a/n: I’d like to improve this and maybe make it longer…so if you could keep that in your mind as you read and possibly give me some criticism or suggestions, that’d be absolutely spectacular. Thanks for reading. n.n

(And a special thanks to those who voted for the quote on myspace.)

Flowers Shall Grow

There are things in my life that I wish I could remember but find it impossible to do. I want to remember the way things were before they stopped being perfect. I want to remember the way Ryan's body felt against mine, warm and solid as he slept. I want to remember the way his voice was when he talked to me…lowered and gentle and loving.

There are things in my life I wish I could forget but find it impossible to do. I want to forget the way our perfect life shattered. I want to forget the way Ryan's body wasted away in front of me…the way his muscle melted and his bones stabbed as I tried to hug him like it didn’t hurt me as we both desperately grasped for sleep. I want to forget the way his voice raised to screaming and sobbing. I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die.

But more than those things, the one thing that really stabs into me and won't leave me alone are those words... From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Ryan left me a few days after one of his breakdowns. It was the worst one he'd ever had and it had filled the night with tears and shaking and I hate you I hate you I hate you! while the neighbors complained about all the noise. When he disappeared, I searched for him all day, afraid of what he'd do. I perched on bridges, expecting him to run up at any moment and dive over the edge into the brown water below before I could do anything to stop him. I waited outside hardware stores, half-hoping that he'd slide out with a length of rope trailing behind him, long enough for me to grab and pull him back to me. But at midnight he returned to our apartment, completely calm and affectionate, kissing my neck and then shedding his clothes and peeling off a patch of gauze that had been taped to him to reveal the words, a swollen red hugging delicate cursive black.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

"What does it mean?" I asked him, sitting on the edge of our bed and staring at it arch from the point of his pelvic bone that seemed to be growing sharper each day, twirl and slide around his belly button, and land heavily on his other pelvic bone. I felt sick to see it. From my lover’s rotting body flowers would grow because he’d be buried, dead, gone, never to touch me or smile or laugh or kiss me again…for eternity.

He smiled at me and stepped forward till his legs were on either side of mine and his stomach was in my face, so close that the words blurred and slid together into a finger-painted smear. "Exactly what it says, Lev." His hands slid over my head, flattening down my unruly dark hair before running down to my shoulders, resting there, weightless and warm, something that somehow always managed to keep me grounded.

"But... I don't understand it." My words squeaked from me so painfully sharp and cracking that I was afraid the shards would get hooked into the tender flesh of his belly, marring his brand new branding across his skin.

"I'm not going to live forever."

"I know that."

"But when I die, I want there to be flowers planted above me. They'll be growing from me... They'll be a part of me and a part of me will still be living. From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity..." He backed away from me and the words came into focus again. I stared at them until he collapsed beside me in bed, sighing. "It's a quote from Edvard Munch."

"I don't know who that is," I confessed and stared down at the words, wondering if they’d look less livid when the swelling went down or if they’d still sting me even then.

"Yes, you do." He rolled onto his side, facing away from me and revealing the dots of his spine, pointed and pushing like Stegosaurus spines.

"I don't."

"He was a painter. You know." He peered over his shoulder, placed his palms on his cheeks, and opened his mouth and eyes wide. "That painting. The Scream. He died when he was eighty. An old man. How old am I, Lev?" I stared at him, unsure if he wanted me to answer or not, unsure if answering would send him into another one of his desperately depressing rages. You're not eighty. You're not close to being eighty. You're not even close to being fifty. You're not even thirty, Ryan. I didn't answer and he shrugged and turned his head back to facing the wall. "I'm tired. Could you turn off the lights?”

I did as he requested and returned to him, curling up beside him and wrapping my arms around him, my sternum getting stabbed by his spine in the process, but I didn’t let him go. I didn’t want to ever have to let him go.

“Ryan?” I kissed the back of his neck. “Did you take your medication today?”

