• Sickness. It wraps around my body like a snake- constricting my airways and the blood running swiftly through my veins. And when it slithers away, it leaves thick bruises on my skin. They swirl around the ivory surface like bright, purple ribbons. I press my fingertip to one of them. My skin feels as if the blood running under it is boiling. When I pull the appendage away, the thick ridges of my fingerprint glimmer dully with sweat.

    “I DON’T WANT TO DIE!” I scream with a certain fierceness that I’m sure nothing would dare take me away after the outburst. “Not yet …” I whisper as an afterthought.

    And then all I can hear is my heavy breathing. I lift my arm off of the bed and let my shadowed eyes wander over it.

    The spidery blue veins travel underneath my pale flesh like routes on a map. I wonder briefly where they lead to. Maybe if I trace them with my fingernail, they’ll lead back to where I came from, or more importantly, where I’m going.

    The thought is knocked out of my mind by a blinding flash of agony.

    I clutch the stark white sheets of my hospital bed in a desperate attempt to dull the pain ricocheting against my bones like a heated match of ping-pong.

    The drugs that are pumping straight into my blood-flow do nothing to minimize the burning affliction.

    The beeping of the heart monitor and the incessant drips of the IV stabbed into the crease of my arm are being drowned out by the sound of my heart beating and the blood pounding in my eardrums.

    My unwashed, sweaty hair plasters against the brick-like pillow in thick clumps. I imagine if someone walked into the room, they’d take one look at me- see my back raised off the bed in an arc, my hands and feet curling so tightly that the skin might tear- a thick sheet of sweat shimmering on my skin almost beautifully in the shards of moonlight ghosting through the window- and know that I was dying.

    I gasped for air- my throat felt like a line of wire was wrapped tightly around it. I thrashed around hopelessly. The IV tube swung along with me like a jump rope.

    I stilled. My ears strained to listen to the heart monitor positioned at my side. It was slowing.

    I panicked- trying to suck in as much air into my shriveled lungs as I could. They must look like dying grapes by now; their wilted, rotting bodies clinging to their vines in desperate hope that the winter will not come.

    I gulped down one last cloud of air, and my body collapsed and bounced slightly off the mattress. My arms splayed lazily across the sheet, and my breathing slowed.

    My throat was raw; it felt like I had swallowed burning acid. I tried to push the fire raging in my throat down into the blood stilling in my veins- into the marrow in my bones that felt like powdery snow.

    I could feel the odd chill running up and down my insides like a river in the dead of winter. A river laced thickly with drugs and disease.

    The heart monitor cast a square of dim light on the linoleum floor as the jagged little mountains that ran across it turned flat. The long string of noise that came out of the machine pulsed through the dark room.

    I stared blankly out of the large window at the glowing moon. My dry, crusted lips cracked slightly as they curved upwards.

    The moon was casting a spotlight on me- as if my death were a show and the whole world was watching.

    I blew out the breath I was holding, and watched it swirl in the air like smoke.

    The world stopped turning, and darkness overtook me. My eyes glazed over in blindness; my ears stopped listening to the monitor now flat lining as if it were music.

    And then there was nothing.

    The last fleeting thought I have is that I hope my body decomposes and sinks into the sheets- staining them; forever scarring the earth. That way …

    No one will ever be able to forget me.