I Fell in Love with Hope(105)

She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she stares at the dying plants on her windowsill. I try to water them every day, but without Hikari’s care, they wither anyways.

“Sam,” she says, breaking the silence.

“Yes?”

“At the beach. You said you had to tell me something. What was it?”

Settling back on the bed, I can’t help but think that Hikari and I’s grief has become cyclic. She clings to things of the past, objects, moments, and places as if she could crawl into time’s body and tear it apart from the inside if only to emerge where her friends are still alive.

So she feels her pain, her loneliness, the excruciating feeling that she is dying, but at once not dying soon enough. She grapples with her guilt and her fear and her love for me. They torture her until she can no longer bear it and must feel the pain with blood. When I stop her, she resents me. She resents me for keeping her alive. Then, it begins again, till all that’s left of her to torture is her mind thinning away with her body.

“It can wait,” I say, laying under the covers with her.

As Hikari falls into sleep, a selfish fantasy of mine rears its head. I dream that Hikari and I become one person. I dream of being so utterly close that we melt into each other. That way, I could take all this pain she has, every drop of this misery, and nurse on it. I could rid her of the shadows. I could bear every single suffering note till her smiles and her mischief and her curiosity and all the things that are hers return.

I beg the possible to gift me this one impossibility. I beg as I once begged the dead to haunt and wallow in the silence. Because if she and I were one, then I could never lose her.

“I know you’re hurting, my Hamlet,” I whisper, trembling, I hold her so tight. “But please, hold on. Just hold on for me.” I kiss her again. I kiss her till I realize she has already become as empty as I used to be. I kiss her till it feels like my fantasy could come true and even if she dies tonight, I will pretend I have died with her. I will crawl beneath the ground as soil is spread onto our bodies and the dark submerges us. I will hold her as she decays to bone and then to ash and I will love her till time takes the world away and my curse is vanquished by its end.

“Please, Hikari.” I kiss her like it’s the last time. “Please, don’t leave me yet.”





i understand




“Is this how you felt when Sony was dying?” I ask. I sit in a rolling chair at the nurse’s station, holding the Hit List as I watch Hikari’s room from afar.

Winter is here, and her mom has quit her job. She spends her days at the hospital to stay with her daughter while her husband continues to work to pay off medical bills.

“Did you think, This is it?” I ask again. “This may be the day I lose her.”

Eric either doesn’t hear my question, or he ignores it. Rummaging through charts, he handles paperwork with efficiency, as always, only now with an added edge. After we spread Sony’s ashes, he went back to work as if nothing had happened. He was offered leave, but all of his colleagues, tiptoe around him still, offering to do tasks for him.

I don’t think Eric likes that.

I don’t think he’s ever liked me either, but I’ve known him since he first began clinical rotations fresh out of school. When he first saw me, he reacted the same way all others do. He felt he knew me fundamentally, a face from his past, but he didn’t question it. It was a natural ignorance. He saw me as a detail. A stethoscope around a doctor’s neck or the sound of shoes against the tiles.

It doesn’t dawn on him that I don’t look like I’ve aged a day since then. People don’t question background details unless prompted. They accept them as they are. Sometimes, though, I wonder if like Hikari, Eric wonders what I am. I wonder if he does notice all those peculiarities. I wonder if he ignores them because, for all he doesn’t like about me, he likes that I am constant. I don’t bend and tiptoe for him. I don’t offer what I would not have offered him before.

People need that sometimes. They need things to stay the same to make room for what has changed.

“I think I’ll lose her every day,” I say, standing up and laying the Hit List on the counter next to whatever Eric scribbles on. “Every night once her mother goes home, I lie with her and I beg her not to leave me.”

Hikari is no longer tempted by blades of any kind. She barely has the will to be fed by others, let alone the will to feed herself. In the absence of knives, she becomes vegetative. She doesn’t leave her bed unless forced. She can’t be awake more than a few hours at a time. She vomits after every meal. She loses strands of hair before they have a chance to grow.

“Neo’s mother gave me this,” I say, caressing the front page and title of our glorious little notebook. “It’s everything we ever stole.” It’s everything they never got to steal.

“She thanked me,” I say, my voice weakening. I didn’t save Neo. I didn’t save any of them. And yet, “Why did she thank me?”

Eric continues to go through his charts, letting them loudly fall back into their trays as if to accentuate he has no answers to offer me.

The cat that has made a home on this floor hops onto the counter.

Eric ignores her too. With a hooked paw, she plays with his ID badge clipped on the breast pocket of his scrubs. If I thought she was capable, I’d say Hee was trying to cheer him up. At another time, maybe if Sony were still alive, Eric might’ve actually smiled for her.