I Fell in Love with Hope(103)

“Sam,” Eric says. “We have to take her to her room–”

“I have her,” I interrupt, my voice hardened.

“Sam, just let us–”

“I have her!” I yell.

I pick Hikari up off the floor and not knowing where to go, stuck in my own paralysis, I walk, cradling her like an infant, to wherever loneliness and hurt cannot touch us. All the while, I think of Neo’s mother tightening her fist around her necklace the way you tighten a loop around the wrist.

I don’t know if there is a God.

I’ve seen too many be manipulated, exploited, and cheated by those claiming to know God’s will to know for certain. I think God can be a good thing, a good idea. God is the greatest provider of hope among those who cannot find it in themselves.

God has never spoken to me himself, herself, themself, whatever God may be. The closest I have ever come to it is the hospital’s chapel. It’s a rather rundown room with a cross hanging on the far wall and benches sitting in rows for worship.

I gaze up at the cross in the center, the podium back cast by faux glass stained windows and I wonder if time and disease and death are his accomplices or if they are his enemies too.

I know one thing for certain.

If God has ever spoken it is through the yellow flairs in Hikari’s eyes. The yellow flairs in Sam’s eyes. The affection so strong in my core that I am willing to challenge the curse God placed on me when I was born.

But today, Hikari’s eyes are dull and God is silent.

“You warned me,” she says. I laid her down on the bench furthest from the door. She stares at the ceiling–no–past it, her tears trailing down her temples without sound. “You told me hope was useless. I should’ve listened.”

“No.” I shake my head. “No, I was wrong back then. I was just angry at the past. You know that.”

“How are you like this, then?” she asks, as if she’s accusing me. “How do you choose to feel nothing so easily?”

“I do feel. I’ve been through this before, and it’s tearing me apart. I’m just– I love you. I need to be here for you.” I take her hand, the one hanging limp off the side of the bench, dragging my thumb over her pulse point. “I love them too, and I hold on to that–”

“Loved,” she corrects.

“Hikari. Love doesn’t fade when people do.” I reach across her chest, to the black pattern of a moon crested as a partner to mine. “Time will stop, disease will fester and death will die.”

“They’re dead, Sam!” she yells, throwing my hand off of her. She shakes, pulling herself upright by the bench’s back to put space between us. To create distance. As if the mere touch of my skin will burn through her like paper.

“Our enemies won. They took them and they’re gone now.” Hikari’s hands curled around the edge of her seat, her eyes wide and downcast.

“Coeur and Neo will never get to finish their story,” she says. “Neo will never get to run his fingers over a cover with his name on the spine. Coeur will never get to wrap his arms around him and smile into his neck while he does. Sony will never be there to give them her sweatshirts and she’ll never get to bring those stories back to her kids.”

Her words beckon shadows I banished. They creep past the threshold of what is meant to be a sacred place. They infest it, patient predators, that have been waiting for this moment. They crawl past Hikari. They already view her as something of theirs. They set their sights on me.

“They’ll never grow old,” Hikari says, but she is so empty her voice is only air. “They’ll never get married. They’ll never have children. They’ll never see the world or live the lives they were meant to have and they’ll never leave this place.”

Hikari looks at me as if I am one of the shadows, as if I belong with all the little spined monsters that reap us of our lives. She looks at me as if I am seated amongst them, and just as much to blame.

“They’re gone. We didn’t save them. It’s over, Yorick,” she whispers. “People die, disease spreads, and time goes on.”

Her eyes draw to the tattoo peaking beneath the crown of my collar as they draw to her knife during meals. She rejects the reflection as a thing of the past. And this time, when she stands to leave, I know I cannot follow…

Am I a shadow, God? I ask once she is gone. Am I loneliness and fear foolish enough to believe they are light?

I wait for an answer, but without Hikari, my loneliness coils me. Don’t misconstrue. I do not care for Hikari because she is a body to fill a space. I am not afraid of being alone. I am afraid of being alone without her.

“I won’t tell you again. Give that back to me.”

“Are you going to hit me? Here, of all places?”

“You’re grieving. You’re not thinking straight. Just let me handle all this–”

“No. No, I’m not letting you eradicate him like this–”

Just outside the chapel, a man and a woman argue. When the man raises his voice, I stand up. He’s been escorted out by security for harming a patient before. Whether that patient was his child or not is irrelevant. If he isn’t careful, he’ll get forcibly removed, and this time for good.

Neo’s mother knows that. She uses it to her advantage as her footsteps clap against the chapel floor and her husband, muttering things under his breath, storms off down the hall.