Sojourn

They call it Meadow House, and it’s where you went when we broke up because of your illness. In the greatroom you can see the eponymous meadow from every direction, covered with snow, sweeping out to the ruined willows. Your parents wanted to chop those down when they moved in, but the landscapers convinced them otherwise, calling the trees wounded soldiers.

You’re in your room, working on your music made on broken keyboards. We both find this poignant given what has happened to you. Because of your illness, I can only visit you for fifteen minutes at a time, so I’m staying a few days to make it a real visit. My first night, it is just your mother and I for dinner. The table is too big for us. I bring a bottle of wine. We say we’re not going to drink the whole bottle but we drink the whole bottle. Talk around the fact that you’re still the love of my life. She, like you, doesn’t guilt me for leaving. When she goes to bed, you and I text each other good night.

After everyone has gone to sleep I open the double doors of the guest bedroom. They groan, but nothing else stirs. I wander through the snow-quiet house, touch the piano you used to play before you became bedbound. “It’s so Gothic,” I tell my friend.

When one is a writer everything looks like symbols. Your broken toy music, the silenced piano, the willows. It helps with difficult things, I think, to always imagine I am storing up material for a story, especially when that story is a place someone I love might live in forever.

My hand ghosts over the stone fireplace, the exposed chimney that reaches two stories up to the ceiling. Each stone was individually picked. I can’t resist sending another friend a picture—“they rich.” You’re spending a fortune on anything that might make you better, myriad supplements and at-home phlebotomists and concierge doctors. Healthcare is full of disparities, and we are grateful that you can afford this. But we are at the bleeding edge of medicine and nothing works. I know that if you could, you would give up every dollar you have just to be healthy again.

Alone in your room, your skin light grey, in this house that sits upon a vast meadow, in this house that echoes with the music you used to play, you are a cursed prince. Like the Beast, like Howl, like John Keats. I wonder again whether I should try to save you, whether I should take a low-paying job in some lab just to research your illness. I am doing enough, I tell myself. I have been trying for years to tell your story. And I am here, keeping you company.

But of course in two days I will pack up and leave. The drive between Meadow House and my house is a kind of distance. The hope that this might become a good story, a story in which you live forever, is also a kind of distance.

“I wanted to see all the things he was going to do with his life,” your mother tells me. She is near tears. “He’s not going to do those things.”

“He still might,” I tell her.

Even now, my mind recoils from the true horror of it. Even as I write your illness, I am running away from it.

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