Because before I could lift that crooked wooden lid, I had to understand what it cost him to build it—how many pieces of himself he’d already promised away. His organs, signed over on a porch at sunset; his body, argued over in a hospital room with his mother’s grief like a storm; his last clear choices, inked again and again on donation forms that turned his name into a legal object. I had to remember the nights he sent me out for milk we didn’t need, the way his doctor arrived with a brown paper bag and eyes he wouldn’t quite meet, the rocking chair creaking at two a.m. while I lay in bed, furious at a secret I thought might be betrayal instead of love. Only then could I see what Mark had really been cutting apart in those final weeks: not his body, but time itself, carving it into messages he’d never live to deliver, for people who didn’t yet know they were wait… Continues…
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