I Fell in Love with Hope(107)

Is this it?

Is this what their lives amounted to? Is this the unfair ending that I was told to cry and rage and curse? Is that single day full of tattoos and beaches the in between I am meant to cherish? Did they live only to die? Is love pointless? Is even the only thing that cannot be stolen destined to be lost? Is there anyone, anyone in the world, whether they be human, shadow, enemy, or God, that could answer me?!

I cry silently, staring down at the empty page. I miss them so much it carves through me. I miss Hikari and all the things that make up her soul. I miss being able to fall and knowing I would be caught. I miss the moment we caught her and our embrace on the cold floors of the old cardiology wing that kept out the world.

Hee meows in my face then. I try to pet her, but she shakes me off. She meows again, running across the Hit List, knocking it over and tearing the page with her claws.

“Hee! Careful!” I yell.

I grab the notebook as tenderly as I can, placing it back on the counter like a crying baby in need of attention. I wipe it off and look through the ripped piece. Only, after the torn, tear-ridden page of Our Escape, there isn’t an ensemble of empty sheets like I expected…

A sad string of piano notes sings as it starts to snow. All else becomes blurred. Muffled. Lost to another world. White spots sink in a gray, foggy evening. They cast their light through the glass on a glossy photograph taped to the page.

It’s a polaroid.

Taken by Sony on a sunny day with shrubbery as a background. She extends her arm with a toothy grin, showcasing herself, Neo rolling his eyes beside her, C holding Neo’s hand, and me on the very edge, awkward and stiff. Beneath it, it reads:

Spring.

There is a paragraph under the caption, a messy, albeit legible, marker-written account of what we did that day.

I’m confused at first, my crying stalled. But when I turn the page, there is another.

There is one of Neo and I asleep in the library together. There is another of C trying Sony’s oxygen therapy, the tubes sticking out of his nose as she giggles when he says it feels funny. There is a photo of Neo’s first day in a wheelchair. There’s a photo of his last. There is a picture of C getting an ultrasound of his heart, his tongue sticking out. There is one of Sony hugging me on her first day without oxygen therapy. And there are so many more.

There are song lyrics and book passages and movie lines. There is a leaf, brown and crumpled taped down. There are little drawings and doodles I recognize as Hikari’s all around. There are excerpts from Neo’s stories, the ones I always said were my favorites. There are depictions of the bad days and the good days. There are moments we laughed and moments we cried.

I reach the last page with a trembling hand.

Here, there is no overflowing writing or mess of words. There are no artifacts or lyrics.

There is only a photo of a beautiful girl in a sundress kissing her ordinary lover on a shore. Tucked beneath is the final picture Hikari drew of our friends. And on the other side, just before the notebook shuts, there is a message.





Sam,

Your garden grew and flourished and it was beautiful for a time.

It fell ill and died and its beauty lasts only in memory.

But without you,

Those flowers might’ve never known light.

So to our narrator and dearest friend, thank you

For the memories.

For the goodbyes.

For the Heaven.





The snow continues to fall with the slow rhythm of a sad song. I close our lonely notebook and gaze out with blurry vision at the city I watched grow from the time it was a wilderness.

My tears flow, and yet I smile.

I smile with an open mouth and crush the Hit List to my chest.

I think to myself how lucky I am.

To have known a boy, foul-mouthed and resilient with poetry in the mouth. A girl, brave and brusque, and passionate. A heartful beast, gentle, musical, elsewhere, and above all, kind. An ill-tempered nurse with a sense of duty and care beyond anyone. A girl whose soul I already knew.

She walked into my life through that door, a creaky, loud entrance, bright yellow crowding the darkness of her roots and glasses, too big, too round, perched on the bridge of her nose. When she gave me her everything, and I gave her mine, I fell again.

Although when I look out the window a second time, in the middle of a brewing storm, the empty streets carry a single traveler. A girl whose soul I already know walking across a bridge in nothing but a coat, a hospital gown, and bare feet to mark the snow.





not enough





BEFORE


When a person dies, we say they have passed on. As if they’ve traveled from their body into another world the living can’t perceive. We say that we’ve lost them. Then we argue what it is exactly we lost them to.

What shape does Death take after it’s taken?

Compelling in the hypothetically and terrorizing in the tangible.

Because what if there is nothing? What if death is the explosion of countless synapses, a light going out, and that’s it? What if Henry and all soldiers trudge through the dark only for there not to be another side?

Human beings are selfish. They don’t accept this because they cannot fathom a world without their existence. As such, there must be an eternal life of some kind. Whether it is found in spirituality, in delusion, or in God, there must be an after. A Heaven.