Dry mouth. The tickle treading softly up the back of my throat registered faintly in a distant pocket of my brain. In a lazy movement, body still heavy with midday sleep, I reached for the water bottle sitting in the cup holder and put it to my lips. My eyelids fluttered, apprehensive of the strong light that began to slowly seep into the spaces between my lashes. I was blinded momentarily, white stars clouding my vision, before clearing to reveal the long black road that the car steadily but surely continued to devour. “There she is.” “How long have I been asleep for?” “A while.” I turned my head to look over to the driver’s seat and was greeted with a familiar sight. One that had been planted as a child and unbeknownst to me had grown into an image of safety and comfort. My father’s long pale arm casually outstretched over the steering wheel. Skin so luminescent you could see constellations of stars beneath the surface, planets travelling along the veins and disappearing into his bloodstream. A complexion his mother had gifted to him and one he’d passed on to me. The black of his watch strap sat stark in comparison. It’s appearance only softened by deep lines that ran horizontally across its width, marks that traced the passing of time. 8am fasten. 7pm release. I returned his affectionate smile. “Are we almost there?” “Not much longer.” Not much longer. The words hovered in the air between us, heavy and intrusive. Three words that had slowly engulfed our lives ever since they were first uttered between the sterile, white walls of the clinic ten months ago. The same words my mother had used to articulate her own doomed timeline. A casual reference to describe the uncertainty of what lay ahead, easier than putting her indefinite existence into days, weeks and months. I suppose we had imagined it would be easier with no endpoint, no deadline. We had tied an endless red string to my mother’s life, in the foolish hope that after her untimely end my father and I would be able to simply rethread and continue sowing. Not much longer. The sun slowly crawled towards the west. Scenes rushed past us, a steady stream of blurred shapes. Fragments of green, now grey, now brown. Motionless figures that sometimes resembled a house,
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