The spider twirls and twitches its spindly legs above my head on the thin thread supporting it. Teasing me, tormenting me with the fact that a spider in my room managed to outlive me. Maybe it’ll drop on my head and crawl through my hair, make it it’s home, dominating my corpse knowing that I'll never be able to crush it the life out of it. How pathetic that a spider so small can easily claim me now that no life breathes inside of me.

Here I lie – worm food - dead, I shall never know marriage, children or old age. I 'am to be buried in the comfort of a cushioned box forever alone in darkness with my arms crossed over my unmoving breast, skin forever pale and eyes forever shut. Maybe it won’t be too bad? Maybe death will let my sleep, the tuberculous never allowed me to sleep. Every night I was up awake coughing and spluttering, bones aching, head hammering and skin burning. That virus snuck into my life and robbed my youth before I could fully grasp it into my hands and run wild with it.

I had so much to do. I wanted to see the world, go to far away cities, swim in tropical seas and sip untasted wine. God, death just couldn’t wait to snap me up in its claws and drag me deep into the frigid seas of its domain. Couldn’t wait till I see the lights of Paris, kiss the lips of a foreign man and wonder lost in the streets of an unknown town. He could just not wait. No, I will be forever imprisoned in this box, a wooden cage with no bars and windowless walls with nothing else but my rotting flesh.

At least I'm dressed in my best, a white cotton sleeveless summer dress with a silky rose at the corner of my collar bone, long green beads draped down to my waist and kitten heeled shoes with gold buckles. My lips are painted red much to my mother's distain, I loved my lips being red and my cheeks being rosy against my unnatural pale skin, it made me feel like snow white especially with my thick locks of ebony hair pinned behind my ears. I was planning on getting it cut it into a bob to fit in with the vogue crowd in the night clubs but by that time my lungs had already started coughing up blood and the doctors assigned to me to bed rest. I was approaching twenty and death couldn’t even allow me to celebrate my birthday. It had to rob me of that important age.

Bastard

He couldn’t even allow me to see Rubens face one last time before I descended into the ground. Sweet, sweet Reuben and his dark face and hair leaning over me, teasing me for being so short, pecking my forehead. At least he never saw me as the clammy and frail, dying and greying girl trapped in my bed, damp with sweat and reeking of bile. I’m glad he’ll at least get to see me resting peacefully and wearing my sapphire earrings, the ones he got me for our last day together before he had to return home to Scotland. I would have given anything to see him one last time and not as some dying girl but alive and full of zest and filled with red-hot blood and a heart beating for him only. I’d have given anything........