Goodbye.

Goodbyes are the saddest part 
even of the greatest stories.
Hard to voice and harder to leave.
They say we never give enough time
for a loved one's departure.
So I turned you into poetry
keeping you alive between the lines.
Now I think of you in multiples of twelve.
Twelve minutes past our first meet,
we exchanged nervous smiles 
across the beds.
In the twenty-four hours that followed,
We bonded over a million sicknesses 
and sour soups.
I faintly remember,
It took you thirty-six failed trials 
to rightly pronounce my two-syllable name.
Forty-eight hilarious jokes later,
we knew we were stronger 
than our illnesses combined were.
Lying in the critical care unit for sixty days straight,
we now wake up to pills and hopelessness
or mostly the latter.
Admiring our seventy-second sunset
you told how when young,
sunsets fascinated you the most;
I couldn't un-see that spark in your eyes.
The eighty-fourth sunshine set me free
from that room which forever smelled like
antiseptics and sanitizers.
I went back to my home 
And it never felt so uneasy before.
'Long time, no hear?'
Ninety-sixth letter as I write to you.
You liked them that way,
Didn't you?
I hear from your son
on the hundred and eighth day.
You were gone
with no signs of leaving.
Goodbyes are the saddest part 
even of the greatest stories.
And now I turn you into poetry
keeping you alive even between the lines. 

-J.