But it still surprised me. At the end.
NINE
TOMORROW, I WILL BE DEAD.
On this day before I die, where do you want to start? What would you like to look at first? I get up, I have sleep in my eye. I make a pot of coffee, the water hisses over onto the element, spits at me. I can’t get the water temperature right in the shower. Sometimes I think the faucets are switched from day to day, just to confuse me. I eat a banana, the texture struggling in my mouth. I step around dog toys, kick them into the corner of the living room, and open the window to the day. The street is its usual mix of bloated rubbish bags and metal frames. You could swing down them, if they didn’t always seem on the verge of collapse. The sky is blue, later it will rain again. There is dog hair creeping across my big toe. The day is light, bright, ordinary.
I get up. I have sleep in my eye. Make coffee, water hissing. Temperature wrong. Banana slick on my tongue, and the squeak of a rubber bone. Rubbish bags and metal and blue, blue sky. Rain coming. Dog hair itching my toe. The day is light, bright, extraordinary.
The morning passes. Neither slow nor fast. It just passes. I have had near on a month of these mornings and I am used to them now, accustomed. I make a cheese sandwich, leave the plate and knife in the sink next to my coffee mug. I should do more to help out with keeping the place clean, I think. I must not forget to show how grateful I am. I press down on another post-it note and write the word Help, before a large bang outside startles me. My ‘p’ wobbles, shoots off the yellow paper as I drop my pen. I had intended to write: Help more around the apartment but the pen has rolled under the table now, and I cannot be bothered bending down to find it. Help will do, I think, smiling, as I post my final fluttering debt on the refrigerator door.
This last light, bright morning of my life.
On this last, bright morning of my life, Ruby Jones looks out the window. Wrinkles her nose at the black garbage bags lining the street, piled one on top of the other. She imagines the smell of the rotting vegetables and soiled nappies, though the only scent in her room is the vague, musky remnant of her designer candle. She can see a lane of sky made between her building and the apartment opposite. Blue. No rain, but it is coming this afternoon, they say. The promise, too, of a warm summer ahead, once they get past this temperamental spring. Meteorological broadcasts from a future, already laid out.
（They are right, by the way.）
She too has an unthinking routine on this last morning. Downstairs for coffee, back up to her room for a shower. Shoes on for a run, some stretches, and down to Riverside Park for a change of scenery, terrain shifting under her feet from street, to canopied path, to the pier. Listening to loud music through her headphones, trying to outrun the beat of her thoughts.
Ash hasn’t mentioned coming to visit.
Not since he told her he might come to New York, and she waited hours before replying—I would love that!—and soon enough they were talking about other things, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t ask him about his plans, until a week had passed, and then another. Until her first month in New York was nearly over. A whole month and, still, Ash remained the lump in her throat, the ache in her bones. That was not supposed to happen.
There are things Ruby has tried to do, remedies she’s sought. Like downloading a dating app and engaging in tentative conversa-tions with a few of the men who responded to her profile. One man, a Financial Manager living in Chelsea, seemed pleasant enough, until he sent explicit pictures of himself in the middle of an afternoon, asking Can you handle this? as if they hadn’t just been talking about getting tickets to a baseball game. Ruby blocked him immediately, before shutting down her new profile completely, her cheeks hot with embarrassment, and not a little alarm. She had been this close to asking him to meet her for a drink. The unwanted pictures felt aggressive, sinister even. Would this Financial Manager have been the same way in person? New to online dating, Ruby had no idea whether this kind of behaviour was the norm these days. Perhaps she was supposed to laugh it off or admire the guy’s misdirected confidence. It didn’t make her feel like laughing, though. The whole episode made her feel queasy, and then sad. Ruby had been looking for a reprieve from Ash, a chance to replace the almost of their relationship with something present, real. Instead, she found herself longing for him more than ever, for an intimacy already mapped out.
That was not supposed to happen.
Scratching the navigation of strangers and dating off her list, Ruby kept on running. She started a daily journal. Wary of the words that tumbled out, embarrassed to see her heartache spread naked across its pages each morning, she discarded the journal five days later. She took herself to a talk on self-actualisation at 92Y, and another on guided meditation at ABC Carpet & Home, and she spent afternoons reading or people-watching from the damp wooden benches of the High Line. No longer a tourist exactly, Ruby spent the last days of my life trying on a different New York, and a different version of herself. Nothing worked, of course; anything she tried felt like a misstep, like she was still running the wrong way. Loneliness is disorienting like that; with Ash as her only lodestar, Ruby continued to feel utterly lost.