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A Chapter by Aehr

Chapter 1 of 'So Far, So Close'.

When you lose someone, you never miss the bad things about them. You never miss their bad hair days, or their acne, or hot fat or skinny they were. You never remember the times they made nasty, heart-breaking jokes about you, or when they sang like their voice box had just been run over by a truck or the times when they forgot the promises they kept. Because when you lose someone, the good things suddenly seem to come above the bad ones. All of a sudden, the grief and depression and sadness and emptiness push you to realize how good a person they were. You don’t remember any of the aforementioned bad things about them. Instead you remember all the beautiful things, the parts of their being that were-and in your memory, will be till you yourself die-good and amazing.

And those good and amazing things are usually the small things, the tiny insignificant but still significant details that leave a mark in your heart. You remember the way the light hit their face in the sun and how they wore their hair. You remember the sound of your name in their voice and the smell of their skin, the way they pulled their sweater closer and tighter to their bodies in the cold, and the things they loved to eat. Like seriously, you’ll be eating pancakes in the morning, and all of a sudden you’ll remember that [insert name] liked pancakes, and you’ll find yourself lost in remembrance and longing and your chews will be slower in their name and a few moments of your morning will unofficially be dedicated to them, and you might just feel this undeniable ache in your chest.

Dying is pretty easy for the dead person. He’s in heaven, or hell, or oblivion, or invisible and sitting on the roof on the house that was his when he was alive, all done with pain and suffering, even death so there’s nothing they have to overcome any more really, and he can just look at the people who miss him and go ‘LOL, now don’t you wish you had spent more time with me before I got into a f*****g car crash and lost my life? Well guess what? You can’t now, b***h.’ But the people left behind, yearning and crying and flooded with sadness who really cared for the dead person are the ones who’re in deep s**t. But that’s only because they’re alive, you know. It’s only because they aren’t dead that they’re able to miss and cry and yearn and remember and feel.

Me? I knew he was going of course, eventually, sooner or later. I knew it the moment he said ‘incurable’, and cried into my shoulder like what he himself described as a ‘wimp’ later on. I didn’t think it was wimpy, though. Dying can scare the s**t out of anyone, and cause anyone to cry. It scared the s**t out of me too. It felt like I was dying, like I was getting kicked out of the world for some reason, like my soul would leave as soon as his would. That wasn’t true. But there was a point in time when I kind of wished that it was. Because he went away, and I’m still here and he’s too far from me and I’m too far from him and we’re both like broken strings, no more together, when we were once never apart.

He was a peculiar person, Aditya was. His middle name was Harish. It was his grandfather’s name, and he hated it as much as he loved his grandfather. He had a thing for girls who wore spectacles, and no matter how much of an egoistic a*****e he was sometimes, he was like a snuggly teddy bear at heart. And also literally. He wasn’t flabby or fat (he was pretty fit, actually) but he was the kind of hugger to wrap his arms around you and squeeze you in a way that would not only push in your muscles but also threaten to take the piss out of you, but he made even that feel good. And then he would just put his head into the crook of your neck and take a deep breath in and sway to the side while still hugging you, and make you feel insanely amazing about you being yourself and him being there to hold you. No matter who you were, if you knew Aditya Avasthi, you knew that he was a phenomenal hugger. He loved cooking, unlike most boys his age. He wanted to be a chef, and volunteered to cook dinner a lot. His mother was happy about that. The downside, of course, was that she never knew what she would be eating for dinner when Aditya was in the kitchen, and if or not he knew what he was doing, but disasters were a rarity and even though he sucked at giving Physics tests at school almost as much as I did, he was always alert in the kitchen. He looked cute with the apron on and the food stains on it, and the wooden stirring stick in his hand, running around for onions and chillies. I suck at cooking. He always mentioned new recipes with enthusiasm, and I always listened but I never felt particularly interested in them. But then Aditya was interested in everything. He loved listening. He loved knowing about things, even if he forgot them later on. That boy was one heck of a human being. Everybody loved him, and he was a lovable person. He saw the nice things in everyone. He was annoying and moody and talked about cars too much sometimes, but that was him. That was Aditya Avasthi.

