Life came down and gave me an angel,
An angel that would give me hope,
Hope came down and promised a fix,
'Till death came and washed it away.
She was just like me.
The burning warm summer sun reflected off of her ghostly pale skin like how the light would beam off of the blinding white grounded winter snowfall. Her long, flowing blue hair would whip in the breeze as she ran around with glee. Her hazel eyes would pierce the air and land themselves upon mine. We would hang out with each other after we got out of our respective workplaces and sit by the edge of a lake on a river in the woods of my hometown with mutual friends, eating snacks, blasting music, playing games, and doing silly dives and cannonballs into the semi-cold water of the river.
She was just like me.
She'd been going through a lot in her life.
She just wanted to enjoy herself with company.
She just wanted to make people happy.
She just was looking for that lighthouse fire to help guide her home.
Just like me.
Her name was Vanessa, but we called her "Fate."
Our days were joyful, with the feel of riverbank sand beneath our toes, the sounds of splashing water, and the freedom of the shuffle playlist coming from the speaker placed behind us, drowning out the sorrows that had begun to creep into my life at the time; it kept back the demons.
It was the only real place at home where I felt true happiness.
I wanted it to last forever.
My friends and I would sit on the riverbank after the sun went down and look at a small, heavily vegetated island that sat alone and steadfast in the middle of the water—a constant force in an ever-changing world. We would listen to the crickets and cicadas chirp in the peaceful summer night air and ask whatever questions came to mind, seeing if anyone else in the group had the answer.
"What do you think is on that island?" One of my friends asked.
"The secrets to the universe." Another one of my friends answered.
"I'm sure we'll find out one of these days." I proclaimed.
We all laughed.
We would always stay out on the riverbank until the early hours of the morning, packing up our things in my friend's very luxurious 98 Pontiac Firebird. He always put the top down to let the warm summer air wash over us as he drove, admittedly high above the speed limit. We would stop at the local convenience store, pick up more snacks and energy drinks, and then hit the road home.
We all looked forward to the time when we would see each other again on that riverbank.
She was just like me.
I would always be happy for work to let out; I could leave and return to the riverbank to be with my friends again. I could be with Fate again. My life had been going downhill quite fast at this point. My job, a summer camp counselor position at the local community center, which I had always enjoyed with all of my heart, had begun to turn sour. The same people who always called me names and picked on me in school had begun to work there as well, and they had never changed their ways.
It was the only place I could go to get away from that frustration.
But now, it only ever brought me more of that anger.
I had been living with a storm on the horizon for the past year or so, a storm with a name of three words. A storm that would give me the kingdom that I now possess today.
A storm that Fate helped me deal with in the beginning.
A storm that she accepted.
I couldn't wait to see her again.
We would hang out almost every single day, but I can remember each individual day with great detail, as if my brain was trying to hold on to that last little bit of good in my life.
But eventually, the summer had to end, and we had to go back to school.
On the last day of the summer vacation, before school was back in session, we all gathered in a circle on the river bank at night before we left for the last time and promised each other that we would stay in touch and return in the next summer to enjoy ourselves in the sun one more. Everyone agreed and cheered as we raised our fists into the sky.
We would keep that promise.
I couldn't wait to see her again.
She was just like me.
The summer may have been over, but that didn't mean that I tried my best to still keep in touch with Fate. We would text every day, back and forth, for hours. It was very common that I would sneak my phone under the desk while I was rotting in class in order to text her to bring that little bit of light into the depressingly dark classroom, surrounded by people who knew about me. People that didn't like me.
I was surrounded by my detractors, but that little light in my life was still lifting me up.
I held onto her tight, and even though I was always an hour's drive away from her, I appreciated her warmth and light.
It felt like she was right there with me.
Warmth and light that would prove to be in short supply as the storm on the horizon had come to pass.
When I was diagnosed with those three life-changing words, I felt like I had nobody, that nobody would understand, and that I was all alone. I remember being in the car driving out of Chicago, looking out of the passenger side window as the brick-and-mortar buildings blurred between my rapid and dark thoughts of what my future might hold with the diagnosis. I was occasionally sending texts to my friend group chat, keeping what was actually going on vague so that I didn't get outed; I was worried that they would look at me like the freak I saw myself as and run away.
That's when Fate messaged me in a private channel, and she said one line that opened up my soul.
"Hey, are you okay? I can tell from what you said in the group chat that something happened. I'm here for you if you need to talk."
