prose by Maddie Flanagan
She left her husband on a Wednesday, but it wasn’t because she didn’t love him anymore.
It wasn’t the seemingly permanent stains on his obnoxious Hawaiian shirts, or his passion for collecting tropical fish, or the slightly sour smell of sweat that clung to him regardless of how often he showered. It wasn’t any of those things. She looked back fondly on the time he squeezed his swollen body into a dress and proceeded to sing an Elvis song to her on their anniversary. She remembered the time he insisted on cooking dinner, and she ended up laughing as she watched the pancakes catch on fire in the pan. She loved him still, very much so. She just knew that she couldn’t be tethered to a person when she left.
She put her house on the market that weekend, but it wasn’t because she didn’t love the place she had built her life in. It wasn’t the chipped cabinets in the kitchen, or the fourth stair that always creaked, or the toilet that didn’t flush no matter how hard you tried. It wasn’t any of those things. As she ran her fingers along the outdated floral wallpaper, she remembered when her five year old son took his crayons to it and drew a poor excuse for a dragon. She remembered watching that same son walk out through the heavy front door seventeen years later, and wiped hot tears from her cheeks. They weren’t sad tears, but tears of triumph as she thought of her future. She knew that she couldn’t be confined to four walls and a roof when she left.
She started to travel the world on her sixty-second birthday. She had always wanted to see what the world outside of fish tanks and stucco had to offer, but she always felt that she was getting too old. As she started to watch her days slip through her hands like grains of sand in an hourglass, she started to think that no age was too old to escape mundanity. She was sixty-two, but she was fit. She was in great health, except for the cancer in her lungs, of course. The pang of sharp pain in her chest as she drew every breath was a constant reminder of the quickening stride of Death, his footfalls drawing nearer every day.
She refused to spend her last months in the hospital. What could they do for her anyways? Sure, it was getting harder to walk up a flight of stairs, but she would rather have to catch her breath than be confined to a hospital bed. She would rather watch the sun rise and set over a tropical landscape than out of a second story window in some dank city. She would rather spend her money on a hotel room than some experimental treatment that might grant her a few more weeks. She would rather state final goodbyes than give questionable ones. Finality. That’s how she wanted to live out the rest of her days. With finality.
They found her two months later on a beach in Thailand, her pale feet half-buried in the sand, a Siam Sunray still loosely clutched in her fingers, and the traces of a smile lingering on her gaunt face.