I do, Augustus.

I do.

I re-read those letters, not because I didn't understand them, but because I wanted to soak in every single syllable of Augustus, even though he may have been lapsing in and out of consciousness when writing these. I was taken back to a few days ago when I had inhaled his scent in the basement. There was nothing like it, not because it was so impossibly unique, or because it had some sentimental value, but because it was his. It's funny, actually. The scent that he produced was made up of all the things most other humans have. The sweat on his skin. The natural musk that humans who don't shower for long periods of time produce. Even the cologne, and Gus never wore cologne, except when we went to Oranjee, I could smell it on him after we… But it was no different to the scent another person would produce, yet those singular particles of air meant so much more to me than most others ever would. And indeed, I never quite caught his scent again.

The next few weeks went by as smoothly as you could imagine for someone with lungs equivalent to the usefulness of a paper umbrella. In between watching episodes of ANTM, I spent time with Isaac, slowly returning to my classes at MCC and visiting Augustus every so often. I don't write poetry but for some reason, every time I visited Augustus, I heard his voice in the back of my head saying something like 'How solid the tombstone can be, when protecting something so fragile as a bag of bones.' I don't know why people keep the ashes of the dead or bury their skeletons in bone cages. I mean I know why, but like what's the point. They are nothing but useless matter being held together by flesh and bones that's past its use-by date. And that's just burial. The process of cremation is a luxury I would rather forego. The image of me being a burned pile of ashes sat on my parents mantlepiece is not a pretty picture. I can imagine them giving a new neighbour a tour around their house and pointing to me, on the mantlepiece and saying something like 'This is our daughter. We were never quite able to get over her death and so because of this we keep her remains in a jar on display in the most commonly used room in the house.' That's exactly what I don't want to happen.

One morning about 3 weeks AG I was sitting in his room where he keeps all his belongings. I never quite understood why we refer to things as belongings. How does something truly belong. Material things don't really belong. Like people say that they have money to spend, indicating that the money is theirs. However, it is in fact only their turn to spend that money. Things never really belong. Do children belong to their parents? They created them, they gave birth to them and in most cases took care of them, but are they their property? Are they a possession of the parents? A child playing with a toy may believe that it belongs to them, but eventually once they get tired of playing with it, it will go to someone else who will think of it as their possession and so on. It's an endless cycle of possession until the things gets destroyed. The saying is 'possession is nine-tenths of the law.' In my opinion, this statement is flawed. It should be 'possession is ten-tenths of life and nine-tenths of everything else.'

Anyway, I was hanging out with Isaac, playing around with his voice computer as we always did. Isaac was a cool guy. I didn't hang out with him out of pity, because from what I've seen, pity can be the catalyst for a chemical reaction that there's no coming back from. I hung out with him because, even though he was blind, his eyes were open to the world in a way that most others weren't. I guess that's why Gus liked him so much. We played the games involving the adventures of Max Mayhem and his Private Jasper Jacks and his Specialist Manny Loco. It was just to pass the time. Isaac still hadn't heard back from Monica, even after the vandalism episode. I didn't think he'd be hearing from her any time soon. Now, I'm no hopeless romantic, but dumping a guy when he's about to go blind is up there with kissing at Anne Frank's house. You're not supposed to do it, but if you do, it can often lead to unforeseen circumstances. It just so happens that in Monica's case, it led to vandalism. I remember how angry Gus and I were at Monica for dumping a guy just because he was blind. The happiness he felt when he was tossing eggs, all that emotion caught in a picture. The last picture I had of Gus.

His mum called him upstairs and I helped him up the stairs. She said she had to talk to Isaac privately and asked if I could come back another day. It wasn't rude, but she looked profoundly serious.

'No problem' I said, I drove home in no time at all and when I went in, I saw my mum typing up something, probably to do with her master's degree. She looked happier

'Hey mum' I said when I walked through the door. 'What you up to?'

'Just working on something, nothing you would care about.' I noticed a slight tremble in her voice, but I let it be.

'Cool' I said. 'I've got to work on a report for class, but after that do you wanna watch some more trash TV?'

