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by Sarp Sozdinler

One could say they were colleagues. At first glance, they might indeed look like colleagues, even sound like it too, but ask them anytime what they were doing at work, slaving away the best years of their lives like that, they’d blurt a laugh and exchange a glance that might indicate that they shared more than a desk. And when she was diagnosed only two weeks after her thirtieth birthday, he was the first to go visit her in the hospital, not forgetting to bring her sunflowers and a pack of Haagen Dazs caramel ice cream, her winter favorite, without considering how to refrigerate it in a six-by-eight hospital room the size of a coffin. For weeks to come, he was the one who ferried spoons of ice cream into her mouth in the comfort of the latter’s one-bedroom Astoria apartment, and only within two months of their faux-roommateship they built a rapport akin to that of old friends. They rode to the doctor’s appointments together and climbed to the rooftop whenever she was in need of fresh air. They bought vases of plants to change the air in their apartment, turning it into a microclimate of their own. When one day he returned home from work and found her crawling on the floor, he was the one who called her parents for help. He wanted to tell them about their daughter, how she could turn wine into blood with her killer smile, how the two of them shared a naked slice of pizza the night before and danced to Madonna like two good friends. How they’d become more.

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