This was incredibly powerful, full of emotion, and very moving.

Your opening line is one of the best I've had the pleasure of reading: I walked in on your death, and it made me a ghost. That made my mind tingle and scratched an itch in my brain I didn't know I had. But it felt great! It's so clever and poignant and drew me in completely.

It brought so many questions to my mind immediately in a good way. It was thought-provoking and intriguing and you held me prisoner because of it.

Here are a few more great bits of prose that I wanted to highlight because they are also quite remarkable:

air plastered with words that don’t seem to have any place in this language

I can still taste the fluorescent lighting

touching you, just two fingers on the edge of your skin, on your arm, as if expecting you to vaporize any second and wanting to catch whatever small bit of moisture might seep into her flesh

The POV voice in this piece is incredibly strong. You know exactly who this character is. I also am really impressed with how the narration sounds more like a conversation with the reader rather than a narration delivered at or to the reader. It made for an incredibly fresh and up-close-and-personal feel to the piece. And given the nature of the scene, that's exactly what this scene called for.

Death is never easy. And you remind us of that through your observations of characters and how they interact with the dying. But in a way, it can also be tragically beautiful, and your flowery and well-written prose has that on full display. You POV character notices subtle details and nuances in small character actions (like in highlighted bit above of the mom having two fingers on the boy's arm rather than just saying her hand rest on his arm). You're deliberate, precise, and it makes the reading experience so much more intense, raw, and real.

Incredible job.