“They told me that you wanted to see me,” Sam said as he entered the room he despised the most.

“Well, you keep surprising me even when I have no space for surprises left inside of me. I thought you wouldn’t show up.”

“I only got here because they said that you were dying, Elizabeth.”

“That’s supposed to be Mom," Elizabeth said as she stared at her son standing by her hospital bed and looking down on her.

“We don’t always get what we want,” was Sam’s response before he proceeded to sit down.

The light of the room was bright enough to show his mother’s veins hiding inside her wrinkly arms. The short grey hair on her head didn’t resemble the one he remembered from his childhood. She used to let her hair down when she was having a good time. She would tie it up when she yelled at him for doing anything that children did. He was thankful that she had no hair to tie up. She had no power to do it even if her hair was still there.

Elizabeth sighed as she pulled her hand away to deliver a message that she didn’t want Sam to hold. He kept his hands joined together to tell her that he wasn’t planning to. It was their language. They understood each other in the silence.

“I thought that the years apart would teach you to have some respect for your mother.”

“And I thought seeing death staring at you every day before you go to sleep would make you kinder.”

Elizabeth never believed that she did anything wrong toward Sam even when he directly told her so years ago. She remembered how joyous she was in the past before the sickness. Her mind just never made her remember that the joy she once held was never shared with Sam.

“You never loved me,” Elizabeth said as she remembered how her doctor said she had about a week left. She invited Sam a week earlier, maybe in hopes that it would only take him a week to forgive her.

“Funny how both of us can say the same statement even when we have vastly different narratives,” Sam said as he spun in his chair. He only did it because he remembered how much Elizabeth hated it when he did this as a child. She had no more loud voice to yell at him with.

When his eyes landed on her almost bald head, Elizabeth pulled a long wig from under her pillow.

“Shouldn’t you leave this to younger patients? What do you need hair for? It’s not like any of your ex-boyfriends would come to visit.”

The sting these words left in Elizabeth’s heart didn’t break the ice that formed on top of it whenever she looked at Sam. It only made her heart grow colder.

“Maybe you are right. No one visits me, but I can die happily knowing that no one would visit you either when it’s time for you to be in a hospital room." The lights flickered for a few seconds, but the darkness the room fell into wasn’t as dark as Elizabeth’s soul. “You see, Sam, you might hate me, but we are both the same. I look at you now and I see myself when I was your age. I had so much hate toward the world, and I blamed everyone but myself. Maybe you should try to take some of the blame.”

In a few seconds, Sam neared his face to Elizabeth’s. In his mind, his hands were wrapped around her neck, but in reality, he held a strand of her fake hair between his fingertips. He started tracing it to its end as he spoke to her.

“What kind of blame did you want a kid to feel? You think I didn’t blame myself for how you treated me in the past? I spent most of my nights staring at the ceiling in my room and analysing everything I did during the day. I asked myself if I had breathed loudly or if I had brushed against you by mistake. I asked myself if maybe I did something when I was only a few months old. Did I puke on your favorite shirt? Or maybe I cried during a business call? I’m 30 years old now. Not a month passed by without asking myself why you hate me.”

He quickly put his other hand on Elizabeth’s mouth when she tried to talk.

“I never found the answer and now you are dying. I might never know the answer. But you know what? I reached a different kind of answer, and that is that I hate you too. Congratulations. Every mother wants to teach her son about love and to hear that he loves her. I think that you are the first mother who ever taught her son to tell her how much he hated her. You always loved to be unique with no one sharing your success. Now, you have no one to share your pain.” He reached the end of the hair strand.

When Sam was by the door, Elizabeth’s wig missed him by a few inches. At least sickness took some of her power away. At least her death would take some of his pain away.

He told her everything she deserved to hear. She didn’t deserve to hear that he has her number saved as “Mom.”