'How could I ever say no?' she said. The tremble made another appearance. I would ask her about it later.

Once I finished the report on why Stanley was a class-A asshole, I went downstairs and found that there was a marathon of 'Say Yes to the Dress' on TLC.

'Perfect' I thought and waited for mum to come down. Once I was hooked up to the BiPAP, we started watching.

After a couple of episodes, during one of the breaks, my mum turned to me, eyes fully serious.

'You have another PET scan coming up' she said, yet another tremble escaping.

'Yeah, I do' I said back. 'What about it?'

She looked at me and took a few seconds to respond.

'It's just that with everything that's happened, I just want there to be some good news in this house' she said, breathing a little heavier than usual. 'I just. I don't want to be like the Waters family. I know its selfish, but I just wish that I could keep you around just that little bit longer. I want to have infinity with you.' She was crying now.

'I know you think of yourself of this grenade, but I'll be damned if I'm not gonna be there when that pin gets pulled by the cancer or whatever.' She was staring into my eyes, as if trying to see beyond them and get into my head and somehow kick it into functioning properly and getting rid of the cancer.

'Mum, some infinities are smaller than others. I've had infinity with you already. My life has been great. Gus was the final piece to the puzzle. But I would never have got to meet him without you encouraging me to go to Support Group. For that I am grateful.' We were both crying now as the tears came, the stream like a canal back in Amsterdam, wanting to be sailed on in a boat. Although the salty content of tears makes them more like an ocean, but still, the metaphor applies. We hugged each other for what seemed like an eternity, and then went back to watching trashy TV.

The morning of the PET scan came. It was like any other morning. Except for the fact that my parents were perpetually on edge for the whole drive there, even before we got in the car. We arrived at Children's about 10 minutes early. We were always either just a little bit early or late. There was never any consistency or being on time. We headed up to the Oncology ward and waited until they were ready to deliver the scan. I saw lots of crying parents, kids in beds who weren't even allowed to be home. Their conditions must've been bad to have to be kept up here, their small slice of the nothingness that envelops us all a small price to pay for existence in this goddamn universe.

The familiar hum of the machine echoed into my ears as I went through the process. I tried to get a look at the doctors faces, but it's like they were trained to void their face of all emotion, probably not to give away false hope or false sadness. We thanked the doctors for their care for what seemed like the millionth time and left, waiting for our follow-up appointment in 48 hours, to find out the results. The time came and went as time does, seconds ticking away. I remembered one of the Encouragements from Gus's house. It said The future is always in front, the past always behind. So why dwell on both when you can live in the now. The concept of living in the now, or the present, is so misguided. The past and the future are both vast spans of time that encompass millions of years, centuries, and millennia. They are both so impossibly large. And yet the present is an impossibly small sliver of time, but it seems to matter the most. And whoever decided to name it the present is an idiot. The word present gives ideas of gifts, happiness, and excitement. Yet the present for so many is not a gift, but a curse. An existence not based on the idea of the universe giving, but the universe taking.

The call came in the morning. I had just finished taking a shower when I heard the phone ring. I tried to convince myself that it was Gus, calling from the capital-S Something to tell me how he was doing. But my rational side knew that it was the hospital. My mum came to tell me to get ready as quickly as possible. We headed out less than 20 minutes later. We drove to Children's at the exact speed limit on every road. My parents weren't looking at each other, but they didn't have puffy or red eyes. That was as minute of a comfort that I would get that day. We walked in the same entrance, it felt exactly the same. Trust me when I say it wasn't the same when we walked out that day. We headed up to oncology where we met with Dr. Maria. We went into her office, the same expressionless face she had. Then she began to speak.

'As you know, Hazel came in for a routine PET scan a couple of days ago' she began. 'This was a routine scan and we were not expecting to find anything like what we found.'

'Come on, tell us' said Mum, a determinedness about her.

While it is an extremely harsh reality that Hazel's cancer is terminal. The results of the PET scan have determined that…' she paused and let out a sigh. 'The results of the PET scan show and acceleration in that process. The cancer has travelled over into her liver and is traveling to her brain as we speak.' Her face finally gave way and a grave look encompassed her face. Their faces dropped like a brick wall toppling over. Mum began to cry, and in doing so, grabbed my arm with one hand and with her head nestled into Dad's shoulder, grabbed his in the other. Dad was trying to hold back the tears, but it was something he could never do easily.

