I like to imagine those never ending fields full of flowers that everyone loves. I always wonder what it feels like, running until everything in your body can’t take it anymore. Or the feeling of the breeze that glides past your face like ice skates on the best piece of ice. The land would be empty with a warm yellow eclipse brushing over it and buildings so far behind, you forget what they look like. 

It’s never that easy though is it? You can’t just go somewhere and your worries disappear into thin air. The same fears travel with you, they are connected to you, they destroy you. 

My family. This is the complicated part. The part that I hate the most. 

My mum was always the sun to my life, bringing me warmth and light whenever times became tough. The word tough “strong enough to withstand adverse conditions or rough handling.” If you looked at my dad and my mum physically you’d think, in a fight, the man would be tougher than the women, therefore that would leave the man as the winner and the woman as the loser. But you see if you beat a woman with the power of your words that would rid you of all known hope. You’re the weak one, the loser, who deserves to look in the mirror and hate what you see. If you haven’t caught on, dad was the loser, always. To this day I regret how I never got the chance to tell mum she was the winner, she was my winner. 

Two years ago she got caught by the monster you don’t wanna get caught by. The creature that somehow finds its way into your body, and spreads. If you don’t catch him quick enough, you can never catch him. He’s connected to you, like fears. Except this connection was deadly. This monster really took the breath out of you. I guess you want to know his name, Lung cancer. 

I’m going to a friend’s tonight, it’s about time I escaped the prison cell. 

We were just about to hop into her massive warm sack and wind down for the night. When a call came through my phone. 

“Hello Ava.” a man with a very deep unsettling voice said. 

“My names, Bill jones. I’m a surgeon from care and cure hospital.”

The words far too familiar, cut into me. 

“Your father has just had a stroke. He is still alive but in critical care. I’m so sorry kid.”

His deep voice broke as the last words left his mouth. 

I wasn’t in pain, I was stinging. My heart, fingers, head, toes and all were stinging. Within seconds the sting turned numb. 

“Beep Beep Beep” his heart was forcefully pushing blood through his body.

Hand sanitiser became my new scent now. It’s been three weeks since the incident, but the time for recovery is minimising each day. The question that I know will need to be decided soon keeps playing in the back of my mind. 

It was hard looking at his pale dead like face for this long. I hadn’t realised he had a brown mole just below his left eye or that he still wore his wedding ring. When mum left he changed too, no matter how much they fought or everything he said, I knew he loved her. He was just an angry person, it wasn’t always like that though. Something changed in him during my teenage years. When mum passed that’s when angry turned into isolation and depression. To this day we never had a one on one talk about anything. I was scared, which makes me a coward. 

The same man that called me the night of the stroke, came into the room and told me to follow him. 

“Hi Ava, it has been 4 weeks with your dad being on life support with minimal recovery. It’s time I have to ask you the question. You need to decide to take your father off this support.” He spoke with pain in his voice.

“How long do I get,” sharp pain shot through my throat.

“I’m so sorry, but I need to know by the end of today,” he said in a thick toned voice.

This was the decision that could end all pain for him but start it for me. With an outcome that I have to choose, time grew slower than before, my mind was weighing me down and with one last breath, the ones I love will all be gone. During the last hour before I made my decision, I sat with him. And talked, talked like I had never talked before. Telling him it all. I told him my dreams and everything I wanted to say but never could. 

Finally, before the clock had struck 5, I told him how I’m going to look for the two brightest flowers in the field and call them his and mums.