In the Spring

It was a Tuesday. I can feel the way the pollen was polluting the air and tickling our lungs. The sun felt warm on our backs as it began to fade into a soft violet and crimson red sunset that evening and yet my chest felt so cold. It was May 9th. I had a concert that night and a solo to perform. These past few weeks had been so hard to get through.
I felt like the last saltine in the pack, I was crushed and stale and yet I was still there beckoning to be consumed and looked upon. My boyfriend at the time had just broken up with me and my grades showed my mourning from it. I had a concert tonight. I just needed to be at this concert and finish out this semester. Stress was eating away at my edges as everything was coming to a close and I was still trying to hold the door open.
This isn’t about me though. Everything changed so quickly. I may have been in hardship but I was far more worried about her.
She was so sick. Her eyes had became so sunken in and dark, they mimicked black holes that had stolen away the sunshine that usually sat there. Her skin gave chills just at the sight of it. It was a cold porcelain color and her clover green veins bulged through her temples and smoothed scalp. This wasn’t her. The Robin I knew had bright eyes and a dark tan with bleach blonde hair. She was a shell with a cell eating up her body whole. Her laugh wasn’t her laugh anymore. It was a cough and a wheeze till she was almost vomiting what little she had had to eat these past three days.
It was in July the year before when I sat down in my mom’s little chevy after practice and she told me and my siblings she had something very important to tell us. I hadn’t seen Robin in almost two years and yet this hit me like a brick wall. She only went in for a checkup and a cold. She came out with stage three brain, lung, and stomach cancer. I thought back to the summers spent in her swimming pool that was far “too big” for me and my sister. We looked like fish out of water as our bodies flailed back and forth as we tried to steady ourselves with floaties and tippy toes. She’d have lemonade for us and a diet coke for herself. She’d have country music blasting as she laid out and cracked some jokes a little too over our heads for us to understand and yet our older sister would giggle at. I missed that. We prayed for you.
Things got better before they got worse. It was March of last year when we got a call of some good news about her. The treatments were doing great at attacking the last decade or so of smoking cell killers in her lungs and stomach. She was doing better. She was miserable. The medicine made her sick nearly every time she ate. Her hair began to fall out in large masses from the radiation that took place after. Her skin ached, she cried. She cried till she was collapsed in the floors of her small home.
Her small home. A ranch style lay out with a few small rooms that felt even smaller due to the walls packed with picture frames and cheap signs with motivational sayings. Her old sofa took up a third of the living room and smelled of old cigarettes and wood chips. Her jumpy little terrier would pounce up and down for greetings and was always yipping to get into the small patch of grass that was her front yard. She’d loved that small patch, she’d sit and watch the butterflies land in the spring and give them all little names. Her favorite wooden watching chair, a soft lavender color. We passed it that day, we passed it on May 9th.
The last time I ever saw her was on my grandma’s front porch. She was giving me life advice. She told me to live life while I was still young enough to. She told me how being of status didn’t matter. To do well in school and to know when it was appropriate to speak up. She talked about my dad needing to loosen up and let me go on a date every once in awhile with a wink. She made me laugh even though there were tears forming in my eyes. She hugged me tight, I could feel how hard it was for her to breathe. She knew she was dying. She went into hospice not even a week after this moment.
It was May 9th. I had a choir concert to get to and had somehow managed to snag a solo. My mom and I were running late and when we had arrived the concert had already began. I left in defeat and had asked my mom if we could visit Robin one last time. My mom had agreed. We arrived there, but had decided to head back home to get my dad too. We got that dreaded phone call on our way back. My heart sunk to my feet and my stomach was in my mouth. She was gone. She was full of tubes and gone. It was Spring, and she loved the butterflies. It was spring and she was gone.