They flowed as if crying was his default setting, as it had become ever since I was diagnosed. Dr Maria turned to me. I had no reaction. No sobbing. No chest tightening. No breathing problems. I breathed as easily as I normally would, hooked up to Phillip. There was nothing. The present seemed lost to me. I was just there. Once I finally regained my senses I asked the question my parents wanted to ask, but couldn't bring themselves to ask.

'How long?' I asked.

'In light of the evidence we've gathered-' I cut her off.

'Cut the crap. How long?' I asked, not angry, but pissed.

'Hazel' my mum said stifling a word through the torrent of tears.

'It's okay Mrs. Lancaster said Dr. Maria before turning back to me.

'As I was saying, the evidence we've gathered shows a maximum of 1 month. I am truly sorry this has happened.' She took a look at the grieving couple sitting next to me that were my parents. 'I'll give you time to process it. But we need to start thinking about palliative care.' With that she left us to our own devices.

My mum leaned in to hug me. Her eyes were so wet, they clung to the top I was wearing.

I didn't want to hug her. I didn't want to live in this reality. I'd accepted the cards I had been dealt in life had been shitty, but it felt like the Universe was trying to get me to notice it. It was like it was mocking me, taking my last little bit of dignity and hope away from me like some sadistic prank. The grenade was almost ready to explode, and the Universe had all but pulled the pin now. I was going to explode sometime in the next four weeks, and because of that, I needed to limit the fallout, for everyone else's sake.

I don't want to describe to you what happened in those four weeks, mainly because it will have no consequence. What's written is already written in some shape or form and I don't want to be the one to upset that equilibrium. The only noteworthy thing, apart from the reaction of Kaitlyn who balled her eyes out, was when I hung out with Isaac for the last time before going into hospital. I guess in a sadistic cancer patient kind of way it was funny. Seeing all the reactions of people finding out my existence was going to come to an end.

Only Isaac seemed to realise just how I was feeling. We hung out a few times, but the last time was the best, for someone with terminal cancer at least. My organs had begun to fail and slowly but surely my body was shutting down in a slow manner. It took all of my willpower to push through for me to go and see Gus one more time. My parents had become so desperate to spend every waking moment with me, but because I namedropped Gus they conceded eventually. I wasn't walking as steady as I used to be able to, so on the way to his tombstone we had to stop every few seconds so I could adjust myself.

We arrived at it with the bunch of Pentas flowers, more commonly known as the Star Flower. This was a metaphor that Gus would have loved to explore, but we kept it silent, a mental reminder of how much this boy in the ground meant to both of us. Isaac paid his respects and he respectfully acknowledged my desire to speak to him privately. He went and sat down on a bench a few paces away.

'Hey Gus' I said staring down at the stone that contained his name, birthday and death day. 'I don't know if you heard but it seems like getting more and more cancer is a trend at the moment, a trend you lived to the fullest, if you'll pardon the pun. Anyway, big fella, my times nearly here, and don't you go anywhere. I want to see you when I go, and I want to have a heaven of rainbows and unicorns and displaced out of time and space mansions. I want you. So make room up there my love, I'll be there soon enough.

My time came soon after this. I would like to say that I was surrounded by all those that loved and cared for me. But in reality it was a sobbing mother and father. As I listened, I could hear the heartbeat monitor get slower. My dad called over a nurse, but she just shook her head solemnly.

'It's time' I whispered; with every ounce of strength I had left.

'We love you sweetie; don't you ever forget that' Mum said.

'Yeah, and we'll never stop being your parents' Dad added.

'I love you all so much' My voice wouldn't carry. The million and one things that crossed my mind only came out in a singular stutter.

'It's okay sweetie, we know' said Mum, referring to the stutter. 'Say hi to Augustus for us.'

And then, it happened. With one final laboured breath, I drifted off into the capital-S Something to be with Augustus.

I would like to tell you what happened after that but I