She was dead.
I had been naïve.
Even after everything, I had still been naïve.
I took it for granted that she had one year left.
She might have taken that for granted, too.
At the very least, I had failed to realize no one was guaranteed a tomorrow.
I assumed, as a matter of course, that a girl with little time left would at least have a tomorrow.
I assumed my death had not yet been assigned, and could come at any time, but if she had only been given a year to live, she was at least promised a tomorrow.
What kind of fool’s logic was that?
I believed the world would at least spare the life of a girl who had little life left.
Of course, life doesn’t work that way. It never has.
The world doesn’t discriminate.
The world doesn’t pull its punches from any of us; not people healthy like me, and not people with fatal diseases like her.
We had been wrong. We had been stupid.
But who could blame us?
Once a TV serial was announced to end, the show always aired until the finale.
Once a manga’s final chapter was advertised, the manga always ran until the end.
Once the last movie in a series had a preview, that movie always came to the theaters.
Everyone just assumed these things to be true. Life had taught us those expectations.
I had assumed them, too.
I believed stories never ended before the last page.
She probably would have laughed at me and told me I read too much.
I wouldn’t have minded her laughing at me.
I wanted—and had intended—to read this story to the end.
But her story was over; the final pages left blank.
Foreshadowing never to be paid off. Story threads left dangling. Plot twists never revealed.
I would never know how her story was to turn out.
What happened to her rope and the prank she’d planned?
What was her big magic trick?
What did she really think of me?
I would never find out.
At least, that’s what I thought.
That was the reality I’d resigned myself to accept after she died.
But later, I realized that wasn’t really true.
I hadn’t gone to visit her house after her funeral and after her cremation.
I stayed in my room every day reading my books.
It took me ten days to find a reason to visit her house, and the courage to do so.
At the tail end of summer vacation, I remember something.
There might be a way for me to read the last pages of her story.
The key is in the object that brought us together in the first place.
I need to read Living with Dying.