Ballad of a Dying Girl [✔]

6.

it doesn't matter how much time you have left, your friend offers. 

she has multi-colored hair and a good heart.

everyone's technically dying, she finishes with a triumphant grin, like she's done something.

you stare at her with tubes running into your arms, running out of your heart, all tangled and intrusive like roots to a tree (except you aren't a tree).

you are sallow, pale-faced, and dying.

your eyes are wide, bewildered, and shocked.

your legs are sore and stiff from being unable to walk anymore (it's been years).

you wait impatiently for her punchline to come.

it never does.

oh, you stagger as realization hits, amusing like a blow to the chest.

oh, she's being serious.

it turns out that you're the punchline.

she isn't wrong, but it's different.

it's different to discuss death when there's air greeting your lungs and a blush kissing your cheeks.

it's different when there is a wide, expansive future ahead of you, when death is more philosophy than the face that greets you each and every morning.

it's different in such a colossal, massive way that you don't have the words to rightly explain it (you can't talk that well anymore anyway).

she's still waiting for you to say something.

you offer her a stiff sort of agreement, then turn away,

shifting on bones that are about to become dust,

relaxing on a body that is about to turn to ash.

it's different.