87 Before Tomorrow Comes

I was older in the dream.

I didn’t know how old I was, only that my hands looked different. They were still my hands, but the skin had loosened around the knuckles and the veins stood out more clearly beneath it, with faint brown spots scattered across the backs as though time had been quietly painting over me while I wasn’t paying attention. I turned them over once, then again, trying to understand why the sight of them made me uncomfortable, but the harder I tried to remember where I had been before this moment, the further the memory seemed to slip away.

I was sitting in a hard plastic chair beside a hospital bed.

A pale blue light came through the blinds, falling across the white sheets and the polished floor. Somewhere beside me, a monitor gave a soft, rhythmic beep, and the air carried that unmistakable hospital smell of disinfectant, clean linen, and something faintly medicinal underneath it. There were voices somewhere beyond the closed door, muffled enough that I couldn’t make out the words, and every few seconds the ventilation system hummed above me before settling back into silence.

Nothing seemed to be happening.

That was what frightened me.

The woman lying in the bed had her eyes closed, her face turned slightly toward the window. Her hair was thin and almost completely white, resting against the pillow in soft wisps, and the years had left deep lines around her eyes and mouth. I stared at her for several seconds before something in me recognized the shape of her face.

“Grandma?”

My voice sounded unfamiliar.

I leaned forward, studying her more closely. I knew that face. I knew the little crease beside her left eye and the shape of her nose, the softness around her mouth. I knew her, but she looked impossibly old.

My eyes moved to the small information card clipped to the end of the bed.

Sara.

Beneath her name was a number.

87.

I stared at it, unable to understand why that number made my stomach tighten.

Seventeen years.

The thought came without warning.

Seventeen years from seventy to eighty-seven.

I looked back at her and felt an ache spread through my chest. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here or what had happened during those seventeen years, but somehow I knew that too much of them had passed without me noticing.

I reached for her hand.

It was warm.

That surprised me. Everything else about the room felt cold, yet her fingers carried the familiar warmth I remembered from sitting beside her in the kitchen, from the mornings when she’d pass me a cup of coffee or put her hand against my forehead when I was sick. I closed my fingers around hers carefully, almost afraid that holding her too tightly might hurt.

“Grandma,” I whispered again.

Her eyelids moved.

I leaned closer.

For a moment I thought she might open them, and then she did.

Her eyes were the same.

That was what broke something inside me. Everything else about her had changed, but her eyes still held the same warmth I’d known my entire life, the same expression she’d given me whenever I’d done something foolish and she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or lecture me.

She looked at me for a long moment before the smallest smile appeared.

“You came.”

Her voice was weaker than I remembered.

“Of course I came.”

I tried to smile, but my throat tightened around the words. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. I wanted to apologize for every time I’d been too busy, every time I’d stayed in my room, every time I’d assumed there would always be another Christmas, another birthday, another Sunday morning when we could sit together and talk.

Instead, I simply held her hand.

She gave it a faint squeeze.

“You always were a good boy,” she said.

I shook my head, feeling the tears gathering.

“No.”

She looked at me with that same gentle expression.

I leaned closer, trying to memorize everything about her. The silver strands of hair against her cheek. The lines around her eyes. The tiny mark beneath her chin. Details I had seen countless times without ever considering that one day I might desperately wish I could see them again.

Her breathing grew slower.

“Grandma...”

Her eyes closed.

I waited for them to open again.

They didn’t.

The monitor continued its steady rhythm beside us, and I watched her chest rise beneath the sheets before falling again. When the next breath didn’t come, I felt panic spread through me.

“Grandma?”

I stood so quickly that the chair scraped across the floor.

A door opened somewhere behind me.

Footsteps approached.

I bent over her, still holding her hand.

“Grandma, please.”

I didn’t know who I was pleading with. The doctors, God, myself, anyone who might have been able to give me back the years I suddenly realized I had taken for granted.

The monitor changed.

The sound became one long, uninterrupted tone.

Her hand slipped from mine.

And in that instant, everything I knew seemed to disappear with her.

The kitchen.

Her laugh.

The sound of her slippers against the floor.

Her voice calling my name from another room.

The smell of coffee in the mornings.

All of it seemed to vanish at once, leaving me with nothing but the terrible certainty that I had been given years with her and somehow hadn’t understood what they were worth until they were gone.

Then I woke up.

I sat upright so violently that the blankets fell to the floor.

For several seconds I couldn’t breathe properly. My room was dark, but it was the familiar darkness of my own bedroom, not the dim blue light of the hospital. My desk stood in the corner with my computer monitor black and lifeless, a pile of clothes sat exactly where I’d left them, and an unfinished glass of water waited beside my bed.

I dragged a hand across my face.

Sweat covered my forehead.

I stared at the room, slowly realizing where I was, while my heart continued beating hard enough to hurt.

It had been a dream.

I knew that.

I repeated it to myself, trying to make the words feel true.

A dream.

My heart didn’t seem convinced.

Then I heard a cupboard close somewhere down the hallway.

I froze.

A moment later came the sound of a kettle.

I knew that sound.

Grandma was awake.

I pushed the blankets aside and stood. My legs felt strangely weak as I walked toward the bedroom door and opened it.

The house was quiet and ordinary. Early morning light had begun creeping through the windows, turning the edges of the furniture gold, and the smell of coffee drifted down the hallway.

Then I saw her.

Grandma was standing at the kitchen counter in her dressing gown, completely unaware that I had just watched another version of her die.

She turned when she heard me.

“You finally woke up.”

I stared at her.

She smiled faintly before her expression changed.

“What?”

I didn’t answer.

I walked toward her and wrapped my arms around her.

She barely had time to put her mug down before I held her tightly.

For a second she stood completely still, surprised, and then her arms came around me.

“What happened?” she asked softly.

I closed my eyes.

She smelled like her shampoo, and I could feel the warmth of her body against mine. Two tears slipped down my cheeks before I could stop them. I wasn’t sobbing, and I wasn’t even trying to cry; they simply came, as though some part of me was still sitting beside that hospital bed.

Grandma pulled back enough to look at me.

“Sweetheart?”

I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand.

She waited.

I looked at her blonde hair, noticing the strands of grey around her temples in a way I never had before. I looked at the face I’d seen almost every morning for years and suddenly understood that familiarity had tricked me into believing she would always be there.

“I dreamed you died,” I whispered.

Her expression softened immediately.

She pulled me back against her and rested one hand gently against the back of my head.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she murmured. “I’m okay.”

I nodded against her shoulder.

For a while, neither of us said anything.

The kettle clicked softly as it finished boiling. Outside, a car passed along the road, followed by the distant bark of a dog. Somewhere beyond the kitchen window, Johannesburg was waking up and beginning another ordinary day.

But for me, something had changed.

Because while Grandma held me, one thought kept returning to me, over and over, no matter how hard I tried to push it away.

Seventeen years.