MILK

So this was dying. So this was death.

A hospice bed was my world. Days had melted into weeks, and after 84 years in this life, my wife was gone, my family gone, alone.

Strong drugs in an IV drip, wires tethered me to some quietly beeping thing, and sleep and waking were smudged and blurred. Sometime the ceiling was blue sky with blurred continents of cloud drifting past. The wires and tubes snaking about me were sometimes vines of ivy, twined stem and leaf around my withered arms. Once I drifted to some semblance of waking to find my bed was deep in an earthen shaft, light spilling in from above, the walls a writhing sea of roots, woven into the black loam. In some other hour, I was surrounded by endless trees fading into pale mists, remnants of the room weathered, mossy, the walls collapsed, the chair fallen and rotted and ancient, while birds called and insects hummed. Nurses came and went, murmured, smiled, and they glowed with warm light, fringed-blue like summer’s lightning at dusk.

As the end came, it was like a distant wind, murmuring, then rushing, then roaring. The mists closed in and I lay in a white void, only a thin sensation of sun, burning weak above me. I had a sense then - let go. I was holding on to nothing. I was tired. I was ready.

And she came to me then. Pale and glowing, hair black and dancing in a fresh wind, not a nurse in white but a woman wreathed in shimmering green, a sheath of silk that lifted and wound and danced in the tumult.

Seven decades and then some since the boy I once was had last seen her.

And her, unchanged, of course. Slender, a face of severe angles and translucent-ivory skin, framing bright, black eyes.

My eyes widened, for my memories of her have never died, her face I’ve held to the end within my thoughts and god, in my dreams. In my dreams.

“I am not a dream” she whispered, and her voice - soft, a parchment-thin rime of delicate rasp like the airy breath of a flute, floating over a deeper velvet-tone. An accent that you can almost smell when she speaks - hot sun, strange fruits that drip with nectar, parched lands well-south, Mexico or Honduras or somewhere deeper than geography can describe.

I am not a dream, and somehow in her hand, a glass of white milk, cool, the glass dotted with condensation like jewels, the color pale and deep, the way morning mist fades to pure white in the distance, like the way light glows on her pale skin.

I became aware of a great thirst, I became thirst itself, and she held the glass as I drank - I drank deep, descending into a warm pool of blessed sleep, and she was gone.

A week later, I was home, after bidding my farewell to doctors, scratching their heads in dismay. Two weeks and my white, wispy hair was seeded with dark roots, thick and soft. My once-white beard stubble was now a dark shadow. Nothing hurt. Almost nothing hurt.

And so I waited.