Sometime In July (2024 edition)

Chapter Two

It was June 2001 and Seth Santiago sat inside the Schmidt's kitchen on a wooden chair before a similarly-styled dining table where the two of them spent most of their time together. He was crying as he looked at the empty chair next to him. She's gone. Kristina had been his life, his everything.

For the nth time, he had ran his fingers over all the things Kristina had touched in the final hours of her life: poetry books and Nicholas Sparks novels, pens and note pads for spontaneous compositions, pictures of themselves as kindergarten pupils in the old elementary school beside the creek, and, closest to her heart, the old violet notebook where she had written her poems. It was kept unmoved by her mother in that side of the kitchen.

It was almost four years ago, and as soon as the doctors diagnosed her of leukemia, they both knew it would all come to this. The treatment was often and consistent; she went to the hospital frequently and the doctors came to her house whenever she was not feeling well enough to go out. Family and friends gave her all the needed moral and financial support. However, no one expected that the cancer would weaken her seventeen-year-old body so quickly. It was as if keeping her alive was just making the agony longer for all the people closest to her.

Knowing she would soon leave him made it tough for Seth. When her body had come to its weakest state after what seemed like endless sessions of chemotherapy, she had protested on being confined in a hospital but instead wanted to spend her remaining days at home. Her mother and doctors obliged and so Kristina was sent home.

Seth was by her side all those times as he had requested to stay at Kristina's house. He had been helping her mother take care of her while he wrote his first novel. Unwillingly, he witnessed her pain and suffering, but couldn't do anything except hold her hand and just be there. Every day, he would play the guitar and sing her to sleep, trying his best to make her smile as often as he can. He fixed her meals, washed her clothes, and cleaned her room. On the bed, he would cry with her every now and then as they told each other stories and memories of their wonderful childhood. It always ended up with the two of them affirming their love for one another.

However, in the end, after her last ounce of strength was consumed, she surrendered to the disease. It was a traumatic night for Seth. He felt unbearable pain. It was her eighteenth birthday.

She couldn't speak, so there were no last words. She also couldn't move, so the only thing she did, and could do, that night was shed tears. Kristina was never someone who howled or screamed whenever she felt pain. She was always quietly shaking and crying as if taking all of it to herself, not wanting to share it with the people she loved. Knowing this broke Seth's heart even more.

He held her in his arms as he felt her last exhale, looking nothing like the girl he had fallen in love with while they were still children at the old elementary school beside the creek. Her mother wailed while calling her doctors.

Despite that, Seth loved her more at that moment than in any other moment before.

Kristina smiled a little as she looked at him before dying, indicating that she was at peace with what was about to happen. It was like she was trying to give Seth all the assurance he needed so he could move on with his life. Kristina was always like that, she always put the comfort of others before herself. She again reminded him to get to know God, something that Seth had always had a hard time figuring out in his head, as she did months before. Her mother's friend was a Baptist preacher and he visited them one day, sharing Jesus Christ's salvation story, which she accepted in her life when she was only thirteen.

It was almost three years since she died. Three long years, he thought. And my love for her is still the same. He was still crying. Those close to him would not believe it, he thought, not of Seth Santiago, whose emotions, they said, were locked away in some secret garden, except in writing, where he truly came to life.