No Matter What (A Nash Grier Story)

Heart Beat

I tried to erase the memory from my mind but all I could I remember from the experience was the pure fear of Nash falling to his death and CPR being done on his instructor. We found out later he had a heart attack soon after we jumped.

That experience reminded me how much Nash and everyone in my life means to me. I sat next to Nash on my favorite swing on my porch. For some reason the squeak it always created comforted me. It made me feel more at home. His arm slung around me and my head rested on his chest. I heard his heart beat like a drum in my ear. I sat up straight and looked him in the eye.

"What are you thinking about right now?" I asked him. I crossed my legs on the swing and turn toward him. The sweater that I was wearing drooped over my shoulders. Before I had gotten sick it fit perfectly with the right hang over my shoulders, now it was loose and it looked like I was being swallowed in it. I had always been pretty short for my age. Not the smallest of the class short, but always a little closer towards the end.

He looked at me like I was a lunatic. I asked him again, "Tell me, what are you thinking about right now?"

He shrugged, "I don't know. About life, about you. How crazy things have been lately and how it's all just hitting me now like a brick smashing a window. How much I'm going to miss you when you're gone and how scared I am for when I'm going to have to face that reality. How much I want to go back in time and stop God from making cancer. How much I want to run into a research lab and find the cure for cancer," he stopped and looked at me. His eyes got big and a tear rolled down his cheek. "How much I want to hold you in my arms for the rest of my life. How I want to see you walk down the aisle towards me in a white dress as you take my hands and I can tell everyone that we know how much I fucking love you. How much I want to see you hold our little girl or boy for the first time. How I want to hold your hand while we strolled down the sidewalk in our wheel chairs laughing at old memories. But then I have to look at reality and see that I can't. I can't do any of those things and all I want to do is scream and yell because you are the thing that matters the most in my life and I can't have you. I can't have you forever."

My heart literally ached. I heard the things he said and I realized two things. One, I can't do any of those things with him. I won't get to love him till I'm 90, but only till I'm 19. And two, I am going to die. I had never heard him admit that I was going to die. There's always that glimmer of hope in you that things will turn out differently. Like when you like someone and you don't know if they like you back but you have that glimmer of hope until one day they tell you they don't like you. It's that gut wrenching feeling inside knowing that that glimmer of hope was only a figment of imagination.

I wiped away my own tears and put my hand on his heart. With my other hand I put it on my own heart and closed my eyes. Before he could ask what I was doing I put his hand on my heart also. "Close your eyes. I'm trying to get our heart beats to match up."

"How do you suggest we do that?" he asked me.

"Hold your breath or breathe quickly." We focused for a few minutes until our pulses matched. I opened my eyes to see his blue ones. "This means we're always conntected and that I will always love you." I smiled at him as he leaned in close. I kissed him passionately.

I stopped. I bit my lip and smiled at him inches away from my face. "Wait. You're gonna speed up my heartbeat."