Chapter 200 Ryan Ashbrook

Chapter 200 Ryan Ashbrook
Two days later, in Ryan's bed, with his head against my shoulder and his hand in mine...
Ryan Ashbrook.
The glow that made me melt, took his last breath.
There was no dramatic final moment. No warning. Nothing that announced itself as the ending of a life. Just a quiet exhale, then nothing.
And for something I had spent months knowing would eventually happen, his death broke me in ways I had never been broken before. It left me hollowed out by a strange, sour pain that felt foreign even though it seemed to have settled into every part of me. Half an hour earlier, I'd asked him if he was cold.
He'd looked at me with those tired eyes and said, "No. I'm fine."
That had been our last conversation.
Not ‘I love you.’
Not ‘Don't forget me.’
Not anything worthy of the final sentence in someone's story. His body's temperature, that's what we'd talked about.
And his last words had been, “No. I'm fine.”
When I called his name and got no response, fear crept in so slowly that I almost mistook it for exhaustion. I looked at him and his eyes were open and unblinking. His face impossibly still, with freshly dried tears leaving faint tracks down his cheeks.
I knew.
I didn't want to know, but I knew. He was gone. The love of my life had left despite still being beside me. There hadn't been a sound. No final cry or desperate gasp. Nothing I could have fought. Just a silence so complete it felt cruel. And those tears broke something inside me.
Because even at the end, he'd been hurting. He'd been afraid. And ironically, his last words had been, “No. I'm fine.”
I stared at his face, waiting for it to change. Waiting for his chest to rise. Waiting for him to blink. Waiting for anything that would prove I'd misunderstood. But everything I'd once considered permanent remained exactly where it had always been, except him.
And I sat there holding his hand long after it stopped feeling warm, unable to understand how the world could remain so painfully ordinary when mine had just ended.

It has been three days, fourteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes since you died.
I know that because I've started counting.
I don't mean to. I haven't sat down and decided that this is something I'm going to do. I just keep looking at the clock, and every time I do, I know exactly how long it's been.
Seventy-two hours. Then another fourteen hours. Then twenty-seven minutes.
And that's enough time for the world to keep behaving as though nothing has happened. I keep seeing you everywhere. I see you in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with your arms folded while you watch me make you a smoothie. I see you curled into the corner of the couch with a book. I see you standing barefoot by the window, staring outside because you once told me the trees looked different in the mornings.
Sometimes I smell you, which is worse. Your shampoo. Your soap. The faint scent of your clothes. I catch it for half a second and turn my head before remembering that there's no one there.
I honestly don't know what's happening. All I know is that it hurts like hell. I don't sleep, I don't really want to sleep. Every time I close my eyes, some stupid, desperate part of me expects to wake up and find out I've imagined everything.
This morning, getting out of bed took longer than it should. I sat there staring at the floor, thinking things I don't want to think.
Sad things.
Then darker things.
Things that frighten me because, for a few seconds, they don't frighten me enough.
Your parents are hurting too. Chloe sent me a photograph of the memorial they've put up at your school. They used the photograph from the school's website. That photograph. The one I found months ago, back when I didn't know you yet. The one I'd looked at and somehow knew I was already in trouble.
I hated seeing it there. It feels too polished and official. Too much like a photograph of a lonely employee instead of a photograph of you. I wanted to drive there and replace it with the one from the Japanese garden.
That particular one I loved. You sitting among the flowers with sunlight falling across your face. That's the picture I want them to remember. But doing that means going through all the others, and I can't do that yet.
It still hurts too much. I've even tried that stupid thing where you repeat a sentence until the words stop sounding real. Until they lose their meaning.
Ryan Ashbrook is dead.
Ryan Ashbrook is dead.
Ryan Ashbrook is dead...
I think eventually it might become just a collection of sounds, but it doesn't. Every time I say it, I understand it more. You're dead, and I'm still here.
I'm a mess, Ryan...genuinely. There's no poetic way around it. I'm surrounded by you. The little boat I bought you at Bainbridge is still there. The bowls we made and painted are sitting in the shelf. The oversized octopus from the aquarium is on your bed. Your books are everywhere. Books we bought together. Books you touched and turned over in your hands. Books we looked at with that stupid, childish wonder we both got whenever we found something we wanted.
They all hurt.
Everything hurts.
And now I have to somehow learn to love all of it for you. I have to look at the boat and remember you being excited instead of remembering that you're not here. I have to look at the photographs. To keep living inside the life we build, even though you're not in it anymore.
I don't know how I'm supposed to do that, I really don't. I'm not sure I can.
There are moments when I can't get myself out of bed. Moments when my mind goes somewhere dark and stays there longer than I want it to. But I have to try, because you're the love of my life. You are. You always will be....and you loved life.
God, you loved it. You loved books and photographs and flowers and terrible television and rearranging bookshelves for absolutely no reason. You loved your parents and your students. You loved Ember and the ocean.
You loved remembering things.
You loved feeling things. You fought so damn hard to keep experiencing the world even when your body made every ordinary thing difficult.
So I have to love it too, even if I don't know how yet. Even if it hurts. Especially because it hurts. Because you're gone but the love isn't. And I don't think you would want me to bury that with you.