She understood me when I thought nobody else would.
I told her everything, how I had been feeling recently, the strange switches that I had been going through, about how there were times that a girl would come out instead of me, and the diagnosis I had received.
She wasn't scared away. She cared.
I told her that I had been retreating into the back of my mind while a strange new girl came out into the world through me. How that girl wanted to have her own life, but couldn't, and was just dismissed as me being a delusional crossdresser.
She still wasn't scared away. She still cared.
It confused me at first, nobody had ever really cared about me that much before in my life, and for a while, I thought that it wasn't real.
But it was.
We texted almost continuously as I sat in the car on the drive home from Chicago to Massachusetts. She comforted me all the way and understood everything that I was saying, even in my dissociative haze.
She made plans to meet me after I got home, driving over an hour to make sure I was okay.
I was so happy that I was going to be able to see her.
She was just like me.
I sat at a coffee shop in my hometown, with two string bags placed on the chairs next to me, containing everything that I needed to switch to the girl who wanted to meet Fate so much. The girl that Fate cared so much about, even though they had never met face to face. When she texted me that she was close, I made my way to the bathroom in order to change my identity out; making sure that nobody saw me walk in. I walked outside to go and meet her and saw her park her 2016 gray Land Rover as close as she could get it. She stepped out, her skin noticeably more pale than it was when I saw her over the summer. I blamed it on the lack of sun from the depressing winter weather. She wore bright blue leggings and a puffy turtleneck sweater. She looked so comfortable, yet she walked as though she was in pain.
She walked up to me and hugged me, which I depressingly hadn't felt in quite a long time.
We walked inside the shop, and I gave her a drink I had ordered for her earlier, which she sipped with glee. We talked for hours about what we had been doing, how school was going, and, more importantly, how we each were feeling. She was incredibly nice to the new girl that she had to meet, the girl who was part of me and had not really been shown love before at that point. After a while, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and quickly shuffled off to the back. After a notable amount of time had passed, she returned and sat back down, attempting to continue the conversation right where it had left off. As she sat down and adjusted her arms, her sleeve fell down for a moment before she quickly put it back up, but during that split-second, I saw what appeared to be a hospital bracelet on her, with quite a few markings on it.
"What's that?" I asked, pointing towards her concealed wrist.
"What?" She replied, confused.
"On your wrist, it looks like you have a bracelet on." I told her.
"Oh yeah, that." She said, "I just sprained my leg, so I had to go get it checked out; that's why I was sort of shuffling when I came out of my car."
"Oh, okay." I replied, with a hint of hesitance in my voice.
I didn't believe her. But I didn't want to think any further about it.
I didn't want to believe that something was wrong.
She was just like me.
Before I really knew it, the cold school season had come and gone, and the warm, feverishly hot burning sun came rising into the sky again, and the group had planned their first hang out; a small park in my town with a little playground on it that we could mess around on in the afternoons after work, just trying to be kids again, trying to regain a little bit of that childhood innocence that we had lost.
Nothing could have prepared me for this day.
We all showed up right on time, ecstatic to see each other again, and we were quick to get right to the playful fun times. One of my friends had us all pose in front of the playground as she took a few pictures of us with an old polaroid camera that printed the picture right then and there. Another one of my friends went up to hug another member of the group, and while they were hugging, she said, "Tag! You're it!" before running away with playful laughter in her voice. The rest of us scattered around, blitzing our way away from the tagger. Fate was trying her best to keep up with me, but I would always end up out-pacing her, so I slowed myself in order to stay up with her. After trying to circle around and tag us for a few minutes, the tagger had backed Fate and I into a corner, and we plotted our next move as he closed in. We decided to bolt in both directions, trying to maneuver around him, and we went for it; however, when we made the break, Fate tripped on seemingly nothing and fell to the ground quite hard. She shook it off pretty quickly and asked that we go get some bandages for her in her backpack, which was placed on a picnic table nearby. We, of course, obliged and ran to the backpack so we could crack it open to get the bandages. My friend helped her up, and as he grabbed her hand to pull her up, her sleeve rolled down again, revealing that the hospital bracelet was still there. I saw this out of the corner of my eye, and it made my heart freeze for a moment.
There was something I didn't know.
Something that I was about to find out.
We got to her backpack and opened it to find an expansive first-aid kit inside. We had to shuffle around in it for a moment to find the bandage we were looking for, and as we did, I accidentally knocked a bottle of pills loose from it, and it tumbled to the ground.
