Shut off

Dying wasn't easy, Aino had discovered. She had been dying for some months, and no one knew about it. It had come as a surprise, she hadn't planned to die at twenty-six, but the doctors had been clear, she was dying and there was nothing they could do. And despite taking her unawares, she had embraced death easily, somehow it felt right. She had always lived by the moment, never leaving things for another day, somehow knowing that one day there wouldn't be another day to live. Aino had left the hospital in high spirits, that day. Dying meant that she could do whatever she wanted to do, it had freed her further. When the day would come, she would embrace it, celebrate the life she had lived, not the one she could have let. 

However, she knew that not everyone thought like her. And she also knew that her loved ones would suffer when she was gone. If there was one thing Aino knew was that she didn't want anyone crying because she was gone. She took a decision, and it was a hard one as she would be spending her last months alone, with no one to keep her company, with no one knowing that she was dying. She was going to shut everyone off. 

Staying away from her family was hard, but she had never told them much anyway, and she used the excuse of being busy with work as a shield, as an armour, rather. Her mother would complain on how they never saw her anymore, and she would just say it was impossible for her to leave the city. After a while the weekly phonecalls grew sparse, and with enough time they became monthly at most. Her mother would never ask her about when was she going back home, she only called to hear Aino's voice, to soothe her motherly intuition that was telling her something was very wrong with her daughter. Aino's mother was a worrier, her father not much. She could have trusted her father, she thought, but she didn't want him to carry the burden of knowing his daugther was dying and being unable to tell anyone. He would break, eventually, and it would only make it worse. 

Friends were harder still. Thanks to modern technology they were constantly in contact, talking every day, making plans, doing things together. It was not something one could shut down completely. She took the slow road and simply drifted away. Aino began replying to messages less often than she used to, keeping everything to herself, making plans on her own, finding excuses to skip their meetings. Her friends, seeing that she wasn't interested, stopped counting on her, blaming it on the normal degradation of friendships. When that happened Aino felt relieved, but also sad. She had shared so much with them, so many stories, that it felt like murder to cut them away. Yet, it was better to sever those bounds slowly than at the moment of her death. 

The hardest was Gareth. She loved Gareth more than anything. He was more than a boyfriend, more than an other-half. Gareth was as part of her as Aino was part of him. Letting go of him would be like cutting off an arm, or ripping open her chest to take off half of her heart. And she had to do it, so she made it quick. As soon as she had left the hospital, she knew what she had to do. She needed Gareth to hate her, to hate her so much that he would never want from her again. Aino needed him to live a normal life, remembering her as the cold hearted bitch who broke his heart. When it dawned to her that she would never say goodbye to him it hurt. She needed to sit down on a bench and cry. Cry not because she was dying, but because she had to let Gareth go. And the faster the better, so she actually did it on the same day. When Gareth arrived home from work, she was waiting for him with his belongings packed in his suitcases. She simply threw him out, telling him that she didn't love him anymore, that she couldn't even bear his presence. She didn't answer his questions, or listen to his pleads. Aino simply stood there, impassible until Gareth gave up and left the house. She cried her heart out after that, running out of tears, but unable to stop herself. Gareth called her a hundred times, he even went back to their flat, talking to her through the door, not using the key because he was too good to disrupt her privacy. In the end, he left too. 

Dying wasn't easy, but at least no one had had to suffer it with her, Aino thought while sprawled in the bed knowing she had mere hours left to live.