“Yes, daddy.” He sounded impatient despite the jokingly added ‘daddy’ to the end of his sentence and I couldn’t blame him. That question had become almost ritualistic and possibly overused in the past couple years. At least this time he was nice enough to call me something of my proper gender instead of addressing me as an overbearing mother like he tended to do at times. “Let me sleep.”

But with my mind on his medication, I couldn’t make myself fall asleep. “Your tattoo… How’d you pay for it?”

“What…?” He stirred in my arms and I clung to him even tighter.

“Well, with our money going toward doctor bills and your medication, we can’t really afford for you to throw money away like that… Remember…?”

“It wasn’t throwing it away.”

I hated when we argued and so I shut my mouth and leaned into him. “Okay. Well. Remember that you have a doctor's appointment tomorrow.”

“I remember.”

“Remember that I love you…”

He laughed and relaxed. “I remember.”

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

After that day those words were always around us. They swirled through the apartment in the deep silence of the afternoons when Ryan napped. They danced around us, taunting and leering when we fought. They lurked at our shoulders when we kissed. They settled heavily over my shoulders and chest when I woke up in the middle of the night to find Ryan was gone, studying the patches of thrush in his mouth through the mirror or suffering through waves of nausea, the words keeping me grounded but making it difficult to breathe. They were constantly there, a constant reminder that Ryan was wasting away.

They screamed when Ryan’s T-cell count dropped below two hundred. That night we held each other in bed and I tried to ignore them. My rotting body my rotting body my rotting body.

“It’s…weird. This whole thing is weird. Isn’t it? The whole time I was HIV-positive, I was thinking that when AIDS set in, I wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t matter…because I just wouldn’t care by then…about anything. But I care…more than I expected. But you…you haven’t been tested,” he said into the room and I shrugged. I’d always been too afraid to get tested. Even though we’d always been careful when we had sex, I was always so afraid that I was like him. That I was sick like him. “You’ll get tested.” His voice took that in control, edging toward anger tone that it had the tendency to do when ever he really wanted his way.

“I don’t want to.”

“You will…but you won’t tell me what the results are.”

I understood why he didn’t want to know because I didn’t want to tell him. If I was positive he would’ve blamed himself. If I was negative, I’m sure that he would’ve been angry…maybe even envious, although I knew he loved me.

So I never told him the test came back negative.

When the Kaposi Sarcoma lesions set in, they never seemed to get close to Ryan’s tattoo. From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. It showed clear and strong against his grey-hued sickly skin, the delicate writing seemingly ten times stronger and thicker than they had the first day I’d seen them. For once I thought that maybe I didn’t resent them like I did the first time I saw them. For once I thought maybe they stood for beauty or hope... But they didn’t get the thought of death from my mind.

Not soon after this, Ryan’s tattoo-inspired optimism that had stayed around for such a long time slowly began to fade. I’d find him sitting in our bedroom with the lights off when I got home from work, just staring out the window with a blanket thrown over his shoulders. While I made dinner for us, he’d shuffle into the dining room and sit there, blankly gazing at me as I cooked and tried to talk and smile like I wasn’t as terribly worried as I felt.

Suddenly I realized that blank look was coming more and more often, but it seemed different. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until one night when Ryan grabbed my arm as I set a plate of rice before him for dinner.

“Lev…my eyes… They’re closing in on me…” he hoarsely whispered, his grip tightening on my arm when he felt me tense.

My whole body shook. “What do you mean? What’s the matter?”

“My eyes…in the corners… There are black spots... I can’t… I’m afraid. I’m so afraid, Lev…” He leaned forward, pressing his face into my stomach, his arms circling around to my back and holding me tightly.

