![]() ![]() By her teenage years, Milana was so skeletal and malnourished that she had the appearance of both a child and an elderly woman wrapped up in the same person. Given her sedentary lifestyle, she seemed to be withering away by the day. Even after the doctors placed her on an IV so that she could take in some kind of nutrition, her body seemed to flatly refuse to acquire any sort of weight at all. She ate so little, and whatever she did eat would often find its way out of her body undigested. Then, after the sickness really took hold, things went from bad to worse. Despite the fact she was actually 6 months older than me, she was always a head shorter, and so terribly thin. Even before her health troubles really started, Milana had always been small for her age. Sadly, as I was eventually forced to admit to her, the longer she was absent, the more the memory of that skinny girl who used to miss a lot of days of school faded in their minds. She would always ask about the handful of people she remembered, wondering if they remembered her. ![]() Though her memories of the school must have been fading, she always made a point of making me explain in elaborate detail everything that went on there. As her time out of school increased, Milana instead began to use me as her portal to the outside world. After a year went by, and Milana was still bedridden without any form of recovery on the horizon, her parents decided it would be best if she were homeschooled instead, as it would remain for the rest of her childhood. During this time, I would dutifully bring her all our assigned homework, explain what we had done in class, and then return to school, promising to make emphatic claims to our teachers that Milana was on the mend and would be coming back imminently. ![]() Although Milana had only attended our middle school for approximately one semester, she remained enrolled there, such as it was, for the better part of a year. We would watch TV for hours and hours, play every board game and computer game owned by each of our families on repeat, hold chess tournaments just for the two of us, and spend entire afternoons painting and arranging a growing army of miniature figurines together. There were periods when I would visit her every day after school, sitting by her bed and playing together until one of our parents told us it was time for me to leave. Still, I was not about to lose my best friend over some nameless and vaguely-defined sickness. She was in and out of there over the next few years, but it was eventually decided that the best thing for Milana would be for her to stay in bed until such a time came when she had recovered from whatever this mysterious problem was. That was the first time Milana was sent to the hospital, and it would be far from the last. Then, around the age of 8, everything worsened. She would miss days of school at a time without there ever really being an explanation, and she always seemed to be complaining about some ailment or another, be it her frequent colds, or a headache, or pain in her joints. But even back then, Milana was never exactly the healthiest child. The two of us had enjoyed a happy and active childhood together for a few years, a boy and girl playing make-believe in each other’s gardens during the stiflingly humid Toronto summers, and huddling up inside with video games to withstand the bitter cold of winter. I was the son to two fairly unassuming Jewish parents, whereas she was the daughter of an American woman and a Chinese second-generation immigrant who had both decided to move to Canada for work shortly before having Milana (at the time, they presumably did not realise how good of a financial decision that was, given their daughter’s significant health complications just beyond the horizon). Both born in the year 2000, we had grown up next-door neighbours in a leafy yet under-developed suburb of Toronto, both only children of middle-income families-though hers being somewhat on the poorer end than mine, it should be said. We had known each other for about as long as it was possible for two kids to know each other, almost as long as we had known our own parents. Milana may have just been the sick girl to everyone else, but to me, she was my best friend. All anyone in the neighbourhood knew was that, yes, Milana Mei? She’s that girl with all of the medical problems, right? And that’s how she remained: the sick girl. To most people, acquaintances and such, there was really nothing else of relevance to note about Milana. She was just a sickly girl, that was who she was. Artwork by For about as long as I’d known her, Milana Mei had been sick. ![]()
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