It isn't even death he's facing. Her features he knows from a hundred, a thousand encounters. He's felt her sleeve brush past him again and again. He remembers the morning he woke up and realized he had lost count of how many people he had seen die. He had promised himself he would not forget them, not one.

He knows what it's like to lie back in her cold arms and let her hands come up over your face, touching your mouth...

But this, not even to die, to be erased. Ashes to nothing, dust to nothing.

Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful empty space where you used to be.