Day 16

Greetings readers,

Another day has passed by, and life moves on in its ever slow pace.

For the record, I am not a poet...

Anyway, today was a fun day.  Being a Monday, and normally the day which signals the end of a weekend, and the beginning of a new class week, or work week, this Monday was fun.

It started off regular enough.  I woke up and did my usual morning routine, including the exercises from my doctor.  Each morning lately, I have some "morning pain."  It is more or less just some pain consistent with my disease.  Usually the pain fades, sometimes it does not.

Today, there was no pain, and I felt great!  However, I have done my research, and know that this is almost to be expected.  There will be days when I feel great, it just does not mean that I am miraculously cured and am going to live.  No, I am still sick, I am still dying.  I just get one free day.  I keep my hopes up, but in my research, this is also usually a sign that things are only going to get worse.

Back to this morning though.  So after breakfast and everything, I got some reading done and tended to my plants that I keep on the balcony of my apartment.  Around late morning, I headed back to my old college campus.

Again, I wandered around, said hi to a few people that I know.  This time, however, unlike last time, I had a purpose being on campus.

Inside our student union, there is an actual sit-down type of restaurant.  Just before noon, I went in and sat down, grabbing a table just before the noon lunch rush.  There I sat an awaited my guests.

Yes, you heard that right, guests, plural.

My guests came in almost right at noon.  They sat down at the table across from me and proceeded to open up a conversation.

Now readers, you could be correct in guessing that one of my guests was R.  The other one, was one of the only other people that I suppose can be counted as a friend of mine.  I will call him V.

So together, R, V, and myself had a rather pleasant lunch together.  We talked and laughed, and generally had fun.  Until the end of lunch.

This was where, I decided to let V know the news about my imminent demise.

Needless to say, he was shocked.  There was the usual round of questioning, but in the end, and mind you, this actually took nowhere near as long as I thought it would, he simply accepted it.

Well, that went better than I had hoped.  I was expecting some long series of questions and denial to be worked around.

After lunch, V had to go back for another class, but R was done for the day, so she and I went to a place here in town that specializes in the instruction of developmentally disabled children.  Autism and other conditions.

There, we spent some time with the children, and with the owner/head teacher there.  Now some people may wonder just why 2 random people can walk into a school and interact with the kids.  I will tell you how.  This is neither my, nor R's first time at this school.  In fact, we both have been there many times before.  No, neither of us attended the school, the school is owned/taught by R's mother.  R's mother runs the school, and the 2 of us have helped out there before.

R and I spent the afternoon with those kids, getting to interact with them and play with them.  Most of the kids there know both of us.  There were some kids who were missing, the one's who had gotten too old to be at that school anymore and had moved on after the summer, as well as new kids who were just starting at the school.

I have to honestly say, that this is perhaps the most enjoyable time I have volunteering for something, spending time with these kids.  They are always so happy and cheerful, most of them anyways.  Spending time with them is a blessing.

It was fun to spend time with them, fun to play with them, read to them, and teach them.  Most of them are no different than you or I, they simply take longer to grasp certain things.  In other ways, they can actually be smarter than most other people.  For some odd reason, there are a few of them who are oddly perceptive, noticing things that others would not.

So it was with a bit of embarrassment that one of the kids decided to broach the topic of a relationship between R and myself.

Now I have never really given it much thought, I mean R is my best friend, and we do a lot of things together, but I have never really thought of us as a couple.  The question made us both pause, before R gave an answer.  Her answer being, "Maybe..." with that drawn out ending that tends to signify that it actually means yes.

Well, that threw me for a loop.  Is there a relationship between R and myself?  Even now, hours later and after R and I separated once we were done at the school, I am still thinking about that.  I suppose that I will just have to ask her myself.

Anyway, after spending time with the kids, and for most of them, their parents had come to pick them up, or gone home on the school's bus, R and I separated, and I went back to my apartment.

So now, there are things that I must ponder.

Until next time,
B