Voicemails to Will

nineteen; of calms

They say the calm before the storm is too calm, too perfect, and our calm was no different.

I had been pacing back and forth in the long, stark white hall for what felt like hours. Your doctor promised an update on your condition really soon, and I kept praying that things would be okay.

Within a few minutes, he walked out of his office with a slight furrowed brow.

"Eleanor, correct?" He asked redundantly as I had been coming for the last month. "We have good news- Will's going home."

And just like that, all the pent up stress, and the pent up worries, fluttered right out of my system.

"That's great!" I exclaimed idiotically, running into your room to grab you.

The thing was, and it might've saved me quite a bit of devastation had I known it before, patients are only sent home when it's terminal, way too terminal for doctors to even try anymore.

They were sending you back to say your last goodbyes, and naïve me believed that they cured you, and completely ignored what you said just a month ago, teary-eyed and all.

It was stupid and foolish to be hopeful when you had a disease that every single article and every single doctor said was incurable, but a girl hung up and hung on her boyfriend had to hope for something.

So that afternoon, I slowly walked out of the hospital, pushing you in a borrowed wheelchair.

Everything at the time seemed so peaceful, so perfect, but had I looked a little closer, and payed a bit more attention, I could've spotted the first signs of troubled waters in your eyes.

You might've thought your eyes were plain and expressionless, but let me tell you, they spoke the world. As each day passed, they'd dim just a little more, and had I looked closely, I would've seen that on that very dad, they were beginning to flicker.

But because I was as unobservant as your aunt who nearly burned her own house to the ground, I spent the majority of the ride basking in my own happiness instead of basking in you.

"Eleanor?" You'd ask, voice now permanently raspy. "Will you be okay? You know, when I die?"

I thought it was an absurd question at the time, so I laughed it off. "The doctor wouldn't send you home if you weren't cured," I insisted.

I should've listened to you, Will because you knew yourself a million times better than any medical professional.

The thing was, you always knew, but there were times when you left me in the dark, and for that, I'm grateful, for if I were to know then that you struggled with such menial things like putting on your own clothes, I would've been devastated.

So thank you, Will, for even when you were dying, you looked out for me.