Grief prolongs everything.
She does not notice the blood trickling down her face, or the relentless flames engulfing her, or anything at all, except the anguish on her nephew’s face.
And as tears splash down his cheeks, she wishes she could get up and console. To kiss him all over and say let’s take a Peter-and-Aunt-May-day. To walk around Queens with ice cream cones in their hands, humming their favorite songs, his youthful giggle warming her heart. To tuck his hair behind his ears as he slumbered on her lap. To watch him navigate an adolescence beyond her control, to fear for his every step, to join his journey instead of preventing it because he was born to be something bigger, she’d always known, just not the extent of it.
She wants to continue witnessing the extent of it; she wants to be a part of his life, and watch him grow up with his selfless heart and soul, and relish in his achievements, big or small. She wants to be around to take care of him while he’s busy taking care of everyone else. And so she spends the last moments of her life grieving—for the milestones she’ll miss, for the hugs she can’t give, for the upcoming absence in her baby’s life.
Yet death brings comfort in mysterious ways that don’t exist in the living. An image floats around in her head for what feels like hours, when it is actually seconds. A little boy, waking in the middle of the night, crying out for parents who couldn’t come. An aunt arrived instead, burying him in her arms, loving him with all she had. He was all she had—Peter, Peter, her Peter.
And her Peter is here right now, his grip so tight on her shoulders. She wishes he could hear those three words; they form on the roof of her mouth, and die with her.
I love you.
——
Grief is everything, Peter realizes.
It is the wet slosh on Queens Boulevard, the tasteless ice cream on his tongue. The nights jolting awake, tangled hair in his eyes, cold sweat dripping down his back. It is every part of his life, and that seems to be the nature of things.
He realizes this as soon as he sees her heaving chest, flickering smile. He realizes this as soon as the blood that holds so much love for him seeps under his fingernails, warm and sticky and terrifying. He realizes it all, before he kisses her forehead, before he begs for an answer, before he loses his last blanket of comfort, of a childhood full of silly little songs and Peter-and-Aunt-May days, of a childhood at all.
The day he got bitten by that spider was a catalyst to a reality defined by loss and loneliness. He sits in an empty apartment, yet he is back to a burning planet, back to a burning building. And perhaps he’s learning to become a little numb, for there’s nothing left to say except three words. He doesn’t say them out loud anymore, for there’s nobody who’ll respond.