I wrote this for three reasons.
1. I love this book, and everything in it. It's incredibly special to me.
2. I want to explain WHY I do to my friends. Because I don't have that caller. It's a justification of some sort.
3. To feel something. Anything. This teeny tiny awfully written One-shot sort of helped.
As soon as Hazel Grace leaves, I grab the white packet of cigarettes. My hand hovers over the lighter I bought a few weeks ago, and to as much my own surprise as anything, I picked it up and took it to the roof with me.
My G-tube gets in my way as normal. When you have it fitted, the doctors are all smiles and telling you 'you'll be used to it in no time'. That's a lie, because even though this tube is what feeds me and gives me nourishment, it reminds me of what hinders me. I'd rather starve, but then I would never hear the end of it, and I do not wish to cause my parents more pain. Hazel Grace once gave me the analogy of a grenade she had given her parents. It fits wonderfully, I feel.
This is one of my few places of solace now, the open air frees me from the restrictions of the earthly life I lead. Amsterdam was wonderful yes, but I cannot help but think of Van Houten. He was a reclusive legend, I idolised him. I fear though that the words in The Alchemist were right, and I should never have gone. I wouldn't have, if Hazel Grace hadn't wanted his ending.
In the Alchemist, the boy is talking to the shop owner about the muslim faith, and how it is commanded that each muslin must make a pilgrimage to Mecca once in his life. The merchant then tells the boy that he will probably never go, because once he has been, what will he have to work and live for? What will be his aim?
Maybe this visit to Amsterdam, to Van Houten, was the same. I think it is better for Hazel Grace and I to have our own endings. Sisyphus excluded.
There is a faint taste of nicotine on my tongue, from the worn filter of this cigarette. As I sit back, I think for a minute upon my metaphor. I put the killing thing between my teeth, but do not give it the power to do it's killing. Why? Why do I not let it fill my lungs with toxic smoke? It couldn't kill me faster than the cancer. It would do no harm to my body, my body that is made of cancer.
I pick up the lighter, it's heavy in my hand. Unusually so, perhaps the guilt has settled amongst the gases. The lid flicks open without complaint, and my thumb rests against the casing. I raise it to the cigarette clasped between my lips, and as I depress, the spark leaps to a small flame. So close, just a few millimetres.
My phone rings, and I jump. The lid falls back into the flame, instantly putting it out. My cigarette falls from my teeth and settles on my G-Tube. It dawns on me what I had just come so close to doing, to giving up. Never again. I look at the caller ID, and would you look at that.
Hazel Grace, you have saved me once again.