On the day Campbell was to leave for Toronto for three weeks, we decided to meet at the café for a late lunch. As I met Campbell, I saw his chestnut facial hair, handsomely cornering his chin. I thought about how lucky I was that he had not married, or taken up with someone while I was gone. Actually, he had been seeing a woman, an actress he had slept with, but not much of a relationship with. He’d dated some women and one girl, in particular, he was not willing to discuss. I didn’t like knowing, but I had to ask and it made the meal go down hard with chunks as big as the rough streets of Manhattan.

Campbell spoke of all his women now that we were together. I had to listen, but mostly I kept thinking, is this what I want to talk about in my last three or four hours with Campbell? He droned on about how women are like trees, they seem to come out of nowhere when you’re driving drunk and how the girls he tried to set up his nephew with actually were interested in screwing a fourteen year old. He spoke about how the last girl he dated wanted him to screw her while on a train from Boston. We held a laugh about it all and I hoped that was where it all would stay, just some crazy interactions floating in a sea of normal interactions, but I could not be sure that was true.

We were standing up, gathering things and getting ready to leave, we were discussing the last few details before Cam left when a bald man with tattoos bumped our table so hard it caused some water to tip out of the glass. We both looked over to see the waiters asking him to leave and cornering him to get him back to the front door. I heard the intruder use some pivotal words I used in my book, like graveled roads and options. I listened in alarm to him quoting misguidedly from my book. I had now done several book signings and I knew there were some people who took the book to extremes, supremely stupid in their misunderstanding of my supremely stupid book. I sat back down to avoid eye contact with the man, as Campbell stood watching the chase scene.

I stared straight ahead scared and mildly berating myself for assuming that this tattooed guy had read my book, and by the way he conducted himself, had actually been able to finish it. The places your ego can go when you’ve had too much Manhattan, too much of Campbell’s world. I knew I was ready to tell Campbell of my plans to leave Manhattan.

Still, I waited quietly through the hours it took them to spend two seconds chasing an unwanted patron out of a café. When I turned to get up from the chair, the taste of the chomped food sat sorely in my throat, and the time we’d spent talking about other women, such crazy lines for Campbell to say in a movie, it all turned gray in mind. Again, the tattooed bald man walked past me abruptly pushing me back down into the chair. Before, he pushed me, he looked me straight in the eye and appeared to say the words, “it’s you.”

I was suddenly looking straight at the white tablecloth, shrugging my shoulders trying to balance myself from falling, when I noticed I was stuck to the chair. I literally could not move, as if I glued myself to the chair. Campbell did something to the guy, something about, hey, watch it and gave him a good push when Campbell swung around the table, back into his seat.

Leaning over the table his eyes caught mine; he was excited from the incident. “Are you okay Catherine? Did you see that guy? Oh shit he was one badass guy. I bet from the Bronx!”

But I had no time for that. I had no time to go over the details. I had looked behind me to see why I was stuck to the chair only to see a silver tip of a knife coming through me and releasing the wood of the chair it had stabbed too. I looked down in my lap and there was the other end of the knife. I held the handle in my hand washed in blood that Campbell could not see. I wanted to tell Campbell to help me, to scream but I could not get it out, so I put my hand up in the air so Campbell could see the blood running down my arm.

A woman behind me had already seen the blood and screamed for me. She started dialing her cell phone, when someone else screamed for an ambulance. My poor Campbell’s eyes caught mine, in shock. As blue as the deep Mediterranean Sea I floated in, on my back one warm Italian day. My poor Campbell’s eyes caught mine as he began to terrify of what had happened. He jumped around the table to grab me as I began to fade. He held me tightly and spoke directly into my ear words that whispered as sweetly as the wind blew around the Alps, through the streets of Hamburg and onto my settled mind in Helsinki. How I wished I could have this day back to begin it all again, but that wasn’t real.

This time I did not imagine I was flying, I actually lifted like the ether, floating up above myself, still sitting there on the chair. When I saw the town square in Milan below me, all lit-up in dreamlike fire, I saw the purple balloon and thought only I could know about that balloon, no one else knew it as I did, so I knew, I was dying. Shock spread over me, my body laid stiff and cold. It was as present with me now as it had always been while I was alive, the overwhelming truth that you spent this life alone. I lamented knowing this truth, I thought, I’ve paid my debts with my time facing my loneliness, and by my time spent as a strange face, and because of that I can’t be dying. But I knew I was wrong. No one else knew of my relationship with that balloon, like no one else knew of my love for Campbell, so they must know, I struggled to gain consciousness, he must know before I leave this glorious Earth.

I felt Campbell’s warm arms around me soaking in my blood and opened my hysterical eyes to see his mirroring the same. I managed a small word or two to him but no more. Campbell leaned his face to mine and cried. I closed my eyes, laid my hands at my side and moved to the ragged-edge of my consciousness, marking the end of my happy existence, and was overwhelmed that my last sentiments on Earth were to Campbell, and that I said something to him that brought love into my last glimpses of life.