The Last Sunrise

By Anaya White

They told us not to fall in love, not when time was a countdown, not when endings were inevitable. So, of course, we did exactly that.

Lena wore colors like armor: bright scarves, painted sneakers, sketchbooks blooming with impossible hues. I, on the other hand, wore sarcasm and earbuds. She was all soft edges and starlight. I was tired and angry, or at least that’s what I told myself. We met on the eighth floor of St. Jude’s, where hope whispered through IV drips and echoed down the long, linoleum halls.

“They said I should rest,” Lena told me the night before we left. “But I’ve rested enough for one life.”

So we took my brother’s beat-up Honda Civic, painted a sunrise on the hood with stolen acrylics, and drove until the hospital became a memory fading in the rearview mirror.

Our first stop was the coast. Lena had always wanted to see a lighthouse “one last beacon before the sea swallows you,” she said, grinning into the wind. She sketched it from a cliffside, her curls whipping across her face, while I blasted her favorite playlist through speakers that buzzed on every bass drop. The sky above was painted in lavender and gold. We slept beneath it on a blanket too thin for the night air, but neither of us complained.

“This is what breathing feels like,” she whispered. “For real.”

I didn’t respond. I just watched her, afraid that saying anything would break the moment.

By the time we reached the desert, Lena’s cough had returned. She waved off my concern with a half-smile and asked for her sketchpad. “Every star is a breath we didn’t waste,” she said.

That night, while she slept in the backseat, I painted her handprints on a rusted water tank under the open sky. I added mine beside hers, and above them both, in uneven black letters, I wrote:

Vivamus, moriendum est.

Let us live, since we must die.

In Arizona, we stumbled upon a music festival, one of those chaotic, joyful ones with strings of lights and strangers who danced like they’d forgotten the world was ending. Lena stood on my shoulders, screaming lyrics she didn’t know, her arms spread wide like wings. For a few perfect hours, we forgot why we were running. We just danced.

Later that night, as we lay in a borrowed hammock between two sagging palm trees, Lena turned to me. “I’m not scared of dying,” she said. “I’m scared of not leaving anything behind.”

“You will,” I told her. “You already have.”

The mountains came next. So did the silence. Lena grew quieter, her voice thinner, her laughter softer. We didn’t talk about it, but we both felt the weight in every mile.

When her breath became shallow, I pulled over and held her hand with both of mine, trying not to tremble. “I’m not ready,” I said.

Lena smiled, eyes closed. “None of us ever are.”

Our last mural was painted on the side of an abandoned diner overlooking a valley. A sunrise behind two clasped hands, bright with Lena’s favorite colors. She signed her name beneath it in teal, right under the Latin phrase.

I buried her sketchbook at the base of the wall when the time came. Called her parents. Said everything I needed to say with as few words as possible.

I didn’t cry when the sun rose the next morning. But I did stand there, hand on the mural, whispering the words I had written days before.

Vivamus, moriendum est.

I still drive that Civic. The paint is chipped now, and the engine rattles like an old man, but the sunrise on the hood is still there. Faded, but unbroken.

Whenever I pass that diner, I stop. I press my hand to the wall, close my eyes, and feel her fingers beside mine, like echoes that never left.

And then, I keep living.