C10 Stay with me Yeo

Yeo stood in front of the large vanity mirror in his bathroom. He had just taken a bath. He was naked. He had been standing there for twenty minutes, simply staring back at himself.

He was a smaller man than most. Most of his race was. And yet he was powerfully built—wide, strong, with the legs of martial arts enthusiasts.

But he now understood his fragility, his vulnerability, his mortality.

He looked deeply into the eyes of his image in the mirror.

Someday, these eyes will not be looking back at you, he thought to himself.

He watched the air moving through the wings of his nose.

He watched himself breathe for fifteen minutes.

He tried to imagine the number of hours and minutes when breathing went by unnoticed throughout his entire life.

The way he took it for granted.

The unconscious notion that it would never cease.

Your nose will become still, he told himself, no air will enter your nostrils. Your nostrils will remain still, not for a moment, but for eternity.

His shoulders slumped at the thought.

His hands hung limp at his side.

He watched his mouth utter the words back to him:

You will no longer speak, you will no longer chew.

Your mouth will remain still forever.

Not another word will be uttered to anyone again.

Finally, he imagined his heart.

He listened to the rhythm.

He felt the pump.

He imagined the amount of blood rushing through it.

The thought was staggering.

He leaned into the mirror and watched his chest beat. The subtle sight of it.

The sine qua non.

The one thing essential to life.

The heartbeat.

The heart that had so often hurt and been hidden by the manic distraction of work.

Yeo tried to comprehend how he had gone through a lifetime, never feeling loved.

Always being there for the loved one, but only to be happy for her presence as the one thing she could bring him.

Her ever-charming mysterious presence, which had always kept him curious, if not loved.

The phone rang.

He shook himself out of it.

He took the phone by the bed and sat down.

It was Ilna.

“Yeo, I want you to come here to stay,” she said.

She had met any offer he had ever made to live with her with stony silence.

“I can’t do that, Ilna,” he said.

“You have nothing left there but the material world. This is not a time for you to be pulled away from yourself.”

He walked back to the mirror and watched himself as he spoke to her.

“I’ve been looking at myself very closely, Ilna.”

“I need you, Yeo.”

She had never expressed such a helpless cry before.

His death seemed to be hitting her harder than him.

“I can’t stay with you now,” he said. “I have work to finish here.”

He hadn’t told her about the plan when he was at the villa.

They hadn’t spoken of work.

She never cared for his work and when he tried to talk to her about her painting, she lifted her head to indicate how uneducated he was.

“Work!” she exclaimed.

“Things that have to be done before I go.”

“Good God, Yeo! How can you think about such things? Let your people run it. Leave it all behind! You have to do this for yourself, Yeo.”

“I am doing it for myself, Ilna.”

“Then I will come to you.”

He stopped looking at himself.

He stared at his feet.

The feet that would never walk again.

The feet that could not take him back to her.

The feet that could only walk toward death.

“I don’t want you to,” he said.