It was his friends who told me—a circle of painters and poets who had gathered around his deathbed, who had watched a bright flame extinguish in a matter of days. They didn't know who I was, this dark-haired woman with tears in her eyes asking questions about a man she claimed to barely know. But they told me anyway, perhaps sensing that I deserved to hear.
"He spoke of you," one of them said—a woman with short-cropped hair and sorrow in her eyes. "At the end. When the fever was worst, he kept reaching for someone who wasn't there. He would say... he would say, 'I can see you. I can almost see you. Why won't you come closer?'"
I remember the way the floor seemed to drop beneath me.
Another artist—a young man with paint-stained fingers and a haunted expression—added, "He made us promise to find you. He didn't know your name, didn't know your face except from the sketches he couldn't stop drawing. But he was certain you existed. Certain you were looking for him too." He shook his head, bewildered even weeks later. "We thought it was the fever talking. Delirium. But the way he said it... the way he believed..."
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I asked them, my voice barely a whisper, how he had died.
They told me it was peaceful, in the end. The coughing had stopped. The fever had broken just before it took him. In his final hours, he had been lucid, quiet, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if he could see through it to the sky beyond.
"He asked if there was a woman waiting outside," the first artist said softly. "He said, 'She's been following me for a very long time. I think... I think I've been looking for her my whole life. Tell her I'm sorry I couldn't stay long enough to meet her properly.'"
Those were his words, they insisted. As if he knew there had been others. As if, in that liminal space between life and death, the veil had lifted just enough for him to glimpse the truth of what we were.
I had to leave then. I couldn't let them see me fall apart.
