The hospital ceiling was white, too white. It felt empty, humming beneath the sterile glow of the flickering lamp above my bed.
My hands lay weak on the sheets. My skin was thin and veined like fragile parchment. This was what my body had become—no longer the legs that raced through sunlit fields, no longer the arms that worked, carried, and carved. Just remnants.
The nurses came and went, quiet as shadows. They were professional and efficient, with barely a word spoken. Their faces blurred together. They were strangers here to make a stranger comfortable.
And so it was with me, here at the end. Alone.
I turned my head to the nightstand.
Fresh lilies sat in a small vase. They weren't from family—there was none—but from one of the nurses. She gently said that flowers brightened the atmosphere.
I wanted to thank her sincerely, but the words caught in my throat. Not because I wasn't grateful, but because the truth echoed inside me:
flowers weren't for the dying.
They were for the living.
For those who would remain.
Still, they were beautiful. Pure white. Unblemished.
I closed my eyes.
In the silence, memories stirred. Slowly and painfully, they began to surface. The weight of decades coiled into a tangle of joy, regret, and loss.
I felt myself slipping from the hospital room back to times when lilies meant spring, not endings.
Back when youth filled my breath, and the world stretched wider than I could imagine.
And so, lying here with no one to hold my hand, my story began to unravel.
A childhood both tender and cruel.
Moments of joy that vanished too quickly.
The loves, the burdens, the griefs I carried like stones.
Now, at the threshold of death, it was all I had left: recollections drifting past, one by one.
My body was frail. My breath was shallow.
But my memories still burned.
And they carried me back to the small house on the hill.