"What kind of pills are these?" One of my friends asked. "I've never seen a shape like this before."
"I mean, we could google it." Another one of my friends responded.
My friend grabbed the bottle of pills from my hand and began to type the name of the prescription into her phone. A few seconds went by of furious tapping before her face of curiosity turned to a face of horror.
"These are anti-nausea meds." She said with fear in her voice. "For cancer patients."
My heart dropped, and the group collectively went silent.
It made too much sense.
"Do we talk to her?" My other friend asked.
"I. I don't know." I said with hesitancy.
I knew that I shouldn't ask, but I was too curious. I needed to know if she was going to be alright. So I palmed the bottle, grabbed the bandages we had initially gone there to grab, and walked back over to her to put the bandages on her. As we walked, I moved my hand to my side so that I could sneak the bottle into my pocket so she didn't immediately realize that we knew she wasn't telling us something. We made it back to her; I wrapped the bandage around her scrapes and looked down at the floor, not wanting to ask the question but being too worried not to.
"Is everything okay?" Fate asked.
"I." I stuttered, unable to speak, fighting my way through tears.
My friend reached into my pocket, grabbed the pill bottle, and showed it to her. When she saw it, her face dropped, and she had a look of sadness on her. Not angry that we had been digging around through her stuff past just grabbing the bandage, but sad that she thought she would've been able to not have to tell us.
"I'm guessing you know what those are?" She asked.
"Yeah. We looked it up." I said, sounding stupid.
Fate let out a sigh of despair.
"Is it true? That you have?" I asked, not wanting to say that horrid word.
She nodded solemnly as she began to cry, causing her mascara to run down her face.
"Lung." she softly said after a soul-killingly long hesitation.
"How bad?" I mouthed to her.
"Stage four." She responded as her voice began to break.
I physically took a step back in disbelief and shouted an expletive as I stormed off to the side and punched the metal railing of the playground, causing my knuckles to swell slightly.
"No." One of my friends said, now on the verge of tears.
The rest of them were speechless.
I was destroyed. I was sad, yes, but I was also angry—not angry at Fate but angry at the world. All of my life, it had thrown these hurdles and impossible missions at me, and the second that I found someone who truly made me feel better, it went and took it away from me.
I guess I can't have nice things anymore.
I tried my best to stay upright and not fall into a dissociative slump; I wasn't going to make this moment about me. I wanted everyone to be there for Fate and comfort her. For once, I successfully resisted the dissociation and, after a moment, returned to the group to talk to her.
After that, we tried to move on and continue to play and have as much fun as we could, but we just couldn't shake the sudden feeling of impending doom that was now in the air. Every time we looked at Fate, we knew that the image in our eyes was fleeting. I didn't want to lose the one person that made me truly happy.
But there was nothing I could do.
I thought to myself for a moment, sitting on the end of a green plastic tube slide, and that's when it made sense to me. She understood so well how it felt to receive a kind of life-changing diagnosis. She understood exactly how I felt when I got diagnosed with D.I.D. I guess she had her own experience with bad diagnoses as well.
I still couldn't believe it.
We would stick around the playground for another eight hours, trying to be with Fate as much as possible. But eventually, the sun went down, and we had to go home. As Fate went back to her car, we all waved to her, with tears streaking down our faces.
That was the last time we would see her outside of the confines of a hospital.
She was just like me.
A few weeks later, she would tell me and the friend group where her hospital room was, and we would all go out of our way to visit her. We would bring her games to play, movies to watch, shows to binge, whatever we could. I tried my absolute best to make sure that she was comfortable and happy, but no matter what I did, it just didn't feel like it was enough.
I felt like I was failing her.
I couldn't save her.
With every passing day that I went to that hospital room, I could see her deteriorate further and further. She slumped deeper and deeper into an everlasting depressive episode, and I could hear the pain in every single one of her labored breaths and in her dry, raspy coughs that sometimes spurted up blood. I had always known Fate as one of the happiest, cheeriest people out there, but you couldn't see that here.
She was sad.
She was defeated.
She was doomed.
It was a cold, windy, and rainy October night. The month had been miserable so far, but tonight was even worse. Despite the sub-par conditions, I made the hour-long drive to the hospital to visit Fate, bringing with me a few board games and a video game console to play with her. When I arrived in the room, all of my friends and Fate's father were already there, all looking solemn.
"Hey, what's going on?" I said with great concern in my voice.
