Okay people. Brace yourselves. Again, I sincerely apologize for this story.
Thanks for not murdering me....i hope.
-smo

~~~~

One day I went to see my baby and found her parents red-eyed by her bedside. My heart dropped and my eyes found the monitor that told me - thank god, thank all of the gods, thank the universe - that hers was still beating.

The next think I laid my eyes on was her, and what I saw, though the deepest, darkest, grayest blue I had ever seen, was serene, and in a way, it was beautiful.

Her face, smooth and youthful in its quiet, dreamless sleep.

Her hair, splayed out around her head, blond with a blue streak in the front.

Her chest, slowly rising and falling, thank the universe.

I knew it was bad then. I really knew. But I also found hope in that moment, and when her family saw me standing there, their eyes lit up and they seemed to find hope as well - in me. They told me all about the night before, how she had sat up and eaten all her hospital food and even complained at the quality, how she had spoken, and laughed, and asked about me, how her face had glowed with health and happiness. And they told me how it had been too much, how she had fallen even deeper into this bad place.

They told me she was going to be let out of the hospital the next day, so she could see her whole family. They didn't have to tell me why.

~~~~

I spent nearly every minute with my little Blue the next week, sleeping on the couch downstairs, then on the floor beside her bed, and eventually I moved up to her bed so we could sleep together, hand in hand. Not sex, just together.

On one of her good days, we did have sex. I have no shame in admitting that - it's natural, and it's beautiful, because it's love; powerful, real love.

She didn't have another good day after that.

They weren't all bad days, not necessarily, because there was always something good. A laugh as ice cream got flung across the backyard because it was too cold to scoop. A kiss as passionate and sweet as they used to be, an embrace from behind like that day playing basketball from so long ago.

On the last day, I knocked on the door to her house - I no longer called it her door because she never answered it. Margot opened it up and smiled sadly like every other day. She suggested I take up this plate of apples and peanut butter, even though we both knew I'd be the only one eating it. So I said sure and climbed the stairs to Blue's room.

She was there, lying in bed like always, but today was different. Usually, she was either asleep or awake and sitting up, maybe even reading or watching television, or else just thinking. Today she was awake, but she was lying down and I could see something new in her face, in her eyes; a dark, lonely kind of navy blue.

I said her name, softly knocking on the door before walking in. She stirred, rolling from her back to her side to face me. She was pale and I could see today was one of the bad days.

I cooed to her some more, and I thought I saw the loneliness fade a little. I thought maybe the shadowy blue became for a second brighter, almost a royal shade. I knew I could see the smile in her eyes.

I went and sat on the stool by her bed - it used to be at her desk, but we - the whole family - kept it by her bedside now, for visiting. Pulling up right close to the mattress, I leaned against her headboard and took her hand in mine. She squeezed it a little, and sighed afterwards with the effort. That was when I knew I needed to be close to my little Blue, as close as possible while I still could - and that this was not close enough.

I stood up and went around to the foot of the bed, where I crawled up beside Blye and pulled the covers gently over myself. I could feel her fever heat radiating from her underneath the duvet.

Wrapping my arm around her chest and shoulders, I scooted over so that I was spooning her, our two bodies joined as one, touching everywhere, during what I knew then was our last time together. I pressed myself right up against her tired, beautiful, burning body so that I could feel her breathing.

In, and out.

In, and out.

In...and out...

I took my breaths in sync with her, and I realized they were coming slower and slower.

I could hear her trying to push something - words, I realized finally - up and out of her mouth.

"Ozzie..." My nickname. The one we used to laugh at, make jokes about. I'm off to see the wizard, she would text me, and minutes later she'd show up at my door. Or, I'm headed to see my favourite Aussie.

"Ozzie...." She gasped a little. I pressed closer behind her.

"It's...it's happening."

My heart dropped, and began to pound faster and harder than ever before. Unable to speak, I pulled my phone from my back pocket and sent two quick texts to Margot downstairs.

Come up.

It's happening.

I heard pounding footsteps on the stairs almost as fast as my heartbeat.

In...and out. Shuddering then, with the effort.

In...and out...

In...

And it all came out in a sigh just as Margot burst into the room.

No.

No.

No! It couldn't be. It couldn't, it wasn't possible. How could this happen?

But it did. It did happen, and as much as I wanted to roll her onto her back and start CPR, I knew I couldn't.

She was gone.

Margot stopped dead, right there in the middle of the room, and I watched her face go white. I watched the tears come to her eyes just as they began to flow from my own.

She collapsed in front of the bed, caressing Blue's face, her warm, white face that would never again burst into a smile, that would never again feel my hands on its cheeks and my lips on its own.

She was gone.

We cried and cried and cried. James and Joanie came, back from wherever they'd been when I arrived. We all cried together, holding her hands and stroking her cheeks and brushing hair off her face. We didn't stop, not for a long time. It felt like hours and hours, that time that we cried together, though it was probably only one.

The weird thing was, I wasn't so much crying for her, for her death as I was for me, and the time in my life spent without her, past and future. I had always loved this girl, since they day we'd met, but it was now that I knew just how much, now that it was too late to tell her.

