I Fell in Love with Hope(111)

“No, I can’t– I can’t–” She fights me, the scars on her arms throbbing, the one on her neck raw from the cold. The shadow is here, standing over us and whether its name is suicide, self-harm, fear, depression, abuse, or hate, it will not take her hand. Not this time.

“Hikari, it will end!” I yell, pinning down her arms. She stills, her chest pulsing. I hold on to her wrists, our weight making indents in the snow. Hikari’s lower lip trembles, her skin cold beneath my palms. It heats as emotions find her face again, as the shadow that looms over her takes a step back.

“It will end,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Everything dies and everything ends, even your pain. Don’t die for it, my Hamlet. Don’t give it the satisfaction. I promise you it will end.”

“Even if it does–” Hikari stutters, her breaths broken and wet. “Even if it does, I don’t want to live for what comes after.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I can’t. I’m always going to be sick, Sam. For the rest of my life. I’m not strong enough.”

“Then I’ll give you my strength,” I tell her. She cries for the night we lied exactly like this. When waves rather than a river were our background and stars rather than snow was our light.

“I know you miss them,” I say, wiping her tears with my thumb and cupping her face. “I know it feels like they were ripped from us by the roots and I know it hurts, but this torture you feel, this intense feeling that it will never get better, it will end.”

I smile a sad smile that I know she will not catch, but that I know she will understand.

“One day,” I whisper, “You’ll look back on your time here, and you will cry, but you’ll smile too. You’ll smile thinking of Sony’s snorty laugh and Coeur’s tangents about music, and Neo’s rare hugs. You’ll remember our nights dancing and kissing with Shakespeare and every moment in between. You’ll survive and feel your scars and remember that even if it was the hardest thing imaginable, you lived through it. You lived through it, and you met three beautiful people, and you loved them as long, and as much as you could.”

“Sam,” she cries.

“Hikari.” I press my forehead to hers as I did the night the shadows ripped out her hair and her dreams. When I part from her, she looks at me with the same pleading I once did to her in another life.

“Why do people have to die?” she asks and all of her hurt escapes in those few words.

There is no cure for grief. It is the most tangible yet intangible of pains because only one thing can make it livable. Forgetting is not an essential part of it.

Time is.

Time stands beside me now, its own shadow. My enemy that has also been my companion. It bends down and casts a gentle palm over the thin layer of Hikari’s hair. It does not promise a future, but it promises a past that cannot be stolen. It promises that it will go on for her.

“I don’t know,” I say, because it is the only truth I have. “We will look for a reason till even the sun and moon are gone because we believe that an answer will balance the tragedy.” Hikari stares up at me with desperation like glimmers in her tears. I wipe them away as mine fall with hers.

“There is no reason for tragedy,” I say. “One day, the universe will collapse, death will have no one left to claim, disease will have no one to infect, and time will come to an end, but even then, it will not have been for nothing. Because if we chose to only love what we wouldn’t lose, then we would never love at all.”

I take her face in both my hands and even if it hurts, I remember each and every moment I held her this way. I remember every moment I held Sam too.

“Love is not a choice,” I say, smiling with all the gratitude in the world that I am the pitiful creature she chose. “And even if it were, I would choose you every time.”

“Sam.”

“Hikari.”

Every memory I locked away on this bridge breaks from its confines. They fly from their glass caskets and I let them all live within me as they deserve to. The snow continues in a haze around them. Hikari’s arms wrap around me, her head tucked to my chest to shield her from the brewing storm until she finally lets the snowflakes kiss her face.

“The stars are falling,” she whispers.

“My love,” I cry. “They already fell.”

The thing about hope is that it is a fearful reaction. We are hopeful because we are afraid. Because we think on some level we are owed. But this story was never about the hope that arises in catastrophic moments. That hope is passive, not a being, but a state of being.

There is another kind of hope. The kind that is eternal, a scenery you don’t quite notice until you glance a second time. It is not a wish, it is an appreciation, a grateful desire for life as it is.

Everything has a soul. Even books, broken things, and hope have a soul.

Hope chased Despair down the street that day. It caught her by the waist, and it saved her just as she had saved it from the unbearable brightness of their own making. After all, suns cannot see their own light.

So Hope and Despair held each other close until the shadows were gone.





after




It takes time.

But over the course of winter’s coldest months, Hikari begins to heal. Her body, and thanks to time’s grace, her mind too.