“It’s okay… You’re going to be okay…” I bent to kiss his head and then reached behind me for the phone, pulling him from his chair in the process, but still he held on. “I’ll call your doctor right now. It’s okay…”

When the doctor saw us the next day and told Ryan that he had CMV Retinitis, an eye infection, I knew my lover felt anything but okay. We sat out in the car in the parking lot afterward, just sitting in tense silence that he finally broke to whisper, “I can’t I can’t I can’t” again and again and again just like the day his blood test came back positive with HIV. He couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t be. But he was and I was so sorry.

For awhile his depression stuck around, but suddenly cleared up one day like it had never been there in the first place and he smiled and laughed about everything so I tried my best to smile and laugh with him.

The depression stayed away even when his first bout of pneumonia set in. He kept me up at night with his coughing and I stayed up with him, tracing my index finger around the curves of the letters on his indented belly. From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. They jerked when he coughed but I did not draw away. I hadn’t yet and I refused to ever do it.

So I stayed with him when things got tougher. Even when Ryan’s wasting syndrome suddenly set in and another attack of pneumonia that landed him in the hospital, I was always there with him, reading to him or watching TV with him, my hands clasped with his as he fingered the sentence on his stomach.

When he got out of the hospital, well enough from his pneumonia, Ryan spent his days hurrying to the bathroom as his stomach would suddenly start to churn on him due to his wasting syndrome. I watched my muscular, beautiful, model-type Ryan turn into nearly a skeleton…

“I must like I just stepped out of a horror movie, huh?” he said sometimes. “The bruised, disgusting skeleton at your service…” and he pressed his fingers to one of his lesions while letting out some choked laughter.

“You look beautiful,” I argued every time. “You’ll always look beautiful to me.”

When his eyes got worse and it seemed like he was made of nothing but bone, I remember accidentally blurting out a question to him one night.

“What kind of flowers?” I asked, my palm over the words, feeling the razor sharp points of his ribs and pelvic bones and the burning and smoldering of his fever.

He rolled over, into me, his arms gathering around me. “I’ve always liked hollyhocks, remember?”

I nodded. “I remember…”

That night we cried together. We broke down together. We’d done it before but it was always a result of fighting. But this time we were completely together, completely each other’s, sharing our pain, sharing our fear, sharing our love. Together we cried and we held each other till morning.

I knew that everyday after that was a fight for him to stay alive. Even though it seemed his body sometimes gave up, his mind and heart were still going. Sometimes I stared at that tattoo of his and I hated it. It seemed that it was the thing that gave him hope and strength, something I’d been trying to do all along, but something it seemed only it could quite manage. Other times I felt myself returning to it being a promise of something good to come.

But instead of that, another case of pneumonia swept into our apartment one night, choosing to attack my weakened lover. We took another trip to the hospital but it wasn’t like our last visit. Our last visit ended. This one seemed to stretch on and on without Ryan getting any better. The doctor’s told us more than once that there wasn’t much of a chance of him being helped with his immune system weakened so severely, but we never gave up hope.

I filled his hospital room with flowers and I watched Ryan weaken and waste away. I said prayers to every god from every religion I had ever heard of and I held Ryan’s hand as his life gracefully slipped from him, his lungs rattling and a smile curling his lips as I continued to talk as if I wasn’t so, so afraid. I cried for hours and yet his skin didn’t warm again. I talked to him at night when I got home from work and I called his parents to tell them of their son’s death. I did everything I could possibly think of that would maybe get him back but I planned his funeral and I watched his coffin get lowered into the ground.

There are things I can’t forget; there are things I can’t remember…and there are those things that I can’t decide about. Do I want to forget it or do I never want to forget?

One of those things will always be Ryan’s tattoo. From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

I stare down at a cluster of hollyhocks reaching up toward me and feel tears come to my eyes. While those words bring back the memories of Ryan’s sickness, they bring back memories of my strong, beautiful Ryan.

“I remember…” I whisper, crouching down and reaching out to trace my fingers over delicate, cursive words etched into a slab of dark black marble. Time passes slowly and I finally bring myself to stand and turn away, running the words that were engraved in my lover’s headstone through my head.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.