Slowly, my eyes dried up of their own accord, and somehow I no longer felt the need to cry. Blue had been in pain, after all, and now she wasn't. Perhaps she was in some 'better place', or perhaps all that was bullshit and she wasn't anywhere, she wasn't thinking or feeling or being, she was just not.

The ache I felt, the one in my heart that used to be all for Blue, all for my desire to see her always, a dark, sky-at-midnight kind of blue, was now an ache for her to be here, to be free of her cancer and to live, to live with me, to love me in that way I knew I always would - and for the first time in months, it wasn't blue. It was pitch black, and it was blood red, and it was everything it would ever be, all at once and in flashes and it came with such force that though I had stopped crying nearly ten minutes ago, I couldn't help but to suck in a breath, to double over on myself, to collapse and to cry. This time I cried harder than I have ever cried before. I cried with all of my tears, I cried with all of my heart, I cried with all of me.

"Oh, Audrey, honey," said Margot. My real name. No one had called me by my real name in ages. It was too much.

"Ozzie," I told her. "My name is Ozzie." And Margot reached over and she stroked my hair, she caressed my cheek the same way I had Blue's, and she rubbed my back, and then she stopped, and she cried some more.

I was still shuddering, still shaking, still weeping; I couldn't stop. It was humiliating. I tried, I tried so hard to stop, but I couldn't, and I saw movement through the corner of my eye but I couldn't stop, and I dismissed it, and then I felt arms around my shoulders, hugging me, I realized, and I gasped in absolute shock and felt the person behind the hug - Margot? I tried to see but I couldn't, I couldn't stop -

And then I did.

And then I saw that it was Joanie, it was Joanie who was hugging me, and her tiny little arms were helping? And I was still shuddering with the ache, with emotion, but there were no more tears, how could there still be tears when there were these tiny little arms around my shoulders and chest? I was safe now, I was safe. I would be okay. Joanie helped me stand up with her teeny little eight-year-old hands; how could it be that I was relying on an eight-year-old for support? and she squeezed my stomach and I reached down and squeezed back and she reached up and clumsily wiped the tears from my eyes and I was safe, and then I was falling, and I fell and I fell and fell and fell and I didn't stop falling until I heard a loud thunk and then I landed.

~~~~

My head hurt. My heart hurt. My head hurt my heart hurt. My head hurt my heart hurt my head hurt my heart -

I didn't know which hurt more.

I opened my eyes just enough to see where I was - the couch in the living room of Blue's house.

Her old house.

I immediately shut my eyes, the pounding in my head slowly receding with the renewed absence of light. I hear a scuffling outside the living room and there's a voice right in my ear, suddenly.

"Awe you awake? Awe you awake yet, Ozzie?"

Joanie's gentle touch on my shoulder wakes me up instantly.

"Hi, sweetie. I'm awake now."

"Finally," she says, but thankfully not loud enough to hurt my head. "Get up, get up! Mommy made us hot chocolate."

"Alright, I'm getting up."

We head to the kitchen where, indeed, Margot is sitting with a steaming mug of hot chocolate and there are two others at the table beside her.

"Thank you," I tell her, sitting down.

~~~~

The air is think with the weight of silence.

My shoulders are heavy with the press of grief.

My eyelids are drooping with the exhaustion that only comes from hours of crying.

There is a pit in my stomach that I know will be there a long time, an ache for what once was.

And there is a hole in my heart, right smack in the center, and this will be there forever, until the day I die.

Because Blue is gone.

As I step up to the podium, speech in hand, I realize something. And so when I look down at the paper in my hand, I immediately look away again, up to the sky, out at all the people who have ever known and loved my little Blue, down at my black dress, anywhere. Because I can't bear to look at my feeble attempt at describing the wonder that is - was - my girlfriend.

"Listen, I'm not going to try to describe to all of you how beautiful and amazing and wonderful she was. I was going to try, but I can't, and besides, all of you already know. And the thing is, we all know different parts of her, slightly different versions of the same girl, changed and grown over the years.

"The version of Blue I had the honour and privilege of knowing wasn't always all smiles and laughter, despite what I'm supposed to say. She wasn't happy 100% of the time, because no one is. But she was always kind and always putting others first no matter how crappy she was feeling.

"My version of Blue never felt the need to worry about the future or regret the past. If she was sad in the moment, she was sad in the moment, but she never dwelled on her tears. And if she was happy, she was happy, and that was all that mattered. This moment was all that mattered.

"I'm not going to tell any of you not to cry, not to be completely and utterly devastated over the death of this wonderful girl. After all, she deserves your tears.

"However, you can't let your sadness get in the way of all the other this moments you get to be a part of. Because, though you can't worry about whether the next moment is going to be your last, you have to give the you of future moments the chance to look back on these ones and smile.

"Cry now. Let yourself break. Now is the moment for sadness. Now is the moment for tears. Be sad in this moment. Cry now so that in the next moment you can smile. Fall now so that in the next moment you can pick yourself up and keep going.

"Crumble now so that in the next moment, you can grab your tools and build yourself up even higher."

I stood at the podium and looked each person in the audience in the eye for a moment, then stepped down and went to sit among them, right between my mother and Joanie.