My mind played through the last day; it seemed so far away now, so blurred around the edges and fuzzy in the saddest parts. Yesterday my best friend died. Her name was Kiaki. She wasn’t just my best friend, but my twin sister. We both fell ill of cancer and were diagnosed four years ago. The doctor gave us five years to live. It was already too far along to remove the tumor; it was only a 5% chance of success and Kiaki and I were going to endure it.
We were stared at and muttered at as we walked by at school. Kiaki decided to shave her head, saying “Well we have cancer might as well go through every part of it!” Then we both shaved of our waist length blonde hair. My mom began crying when she discovered this and when we told her why, she cried harder. When the pain began getting worse we kept smiling. Never going to show how much pain we were in.
Kiaki was the strong one and I the timid one, she kept everyone going. Everything flowed smoothly until a few weeks ago when she came down with a bad fever, she couldn’t eat. She began having memory problems. She never forgot me though; everyone around her became a stranger. Our mother, our father, our grandparents, our aunts, our uncles, our friends, our cousins, and everyone we’ve known forever became just another person on the street.
Yesterday she stopped breathing, with her hand in mine. I screamed for the nurse and they began trying to bring her back, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. She had told me the week before, “When I die, I’m not coming back Kioka… I’m staying there where this pain can’t touch me.” I cried and she held my hand. Not daring to let go.
I had to let go though, that moment her heart stopped. She never re-opened her matching jade eyes, tinged blue at the bottom. I had to let go, but it was strange in the room I sat in now. Two beds for one person, identical desks and shelves. Our names painted in big letters on the walls. I couldn’t let go of her memory now. Today was her funeral, and I dressed in black jeans, with a black long sleeved shirt. I stared at her vanity, at the one thing we didn’t have identically.
When we were seven our grandmother bought us each pin with small animals on them in small jewels. Mine a panda and hers a turtle, we had tantrums but we learned to love the little pins. I walked shakily to her vanity and pulled it off the jewelry tree she had. I pinned it to my shirt and stared at my puffy eyes in her mirror. I turned and ran from the room. My parents went to fetch some family from the airport and I ran to the tree-house my father built for Kiaki and me when we were small. I sat on the floor and cried.
Then I began feeling strange, my stomach hurt and my head too. My hands began shaking. This is what Kiaki felt before she died. I ran to the house slipping in the yard and getting mud on my pants and shirt. I dug through the drawers until I found a thermometer. I stuck it in my mouth and I waited. It Beep-ed at me and I pulled it out of my mouth.
105.9
My parents walked through the front door with the family and they came to the kitchen and saw me standing there. I lifted the thermometer up showing them the temperature. Identical to the temperature Kiaki had before she died.