I Fell in Love with Hope(110)

“B-but you’re better now. You healed. You’re okay,” I say, in disbelief. “I know it was hard, and I’m so sorry I couldn’t do more, but you’re okay now. We can escape together like you wanted. We can go. Let’s just go, Sam. Anywhere you want, please.”

“I’m never going to be better. I’m never going to heal. You know that.” Sam doesn’t push me away. Not physically. His words do it for him. “I’ve always been sick, and I always will be and not even love can change that.”

“No.” I shake my head. “Please, don’t do this. Not after everything. You told me to hold on. You told me not to lose hope.”

“You were my hope, my sweet Sam,” he says. His warmth that once bled into me with nothing but our connection ceases to exist. Instead, the light is drained. He kisses my hairline. “I just can’t wait for any more sunrises.”

I cry a quiet wail, the kind that lingers like toxic air in your lungs. I don’t want to lose him like this. Not when we’ve been through this much, not after he fought so hard to survive. He’s no longer hanging from a ledge, he got back up, he made it. And now he wants to jump.

“Please,” I whimper. “You don’t even know who I am.”

“Yes, I do,” Sam whispers. He takes both my hands holding them against his heart. “You’re my first and only love, and that was enough,” he says. “Even if it wasn’t forever, it was enough that all those years ago, you answered a little boy’s prayer and made his wish come true.”

Night falls.

He parts from me.

He walks out into the cold.

I follow him onto the bridge above still, black water.

I tell him who I am.

But I cannot sway him.

I cannot stop him.

Sometimes hope just isn’t enough.

It isn’t meant to save people.

The dark swallows him and I watch him die.

I realize, as my tears fall, that I always wondered if the suns in his eyes would suit the moons in mine till they shut forever and every night left to come, it rained.





a rhyming line in my history




I should’ve never let them.

I sprint through the front doors and onto the gray street layered by mist. Snow falls, not a single car on the road or person on the sidewalk disturbing its blanket, all but one who leaves a path of footprints in her wake.

I’m out of breath, running as I did all those years ago, yelling a different name with the same fervor.

Hikari looks out at the rushing river, her body gravitating towards it. Reddened fingertips slip atop the metal railing, her breath made of steam. In nothing but a hospital gown and a coat falling from her shoulders, her chin upturns to the sky.

The darkness creeps up behind her. It wraps its arms around her waist and lays its chin on her shoulder. Then, it pushes ever so slowly till her head hangs from her shoulders, and in her mind, there is nothing left to do but let her body fall to the water’s whims.

“Hikari!” I yell so hard that my throat hurts. The line I swore to never breach, the bridge I swore to never cross–I push past them. I climb the stone steps, and I run, and I don’t stop.

Hikari blinks. With frailness, she looks away from the river, and when her eyes find me, the shadow at her back clenches its fists.

I’m almost there, and once I have her, I won’t let go. I won’t let the shadow whisper that it is better to end her life than to endure the minute painful part of it. I won’t let it throw her to the cold and laugh as her corpse cascades downriver.

“Hikari!”

A car’s headlights breach the fog turning onto the bridge’s road.

“Sam?” Hikari’s voice travels, reaching for me as mine reaches for her. She turns away from the edge, towards me, like a magnet that has no choice in its direction. She takes one step after the other, her bare legs red and her bare feet raw. She uses the railing as a crutch, but the moment she pushes off of it, she trips off the curb.

A honk blares, and the car swerves, its wheels screeching against the ice. Hikari’s eyes shut, her arm shielding them from the light. The tail end of the car veers off course, and Hikari braces. The shadow outreaches a hand, but it only knows how to scar, how to watch, how to push.

Maybe I am a shadow too, but I know what it’s like to fall.

I grab Hikari by the arm and pull her body onto the sidewalk, sending us both tumbling back on the pavement. Hikari lands on top of me, then beneath me. I shield her, my hand on the top of her head.

When I look back at the road, the car has already gone, driving out beyond the fog, not even its tail lights left to be seen.

Hikari is breathless, the panic in her veins returning to something more familiar. All of a sudden, as she sees my face hovering over hers, everything I mean and everything I am comes back to haunt her. She struggles, tears welling in her eyes at the sight of me.

Up close, she sees her friends sick, herself sick, her friends dying, herself dying. She shuts them tight, shaking her head against the concrete, pushing at my chest.

“Hikari–”

“No, no–” she whimpers, as if I am poisonous, as if I have cursed her. I keep her down, because I know if I let her stand, she will walk into the fog, across the bridge, down the river, and into the dark.

“Hikari, please–”