Dear Nobody by Gillian McCain Page B

between wheezes, gasps and coughs. Jennifer had befriended me. Talking with her was like having a conversation with myself; that’s how alike we were.
    Now, when I think of Jennifer, I picture her in a coffin. I see her big, caring eyes—sewn shut. I see her in a white dress, a very pretty one, and her arms crossed over her chest. I see the shiny gloss in her dark straight brown hair illuminated by the fluorescent lights we once sat under. But Jennifer seemed so ALIVE. It’s hard to think of her body rotting in coffin. She was rotting when she was alive. So am I. We have been rotting from the time of conception. Disease, infection, swallowed her from inside out. But we are more than just a disease, we have souls. Jennifer had a soul. I wonder where it is?
    I hope that her soul can read this.

Dear Jennifer, Tiffany and Heidi—and all the other angels taken too soon by Cystic Fibrosis,
    You are all with me every minute of every hour of everyday. Every minute without you is a minute without air, gravity and life. You are rarely absent from my mind, and if ever you are absent, for the briefest moment, my mind drains into a pit of loneliness and torture.
    No misery is as haunting and ravaging as your absence. You are so much more than my security and protection from this evasive earth. We exist in a place other than this disgraceful world of maddening confusion and tenacious hatred. We’ve got our own heaven that awaits us. We can only enter into it through our arm’s perennial embrace of one other. Yet this dark world has sealed our only true home off from us. At least you and I know our way home. You have gone to our heaven first.
    Will you wait for me? Will you shine for me up there as brilliantly as you shone for me on earth? I will look for you when I get there. I will look for your burning porch light that will guide me home.
    Rest in Peace.

Dear Nobody,
    I am seventeen. I’m OLD. I’m old. I look great for my age. Very good. I am living my old age. When you were sixteen, how many of your friends did you watch die? Did you know maybe one person that died? One friend? Guess what? I could count my dead friends on my hands. Guess how it feels to have all of your friends being wiped out and slowly dying off by the same Cystic Fibrosis I have?
    God never intended this hurt for me. Please, please what did I ever do? Help me. Help them. Help us. Help us, we’re in hell! No one can save us. Not our machines even. Not our pills. Not even all our endless, lonely hospital nights.
    Help us.
    Why are you healthy and all of us dying?

Dear Nobody,
    Jennifer’s death brought up issues I can’t handle—I JUST CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE. Sometimes it hits me—something like this will trigger it and I will become scared to death. I still cannot believe that I could be cursed with such a horror; to everyone else, this is all second-person. I feel my limitations—my mortality. I will never know what it’s like to be old, to have children, to be married. Just like Jennifer, I’ll be dead soon. The average life expectancy for my type of disease is thirty two years old—and that’s if you take care of yourself, which I never do.
    If I were being chased by a murderer with an axe, a knife, a gun, bare hands, whatever—I could run, I could fight back, and I could call for help. Now, imagine the panic and fear you would feel in that situation. For that second—those few minutes; imagine having that fear all the time, not being able to get away from it; never being able to escape it.
    With Cystic Fibrosis it’s different. You cannot run from Cystic Fibrosis. Fighting back at Cystic Fibrosis with treatments and hospitalizations is all-consuming—and in most cases—futile. If you can take the treatment tube out of your mouth long enough to call for help, the only ones who can hear you are either too ill to respond, or already dead. Besides, doctors and nurses and