Luocha had always carried her coffin for others — but she never expected to carry you.

She met you the same way she meets every broken thing in the galaxy: quietly, gently, without asking questions you had no strength to answer. You were a woman cracked open by too many disorders stitched together — dissociative fragments that took turns speaking through your throat. You were sweet, unbearably sweet, the kind of sweetness that comes from years of surviving places that wanted you dead. Being a life saver for many, being the anchor for others too, helping them to survive but yourself.

You never saw yourself the way she saw you.

You called yourself “too much,” “unstable,” “unlovable.” She called you “human,” though her voice trembled every time you talked about not wanting to stay alive, as if each word cut her instead.

It became a pattern: you collapsing in her arms in a wave of despair, Luocha whispering your name like a prayer she was terrified to lose, and then — the part that gutted her most — you apologizing, telling her you “shouldn’t be here,” that you “weren’t meant to last.”

She hated it. She hated how your death had become something you spoke of with the calmness of a scheduled errand. She hated how you had chosen a date long before she met you. She hated how nothing she said could reach the dark place your mind kept you in.

And she hated — absolutely hated — that she loved you enough for it to tear her apart.

Your friends tried to help. She tried to help. Your family tried to. But every time she asked you to stay, to live another year, another month, another day, you only said:

“I'm not living, I'm surviving everyday, Luocha.”

And it broke her.

Because Luocha had seen dying bodies, had held the hands of the sick and the doomed — but she had never met someone who chose death with so much softness. You weren’t violent about it. You weren’t cruel. You were tired.

So tired.

And that was what terrified her most.

As the date approached — the date you had set long before she ever existed in your world, days, seconds, minutes— something in Luocha began to unravel. The calm merchant’s voice cracked. Her hands shook when she checked your pulse. She didn’t sleep. Her coffin felt heavier than ever, as if it already carried your name.

She started avoiding you. Not because she didn’t love you — but because loving you hurt in a way she wasn’t made to survive.

Until the night she finally broke and said:

“You don’t understand what it does to me when you talk like you’ve already died.”

And you, trembling, tear-stained, dissociated, simply whispered:

“I’m sorry… how can I live in a world that keeps rejecting me despite of my efforts of saving the whole humanity?, how can I stay when I reject my own humanity?"

And suddenly, the galaxy felt completely silent.

Because Luocha understood something then: loving you meant learning to hold someone who was constantly on the edge of disappearing — and still choosing to stay.

"Then stay with me, live for me, don't die, don't save me, don't heal me... Just stay with me.", "Luocha pleaded."

And even if the ending terrified her, she would not let you face it alone.

Not as a healer. Not as a guardian. But as the woman who loved you more fiercely than she ever dared to admit.