“Who am I?” I whispered, staring at my own hands in a kind of nervous fascination, eyeing the white scars and ragged half-moon nails that I’d come to love and appreciate. I could already see them gone, thrown out of the window in the garbage, no longer a part of me but a part of where they formed, floating in the wastelands of humanity.

How many people had sat on this hospital bed like me? How many had been there, waiting until the doctor came in and told them to say their last good-byes as they kissed away a part of themselves they’d had since birth, a part that had been along with them through thick and thin, partaken in every adventure along with their masters.

I extended my forearm, then pulled it back again, marveling in the simple beauty of it, wondering why I had not appreciated what I was able to do before, how smoothly my joints moved together, coalescing into a perfect tool that had brought mankind so far. I wiggled my fingers and stroked my opposable thumb, shocked by the perfection in which it slid over to my glasses case and gripped it, picking it up and holding it tight, never letting it go, until I told it to by an chemical signal.

The doctor stepped in, watching me quietly as I stroked my arm, an extension of my senses and myself, before quietly clearing her throat. “It is time,” she said softly, giving me a smile that was like a ray of sunshine, breaking into the dark clouds.

I just nodded, not trusting myself to speak, following her into the operating room and she offered me something to drink (“Tea? Coffee? Water?”), but I declined, for I was sure if I was to ingest any food it should come straight back out.

I raised my head quietly, but the doctor sensed it, and she turned around. I cleared my throat, ready to ask the one question that had been hanging off my lips all day and night. “Is there any other way?” I whispered.

The doctor pursed her lips. “Nothing else has been working, and the cells may spread from the arm to the heart or even brain, and once it was there we would not be able to fix it. Are you having second thoughts?”

“No, no,” I murmured, resigning myself to my fate, worried, sweat trickling down my brow.

I slid my hand down the smooth extent of my arm, hairless on the doctor’s orders, the skin a perfect combination of peach and olive, a sun-kissed miracle of color. The nails that lay on the end of the long, pianist’s fingers, bitten with worry and still containing blue nail polish from the manicure nearly a month ago, clipped to precision by the careful hands of the nurse.

“I love you,” I said silently, wishing I was brave enough to scream it to the world, tell the world I loved my arm because it was mine, a perfect glorious arm, the finest specimen of arm humankind had to offer, a geometrical miracle. I finally allowed the doctor to slide the needle in, waiting for the medicine to kick in as I drifted off to sleep, with one word on my tongue–“Good-bye.”