," I called to my mom as I put down my favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. I already knew she was just right outside my door, standing, waiting for me to call her. In a split second, she quickly came inside, her eyes were bloodshot, her face had lost all it's color, leaving it lifeless, and her hands were shaking. It has been a year since my Augustus left me and ever since I was feeling very I'll, not only physically but emotionally as well, but now, it became worst. "Honey," she said to me, her voice sweet but shaky; the choked kind that I know that she was holding back her tears. I smiled at her, remembering the first moments when I knew was was going on with the world. "Why is the sky blue, mom?" I would always ask her that, the time when they both of my parents knew that I had cancer, and all of the beautiful memories that I couldn't bring back again. It was all slowly fading away. And then suddenly, my chest hurt, well, everything does. My dad was outside, watching the one I've been watching since, America's Next Top Model, but I can hear him crying, and every time he does that, it always felt like an earth quake. "Mom, I want to see Augustus." I tried saying the words to her every after single breath. She hugged me as she sat beside at my bed with Bluie sitting next to me. Maybe it was only my imagination, but it felt that he's been telling that everything's going to be alright, I wanted to believe him, but I can't. I know that tonight will be my last. Dr. Maria told me and my parents that the Phalanxifor they have been given me had stopped working on me. "Okay honey, I'll tell your father okay?" There were tears from her eyes, she took a deep breath and said, "He'd drive us there."
* * *
I'm here alone with my Gus, we'll, if wouldn't count Philip, it was only the both of us. I was laying down, my face was looking at east, my chest against the dirt and soil that separates us, as if hugging him. My mom and dad helped me get to where I was laying but they went away knowing that we need our privacy. After I can catch my breath, I said to him: "Augustus, my love." And I closed my eyes, feeling the damp night air around me, the crickets chirping from afar, the rustling of the leaves from the trees that surrounds us. "I missed you," I whispered, "It has been a while, yes?" I laughed a little, I didn't know that I could still do that. I lay there for a while when I heard a voice, it wasn't from my mom, or even my dad, it was from someone I wanted to hear ever since. I tried calling him once, but his phone wasn't available anymore. "Hazel Grace," he said in his voice that I had fallen in love with. My body, even my eye lids are too tired, too weak, to move, to open, so I stayed still, closing my eyes. And then he said something that I had been dying to hear from him and now I'm finally hearing it, "Okay?" He said, it's like saying it with an unlit cigarette between his teeth, maybe it was from the pack that I had slid inside his coffin lid during his funeral. I smiled, and then suddenly, the wind was blowing hard, the chirps of the crickets are becoming louder, the fallen leaves had been blown towards me. I waited for it to stop, when it did, I only said what I wanted to be my last word: "Okay."
