Darts On a Map ✓

───BOSTON✥BEFORE───

We met in college. First day of BIO 101, and he had somehow forgotten a pen. I had ten. The rest was history.

After graduating and moving into a dingy Boston apartment together for my M.D. and his Ph.D., starry eyed and full of delusions, we got a map and a box of pushpins and made a pact that we would visit everywhere, anywhere, all of it. Of course, being hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and my brother being a flight attendant with Southwest and having the relative discount, we were limited to the continental US (plus Hawaii and minus Alaska, but screw Alaska - who wants to get eaten by a moose?) along with some of Mexico and Central America, but we didn't care. It was us against the world, and that was more than enough.

We only made it through three pins and barely two years of our respective degrees before the news. Stage four, they said. Incurable, they said. Terminal, they said.

They were right, because CT scans and bloodwork and mortality statistics almost always are. They can't tell you gilded lies about being together forever and traveling the world and being the 5% to beat the odds. 

And it didn't matter that I had spent the past 24 years preparing to learn how to save lives, because when it came down to it, I couldn't save the only one that mattered.

I broke down crying in the middle of my cardiothoracic rotation. Afterwards, the dean had looked across the desk at me with sympathy, or maybe pity, or maybe a mix of both, but that didn't stop him from putting me on an involuntary leave of absence for the rest of the academic year. I didn't blame him - didn't even try to stop him, didn't want to, really.

The irony of my broken heart culminating in me getting kicked off my heart surgery training wasn't lost on me, but the only other person who shared my exact sense of shitty humor was gone, so there was nobody to laugh about it with.

I end up standing in the airport with nothing but that pin-studded map and a stuffed carry-on, because it seems as good a plan as any.

───NYC✥DECEMBER───

I can't walk anywhere without hearing cheerful holiday music and people being happy.

It feels wrong.

I've never been skating before, but he played hockey in high school and always promised to teach me, so when I pass Wollman Rink, edged with lacy strings of golden lights, something compels me to walk up to the counter. Slap down my poor credit card. Soon enough, I'm wobbling along the edges of the rink, clinging to the wall like the life support that couldn't keep him alive.

Despite the clinging, I still manage to end up on my butt.

Getting up seems too hard. I think I might stay here forever.

But a hand appears in front of me. I have no choice but to take it and stand up, no matter how much I wish I didn't.

(I wish very much.)

───CHICAGO✥JANUARY───

Thick swaths of ice crystals kiss brick and iron, and inky air nips my flushed skin.

I can't feel my fingers, but then again, I can't feel much of anything anymore. Or maybe I feel too much. I don't even know at this point. 

I do know that I regret not picking somewhere warmer.

A man wearing a matted Santa suit plops down on the bench next to me with a positively jolly expression. Distorted in the iridescent surface of Cloud Gate, we're a sad sight.