The day I died,

My mother found my cold body on the bed,

Curled and wrapped up in a thick blanket

Facing the wall.

I've always felt so cold all the times,

Yet it was the first time

my fingers and feet couldn't move.

It was a dream,

It was reality.

I was asleep,

But I was awake.

I was here,

But I was not.

My mother leaned over and shook me.

And she kept shaking,

Shaking,

Shaking.

Her mouth was opened,

stretching wide,

calling my name.

Her face contorted around the familiar syllables

—syllables I no longer hear,

—syllables I no longer respond to,

—syllables I no longer understand.

My mother cried.

She called my father.

And my father came in next.

He didn't cry

—because he couldn't cry.

He didn't scream

—because he couldn't scream.

He was calm

—because he had to.

—because there was nothing else he could do,

—because there was nothing else he could fix.

His tools couldn't put my heart and brain together,

His wires couldn't spark my pulse alive again.

The only thing he could build and mend

were dead motherboards circuits,

Not the dead corpse

Of his daughter who he had raised for twenty years

With all the love and strength and prayers in his body.

My father was powerless and helpless,

And for the first time with my own eyes,

I realized how small and sad my father could be.

And to be the one who stabbed and twisted the knife

Deep into his weakened heart

Was the biggest betrayal I had done.

He said to my mother,

"Call the ambulance."

A catch in his voice.

He embraced my cold, immobile body and

Brought me to the front of the house

Where the faceless men in white and red were waiting

To take me away.

My mother and father stood outside watching,

The ambulance van rolled away,

And I watched

My parents' figures quickly got swallowed up

And vanished.