That morning, the nurse did not come. Hope was laying on her bed and listening to the sounds emanating from the stairwell. The neighboring door creaked, and two sets of footsteps echoed from across the tiled floor; one pair of feet shuffled meekly, while the other had a meaningful stride.

“It must be the neighbor across the hall”, – Hope thought to herself, before pensively adding – “her son must have come to visit”.

The elevator began to rumble and Hope counted to herself – “One, two, three, four”. As if on cue, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, opening its doors with a metallic bang and slamming shut once more.

Hope looked out the window and saw, as she always did, a small patch of sky and the crown of the birch tree growing near her home. ‘Birchy’, she had lovingly named the tree – it was the only living thing that had never left her side after all these years. Everyone else would come and go, each year less frequently than the last. Birds would perch on the windowsill and aerorplanes would streak across the sky, the low  of their engines taking Hope to a far-away places she had never been and would never return to. Some years ago, birds had nested in the birch’s crown, and Hope fearfully watched their home sway in the wind. Each time she would helplessly stare, and each time rejoice when the winged parents would return to the nest with worms in their beaks.

Often she would return to memories of her youth – back when she could run, and climb mountains, and swim in the ocean. It was so long ago, yet these sensations seemed far brighter and more vivid than her everyday reality – the sensation of wind against her face, the texture of soft, moist soil between her toes, the warmth of a newly-hatched chick resting in her palms. The memories were precise down to the smallest detail: the words spoken, the wrinkles on her mother’s face, the dimples on her daughter’s and every feeling, every single hue. Hope painstakingly preserved her past, not permitting even the smallest memory to wither and die. Often, very often, she would unlock this treasured vault and experience each day anew. Whether sad or joyful, each fragment of the past held a deep importance and she would not let them go.

“At least,” she thought, “I’m re-living my own life, not someone else’s”.

She had walked this road many times, from end to end, first regretting something, getting angry and repenting, but always coming to the conclusion that things had happened exactly as they should have. She had finally accepted herself fully, from her harsh character to her sudden irritability, her each and every odd whim, and motionless body. She would not change a single thing. Except for one…the death of her daughter.

The disaster occurred unexpectedly, on one bright spring days from twelve years ago. It took them all by surprise, freezing the world like a malfunctioning stop-motion picture. The world outside petrified while her insides grew numb with unrelenting pain. Her house became deadly silent. It was not the silence itself that was awful, however – it was the absence of the sonorous chirping of a child. Playing on a street, Hope’s daughter had been hit by a car, and soon after the incident, paralysis had seized Hope’s body by the grief. Her legs were first to go out, and the rest of her body followed shortly after.

As the room sank into twilight, the shadows of the birch tree grew to encompass the opposite wall, the branches trembling and leaves shaking. Hope imagined herself moving with their frenzied dance, yet her body remained in place, yearning for food and water. Down below, the building’s entrance slammed shut over and over as people returned from work, their chatter and laughter drowning out the sounds of the subsiding day. Hope tried to call out the window that had been left open on the previous day, but her voice was too weak, and her feeble call hardly filled the room.

A loaf of black bread sat on the table. Hope tried to take a deep breath, inhaling the pleasant and familiar smell. She succeeded, and conjured up images of eating the bread with a dollop of butter once the nurse returned tomorrow. Hope did not doubt that the nurse would return – Lana came every day, or had at least done so for the past two years. Once Hope’s mother had passed, Lana regularly came to wash and feed the paralyzed woman. Hope had grown attached to her, although she understood that Lana, like many others, would only remain in her life as long as payment was provided. The poor woman had accepted this, as she had learned to do for many things, with submission and humility. She did not complain when Lana began washing and feeding her less frequently and was grateful that Lana still came at all; the nurse was her last thread to the outside world.

This was not the life Hope led before her mother, who had cared for her paralyzed child for over ten years, had passed. Mother would sit with her for many weeks while her daughter mournfully stared at the ceiling; she read books for Hope and sang songs, doting on her child with such warmth and love that Hope occasionally forgot her tragic state. It was Mother who helped Hope accept her immobility and face her depression. Hope’s grief was real, and her sadness melted away the surface layers of her soul, plunging deeper and deeper into its bowels. Hope’s paralyzed body had become a cocoon for the incessant work of the spirit within.

The next day Lana did not return either, and Hope suddenly realized that her nurse would never come again. Ever. The pain and nausea resurfaced, as Hope drowned her body and mind in a sea of self-pity. She had been abandoned, and she was frightened. Like an artifact forgotten in a storeroom gathering dust, or a stray dog left to the mercy of fate, Hope had been forsaken by everyone. She moaned softly and tears started slowly trickling down her lifeless cheeks. No matter how lonely we are, we live among others and can always call out for help, hoping until the end that someone will come. If left to die alone, everything for which you have lived becomes illusory and vain.

Hope closed her eyes and licked her dry lips. She patiently waited, attempting to control her strained nerves.

Hope awoke suddenly, screaming in horror as she felt a pair of clammy hands upon her forehead. In the panic and disarray, she could not understand to whom these hands belonged. She lay there, as she had always done, with bated breath. As the terror subsided, she realized. These were not the hands of death. These were her hands. They belonged to her.