•27•

19.7K 655 429
                                    

Two weeks was all it took to break me. Two weeks I sat by Lauren's bedside, holding her hand and talking to her as if she could actually hear me. She never moved. She never laughed at my lame attempts at jokes just to make me feel better. She never lit up the room with those bright green eyes that I was begging to see by the end of fourteen days.

But I never gave up hope.

"She has a one percent chance of survival," they said. Each day, the doctors tried to keep me from coming back. They'd say they had testing to do or that there was no use, that I was just upsetting myself. Even Lauren's parents got to the point where they'd sit in the hall instead of in the room because they, "Couldn't tell whether she was dead already or not." Already, like it was inevitable. "One percent," they told me, but I told them no, because after all, it was still more than no chance at all. Lauren was still in that body somewhere. Her soul, the mind that was so wonderfully filled with imagination, it was all somewhere inside of her, and there was a one percent chance she would find it all again. That was enough to make me stay.

The idea that I may one day hear her voice again was enough to glue me to that chair beside her bed for eighteen hours a day. I slept for four hours every night. I had one hour to get to the hospital and one hour to get home; the rest was devoted to Lauren. I had four hours to myself each night, and each second alone was another that I wished I was in her bed.

I began to think that my years of rebellion finally meant something. It was easy to tell the doctors no when they begged me to leave, to hold my ground when they wanted me to give up. The day of my trial was the hardest. The second I was through the hospital doors I had tears streaming down my face. The doctors said I had to leave the room because "the environment wasn't healthy for Lauren," as if she could see that I was crying for her. I dried my eyes and pulled up my chair, and that was that. For two weeks straight I followed the same routine. I ignored the commands of the doctors and the nurses and Lauren's parents, and I sat there with her until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Fourteen days was all it took for me to break.

I didn't give up hope. I didn't give up on Lauren. I gave up on everything that was holding me together.

...

The air conditioning coming from the vent under the window chilled me to the point where I was numb. No lights illuminated Lauren's pale form sleeping peacefully in the bed next to me. It was only the light from the town outside the window that made it possible to see her face. She looked so peaceful. It was almost easy to believe that she'd never faced any trials in her lifetime. The faint smile that still graced her lips made her look so innocent. She looked perfect, but not the kind of perfect that I saw when she was awake and in front of me. This was textbook perfect- silent, still, and untouched. She still had a tube that stretched from her throat to a machine by her bedside. She couldn't breathe without it. It didn't seem fair to me how such a simple task could suddenly become so hard for someone so young and healthy. None of it seemed fair.

"I guess life itself isn't really fair," I thought aloud.

It was easy to speak to her when I wasn't silenced by her breathtaking presence. I found that I spent most of my time spilling secrets and telling stories with no one around to hear. My voice never reached above a whisper, almost as if I didn't want to disturb her.

"I remember one time when I was little, my dad took me to the beach," I chuckled. "It's the earliest memory that I have of him. After that, he kind of disappeared. It was a great day until he took me to the ice cream shop at the end of the pier. There was a family in front of us, and the little girl asked for a chocolate cone, which was what I planned to get. When it was my turn to order, the cashier said, 'Sorry, we just ran out of chocolate,' and I broke down crying in the middle of the store."

Caught (Camren)Where stories live. Discover now