The hospital ceiling was white. Too white. An expanse of emptiness, humming under the sterile glow of the flickering lamp above my bed.
My hands lay weak on the sheets, skin thin and veined like fragile parchment. So this was what my body had become, no longer the legs that had once raced through sunlit fields, no longer the arms that worked, carried, carved. Just remnants.
The nurses came and went. Professional, efficient, barely speaking. Their faces blurred together. Strangers paid to make a stranger comfortable.
And so I was with me, here at the end. Alone.
I turned my head to the nightstand.
Fresh lilies sat there in a small vase. Not from family, there was none, but from one of the nurses. She told me gently that flowers brightened the atmosphere.
I wanted to thank her sincerely, but the words caught in my throat.
flowers weren't for the dying.
They were for the living.
For those who would remain.
Still… They were beautiful. Pure white. Unblemished.
I closed my eyes.
In the silence, memories stirred. Slowly, painfully, they began to surface. The weight of decades, coiled into a tangle of joy, regret, and loss.
I felt myself slipping from the hospital room, back into times when lilies meant spring, not endings.
Back when youth filled my breath, and the world stretched wider than I could ever imagine.
And so, lying here with no one to hold my hand, my story began to unravel.
A childhood both tender and cruel.
Moments of joy that seemed to vanish too quickly.
The loves, the burdens, the griefs I carried like stones.
Now, at the threshold of death, it was all I had left: recollections drifting past, one by one.
My body was frail. My breath shallow.
But my memories still burned.
And they carried me back to the small house on the hill.