But apparently, Aditya was just too good. He was too good to everyone, and everyone was too good to him and he was too content with what he had. His life wasn’t perfect, but it was good, and he was happy with it. But apparently that was too much. Because him playing football on the field, turned into fainting and that turned into the discovery of peculiar reddish-grey blotches on his skin, and that turned into fainting again. And then came the first doctor’s appointment, before many others to come, and that came to the end. That came to stage IV Leukaemia. That came to incurability, and hence the inevitability of the end being closer than it should be for anybody in the world.

We were never told how much time he had when they found out that it couldn’t be fixed. That or he didn’t want to know, and asked his parents and Dr Rawat to tell him. Maybe his parents knew. Regardless, I didn’t, and I was grateful. He had six months before his life gave up on him. And for six months, I had him. We still laughed and joked and read and he still helped me with Home Science. It was only our surroundings that changed. Sometimes the school field, sometimes his bedroom, and sometimes his hospital ward with all the tubes connected to him and his skin pale and lifeless, but his smile still more leftwards than right, and his hair still perfectly messed up, and his laptop still forever open to YouTube so that he could see the episodes of Nigella’s Kitchen that he loved the most.

“What do you think it’s like?” he asked me out of nowhere one day. He’d kind of taken a stumble the night before, and we were in the hospital. MAX was close to his place, fortunately, and my place was only one lane away from his, so we were almost neighbours. I went to visit him all the time and he did too, pre-diagnosis, or whenever he felt healthy enough. So it wasn’t a problem seeing him in the hospital either.

“What do I think what’s like?” I asked.

“Being cancer,” he said, typing episodes into the laptop in way of waiting for me to answer.

“It must suck. I mean, it’s characteristically rude, taking people away from their loved ones and it can’t really do anything about it. It’s supposed to be like that.”

“Yeah. But it’s the bitchiest b***h in Bitchland,” he said, looking up at me from the laptop, laughing.

I laughed along, “That’s true.”

And then, three months later, the bitchiest b***h in Bitchland took him under. Like I said, I had prepared myself. I’m good at things like that. I’m good at pre-accepting bad things, and sometimes taking them more seriously than I should. But the box of tissues on my bedside table and the amount of time that I had spent thinking of the final moment when I would know didn’t help. Because I wasn’t even around when it happened. I wasn’t around for him. I wasn’t around to tell my best friend that it was alright, that I was there and that the pain was soon going to go away. I was in school, in the Home Science lab, giving my last practical before the summer holidays, partner-less because he wasn’t there.

In one way, I was relieved that I wasn’t there when I happened. I couldn’t have handled seeing him like that, fighting for life, fighting for air. I couldn’t have handled watching that beautiful spirit of his being painfully sucked out of him. It would’ve been the end of my life too. But for some reason, I felt like I had lost my loyalty to him. That I had been a bad friend by leaving him when he needed somebody the most.

But it didn’t feel like he was actually gone. I kept getting dreams, feelings like he was going to come back someday, like this was all a bad dream. Sometimes I let my mind wander and thought about him and where he must be if he was there with me what we would talk about. I wondered how painful it was, and if it was painful enough to kill someone like him. I expected him to leave, and I knew that he wasn’t around and that he’d never be any more. But I couldn’t accept it. Not in my mind. I’d see dreams of him. Dreams where we’d talk and laugh like before the cancer and the hospital and basically before broke loose upon him and all of us too. They seemed so real. It was hard to believe that he was dead, that death is the final full stop to all the stories about one person. For a dead person, all his stories will end with ‘He died.’ It was just too hard to accept that.

Nevertheless, like I said before, I knew he was going. I knew that the time would come, and I had at least tried to prepare myself. I expected him to die and go away and leave me behind forever, because there was nothing that could have been done about it.

But what I didn’t expect, was him coming back.

next chapter

© 2014 Aehr

Author's Note

I haven't been on WC in ages! It's so nice to be back and writing again. Please feel free to comment. Constructive criticism is welcome. And if you're one of the few who know me from the days when I was active all the time, sorry I haven't kept in touch, and please, please leave me a comment or a message. I'll be happy to hear from you.

Rhea. Xx.