Then came the day he asked me to marry him.
It was a Saturday. I had made vegetable soup, and we had eaten it slowly, and I was clearing the bowls when he set down his spoon and said my name in a way that made me stop.
“I want to ask you something,” he said. “And I need you to hear the whole thing before you answer.”
I sat back down.
“Marry me,” Carl said. “I know how that sounds. I know we have known each other for a matter of weeks and that this is the strangest thing anyone has ever asked you. But I am running out of time, and there is nothing in this world I want more than to not die alone. I want to leave knowing that someone stood beside me and called me theirs, even for a little while. It is the one thing left that I want. The only thing.”
I was stunned into silence. When I finally found my voice, it came out thin and uncertain.
“Carl, we barely know each other. This isn’t, I mean, marriage is.”
“I know what it is,” he said gently. “I am not asking you for anything you would have to keep after I am gone. No obligations. No expectations. I am asking you to give a dying man a wedding day. That is all. This short time we have had has given me everything I needed to be sure. It is the one thing I want while I still can want anything.”
There was such quiet certainty in him. Not desperation, which I might have refused, but a settled and peaceful longing, as though he had already made his peace with everything except this single unfinished wish. And something in me, some part I did not fully understand, wanted to give it to him. It felt right in a way I could not explain and did not try to.
