"I want to be with you, it is as simple, and as complicated as that."
— Charles Bukowski

I started noticing the small things.

Things most people wouldn't think twice about.
Like how... he never blinked.
Or how—no matter how cold the wind got—his hands never trembled.

I tested it. Once.

It was an early morning in April.
The wind slipped through my patient gown like fingers through paper.
I pretended to shiver.

As always, he draped a scarf over my shoulders.

"Cold?"

I nodded, eyes darting toward his hand.

He touched the side of my neck.

No warmth.
No cold.
Just... nothing.

A lack of temperature.
Like the absence of breath.
Like the moment I first saw the figure in black drawing a cat on the frosted window.

Exactly that feeling.

—

That afternoon, I asked:

"How long have you been at this hospital?"

"A long time," he replied. Without blinking.

"How long is long?"

He looked at me.
Soft. Unwavering.

"Since the moment you started remembering."

I froze.

The words dropped into the calm of my chest like a stone into still water.
They didn't break anything—
just sank
very, very deep.

—

That night, I pulled out my old notebook.

The first page I'd written at seven.
Messy, slanted letters:

"Today I saw a black person standing in the room.
No one else saw him.
Mom didn't believe me.
But he drew a cat on the window.
It was cute."

My eyes stopped at "black person."

I shivered.
It couldn't be a coincidence.
They weren't two different people.

He and that shadow—
had to be one and the same.

—

I tested him.

The next morning, I drew a second cat.
Not to check if I was still alive.
But to send a challenge.

If he really was him,
then answer me.

—

That afternoon, I arrived earlier than usual.

He was already on the bench. Nothing strange.
Except—

On his lap was a paper bag.
Inside, a notebook with a cat on the cover.

"You left your journal outside. I held onto it.
The cat you drew when you were little... it was cute."

I had never told him about that journal.
Much less about that drawing.

I took the notebook, hand slightly trembling.

"Who... are you?"

He looked at me.
Eyes the colour of ash before a storm.

"Do you really want to know?"

I didn't nod. Didn't shake my head.
Just watched.
Waiting.

He lowered his eyes. Slowly.
As if the words about to leave his mouth
would change everything we'd built.

"I'm the one they call
when someone is about to leave."

"I have no home. No age. No origin.
Only a job.
And a name no one likes to speak."

I held my breath.

"But there's one thing I've never had—
and for the first time in eternity,
I want to."

I looked up.
My heart pounded so hard I thought I might faint.
Not from illness.

But because the truth I feared...
was the truth I already knew.

"You're the only thing in this world I want to keep."

—

I said nothing.

Rain began tapping gently on the hospital roof.
In the distance, an ambulance wailed its familiar tune.

But me—today—
I wasn't the same.

I looked at him.

Not with fear.
Not with sympathy.

But with something closer to sorrow.

"If you're Death...
then why haven't you taken me yet?"

He smiled.
Soft. But this time, tinged with ache.

"Because I'm not ready to never see you again."

—

That night, I drifted into sleep on my hospital bed.

Half-dreaming, I found myself walking down a hospital hallway.
No one around.
Just the flicker of old fluorescent lights.

At the end of the hall, a door stood slightly open.

I walked closer.
He was there.
Cloaked in black again.

But this time, there was no scythe.
Only his hand—

drawing a cat

on a window glazed with frost.

And for the first time ever—
I saw him cry.