Magnolia Dream

I can remember her hair.  It streamed in the breeze behind her as we ran.  It was golden red fire.  We raced across the back yard of our grandparents' farm to the hill on top of the cellar. 

We yanked and pulled on the blackberry bush that grew wild on top.  We were trying to make the world spin backward.  Looking back on it, I have no idea why we did it but it seems so symbolic now.  She was 3 and I was 4.

We spent our summers playing together.  We couldn't have been closer if we'd been sisters.  We were cousins, though.  We were glued at the hip.  We slept in the same bed, we bathed together, we tried to figure out how the world worked together.  She was my Magnolia dream.

Our fun was interrupted every six months when she would spend two weeks in the hospital receiving maintenance treatment.  She'd been born with Cystic Fibrosis. 

We were best friends from the moment she was born.  I do not have a single memory of her that doesn't include a sort of backseat terror.  I knew the statistics from a very, very early age.

As we grew up I took joy in braiding her golden red fire hair.  I told joke after lame joke until they weren't funny anymore because I wanted to see her grey-blue diamond eyes sparkle. 

I held desperately to those moments, trying to absorb every ounce of every second.  My heart tore a little bit with every year, every month that passed.  The passage of time was like a cruel freight train with broken brakes that would eventually carry my Magnolia dream away.

When she graduated from high school it was a proud moment for every relative.  Literally, she'd survived to graduation.

I waited a year before going to college.  I graduated a year before she did and I didn't want her to experience a single moment away from home alone.

I remember seeing a letter from her on the kitchen table as I was getting ready for work one morning.  She'd written about coughing up blood.  I hid in the pantry and cried as my grey skies of worry became large threatening storm clouds that would not blow away until the hurricane that tore my world away from me had finished.

Months later we left the state together for college.  I'd had high hopes and bright dreams.  I planned everything around her quite happily.  It was all fantasy, though.

I remember sitting across the table from her in the cafeteria.  I watched her cry because she was so hungry but too sick to eat. 

I cried so hard when her parents came to take her home.  Her father had to carry his baby to the car.  Her legs wouldn't hold her anymore.  My storm clouds loudly thundered their warnings.

I finished out the year and decided to continue my education the next year.  I thought that if she could just hold on long enough I could graduate and find a career that would let me help buy whatever medicine she needed.

We grew apart that last year.  Deep down underneath all my layers of denial I knew what was coming.  It was I who stopped writing, rarely called, faded out.  I was self preservation, I suppose.

Without me, she gracefully accepted her fate and faded into the setting sun.  A Magnolia dream completed and gone.  The storm clouds swept in and the hurricane raged.

Had she needed lungs she would have had mine in an instant.  Had she needed a heart she already owned mine.  But it didn't go that way.  I couldn't save her.  There was nothing anyone could have done to save her from the infection gone septic that she'd gained in the hospital during a maintenance stay.

Next month will mark ten years since my Magnolia dream ended.  Memories of her have a soft fuzziness around the edges like I really am remembering something I dreamed a long time ago.  Time does that, I guess.  But at least I was blessed for twenty years to enjoy my Magnolia dream.