ONE WEEK IN WHENEVER

One day in whenever, she penned some words. And they were torn from her and they were borne from her and she - lying in her pain watching her body wasting - she placed them in an envelope. "Too soon," her heart protested, "much too soon," so she hid the envelope under her pillow - where her dreams could maybe alter the words, like a miracle?

One day in whenever, she rose up - finally finding strength - and began the long walk to the post box. Oh but the words within her letter were so heavy; she could not carry them the distance and holding tightly to the rail she retraced steps - ever those solitary steps back to her home and to the secret knowing.

What did it matter? She spoke to him and it was love and big red hearts and really, she had no right to break those hearts no right to say the words or send the words - but - but if only she could somehow un-think them, if only she could un-live those words, maybe in the re-living a longer future might emerge? For there existed no such longevity ahead; no growing old and sitting on a porch, not in her timeline and she'd accepted this affirmation with the grace of one who accepts all things in nature. Going gently to the fold, no fight in her... No fight in her. Most days.

She wrote, "It's kinda like you're my last whatever. Or my first whatever." And so she asked him for one week in 'whenever'... thinking that one week, that one week, may compensate for missing all the ones which could have followed? Time. Time pours from her where it once held so much within, and she watches it pouring from her, each day more desiccating, more decaying than the next - the mirror saying... "Not long to go now. Dear, not long."

She told him in that letter, "Stay by me, feel with me as I write our love story - for in what others may find fiction is where our hearts Sir, where our hearts do dance and sing."

She told him too, "Oh if they only knew how 'priceless' life is, they would not squander it as I have squandered, they would not waste a minute other than in love - no matter whom, no matter far - one's life is a step here and then steps ever towards the reading, to the now and to the heaviness of this letter."

She added, "Know if I have hurt you... know that the pain is hundredfold in me. Really, I should have kept this secret from you. And I have tried, I have; but there are moments overwhelming by an impossible to bear sense of unfairness? And I act out, and you are forced to - as I say - to "duck and weave" when really, all I am seeking is the strength of you - only it comes across sounding more like a burden I am asking you to carry? For you know not the source Sir, you know not of the urgency pursuing me..."

...Maybe this was their purpose after all, to write one story? She could detect no other explanation, watching the mirror and her reflection... and those damned steps, each one the other leading to the next and to the next - they'd led her here. No room for such a letter here, no way to convey how it was now too late. Maybe a news bite down the track instead; a brief amendment on a Wikipedia entry, and alongside, maybe the vaguest sense he should have seen what she had hidden?

For all that matters here is that the cursor blinks ... ... ... the cursor blinks ... ... ... and she gratefully greets yet another dawn and sees those words again ... ... ... "I love you dearly."