Nobody said a word.
"'M'?" Fate asked.
She was the only one who actually called me "M" at the time.
"Yeah, I'm here." I responded.
"Come here." She requested.
I walked over to her and held her hand. It was cold.
"I want you to have this." She said, weakly and shakily, holding up a sterling silver ring with Nordic runes engraved on the side.
"But why? This is your ring." I said, trying my absolute hardest to not cry.
"This was always my favorite ring, and I wanted to give it to my favorite person." She said, looking at me.
She dropped the ring into my hand, and I couldn't bring myself to speak.
"All I ever wanted to do was bring people happiness. I think I did an okay job. Now I want you to do the same." She told me.
"No." I immediately snapped back. "No. You're not dying. There has to still be hope."
"I've fought hard. But I'm tired now. I think it's time for me to sleep." She said.
"N-no." I said, tightly gripping her hand, growing ever colder in my palms as my stoic face broke into a million pieces.
"It's okay, 'M'." She said to me.
Her hand slipped out of mine, and she slumped into the bed as the monitor that normally had been rhythmically beeping grew to one last, continuous, dreadful sound.
Fate was no more.
That was the last thing she ever said.
She was just like me.
I looked down at her cold, dead hand in mine, then scanned up her arm before my eyes settled on the hospital bracelet around her wrist. There was a big blue box on part of it with white text that was not there before.
"DNR", it said.
I felt like I was going to collapse.
Her father immediately became inconsolable, and doctors soon came in to begin to unplug everything and call the time of death. I grasped the ring in my fist and ran out to my car, viciously crying throughout the entire hospital and through the parking lot, where the raindrops poured down on me all the way to the car. My friends quickly did similar things. I saw one of them outside, repeatedly punching the brick wall by the front door. I slammed the door to my car shut and hastily jammed the keys into the dash before twisting them and peeling away as fast as I could.
I was running from reality again.
I drove all the way back to my hometown; my sheer rage and shock kept me at least 20 miles per hour over the speed limit the entire way. The rain beat down hard against the windows as I drove, and the windshield wipers furiously went back and forth, rhythmically beating and wiping against the glass, bringing that abrasive beating sound of the heart monitor back into my head; I slammed my foot on the gas even harder. After about fifty minutes of intense driving in the nighttime storm, I pulled into the park where we had spent all of those summers by the waterfront. The road gate leading into it was closed, so I parked the car and got out to brave the storm on foot. As the rain poured down over me, I ran as fast as I could through the woods; the loose dirt beneath my feet turned to mud and stuck to my shoes, but I kept on running.
Running as I always had been.
After a few minutes of running down the dark muddy path, and after tripping on a few tree branches along the way, I reached the waterfront and stared out towards the island that had always stood steadfast against the current. I hoped its example of sturdiness would give me anything to grab onto in order to ground myself. As I stared out onto the water, locking my gaze on the island that had always stood there lonesome, my vision started to fuzz. I started seeing spots in my eyes, and I fell to my knees and began to cry hysterically as the reality of everything caught up to me. And then I heard someone call out to me from the water.
"Hey! Over here!" It said.
It sounded like Fate's voice.
I slowly stood up from where I was, the rain still pouring over my already completely soaked clothing, and looked over at the island. I couldn't believe my eyes. I saw Fate, alive and well, waving to me from the island.
I knew I was hallucinating, but I just wanted to believe, for a moment, that this was real; that she was still there.
"I found out what's on the island!" She called out to me.
I smiled and tried to laugh as the tears pouring down my face blended into the evening rain.
"Come look!" Fate called out to me as she ran into the foliage on the island.
"Wait up!" I called out to her.
I hastily put my phone, keys, and wallet under a canopy of leaves in order to prevent them from getting wet. I put on the ring that Fate had given me before I dove into the water as fast as I could, swimming into the river to finally see what was on that island. As I swam and reached it, I slowly climbed onto the rocks and the island itself. I was completely drenched, but I continued my speedy stride through the leaves and the bushes that grew so lush on the island. As I fought my way through branches and a few thorn bushes, I eventually reached a clearing in the center of the island, where I saw someone standing there, facing away from me.
Someone that wasn't Fate.
Someone who stood much taller than me, with no features except for their head, which was covered in spikes. I was terrified by what I was seeing. I knew I was still hallucinating, but I was genuinely scared. I didn't know what this was.
"Hello, Tristan." The shadowy figure said to me.