I have one month to live

according to the slender figure in the

pale overcoat, ogling my
credulous, watery orbs, bloodshot
with nervous tremors. “Why?” I asked.

My cells are special, I learned. You know, we’re all made from cells,
the little units rounded about the outside, not sharpened,
which have all kinds of functions. But they go crazy
sometimes, and they keep having new children
until they kill their host. That’s unfortunate, I guess.

I feel bad for cells. But they probably feel bad
for me, too. There’s no way cells can find their
loving parents
in the tsunami of activity
that is my body, just as I cannot find my guardian
who has been skulking around
in flocks of cigarette-bound businessmen
for all these years. He was consumed
by the flame
of his own decision, I think.

I used to wonder
during unvaried days in my empty cube
if other people had cells like mine
and if my cells were sharp,
like razor-edged prisms of diamond,
cutting my heart’s thin septum into two—
it was weak enough already. Were these diamonds
encrusted with death, brutal, the reality
I was raised to expect?

I used to wonder
if the blood that coursed through some others’ veins
was as weak and as cold as mine,
like my hands, painted dusky shades of Stygian rosewater,
cobalt strips of vein rushing down
bones, and only bones, to splintered phalanges.

I didn’t know what to do
with the twenty-eight days of February that lay before me. I don’t prefer to write
28
because twenty-eight is more formal, you know, and I even put a hyphen there.
I was always told to be formal,
a gentleman, a correct straightjacket of solemnity. That’s what makes you
rich and happy, according to
my hiding guardian. He’ll say goodbye to me soon,
I’m confident. He won’t
forget . . .

Anyway, my birthday
is in February—it has always, in fact, been in February,
the only constancy I know—but I never really
enjoyed an entire day
dedicated to me. Who cares, though, right?
I didn’t have anyone beyond my parent—a singular noun—to physically
inform about this “special” day. If I had such little time
to live, then why should I have celebrated my birthday? It wasn’t special.
It was futile.

I told my parent
that I wanted a train ticket to New York City,
but I was slapped across the
bone with the retort that
I was far too young, and in far too unhealthy a condition,
to embark on such a meaningless journey. So, I ran away
from the dull, dreary, chipped white walls
in paper-thin dress, all parts seeing through;
from the vacuum
with which my disquiet killed me;
from the tears, the screams, the death
that surrounded me;
from the young ones, new to this fickle sphere,
who were taken back by God, or by the Big Bang Theory, or by some other
entity that causes conflict,
or by whatever people consider
correct nowadays.

I stole a train ticket
from an affluent girl
in my school
who’d always come
from her upmarket apartment in the city
(which I’d not dare enter
on any day of the year),
and I did so
furtively, just as I had left my own house
furtively.

When I arrived to the city,
I took the subway, thronged with
so many flavors of ice cream,
none of which I tasted. My favorite flavor
had always been
cancer,
and that’s the only flavor that had been
cut out for me. I never made it past
the subway. I died inside it,
my body rotting there to this day.
With everyone looking down
most of the time,
I’m not surprised no one has noticed.