I Fell in Love with Hope(113)

“Here.” I hand her the bag and it takes all of two bites for the chocolate to stain her face.

“Thank you for all this,” she says as I wipe her bottom lip with my thumb. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to appreciate it the first time.”

The first time, I would’ve handed her a letter under false stars. Tonight, I give her my words under real ones. I think she is happier with that. That makes me happy too. My universal puzzle piece that could fit in any landscape is a natural part of this painting and, at once, the most striking color in it.

“What is it?” she asks, her head cocked to the side, her dark, smooth hair long enough to move with her.

“You’re beautiful,” I say.

She purses her lips, narrowing her eyes at me. “That’s my line.”

I bow dramatically, outreaching an arm with attempted elegance, as much as an oaf can have. Hikari laughs and plays along, allowing me a kiss to her knuckles.

“In whatever form you grace me, my Hamlet, you never fail to infatuate my heart.”

“So poetic tonight, Yorick,” she kids. “This isn’t you saying goodbye, is it?”

She’s joking. Teasing me. But the nervous end to that question isn’t helped by the silence that follows. Hikari looks at the box, then back at me, waiting expectantly for me to say something else, to give her the denial she wants to hear.

You wouldn’t be able to tell from the smile I wear for her, but even as I admire her words, her touch, her everything, every day, there is a reason I am trying to memorize them.

“You’ve healed, my Hamlet,” I say, my voice gone faint. “You’re ready to leave me now.”

“Hey.” Hikari puts the bag down, walking to me with concern knit on her brow. “I’ll come visit you. Every day. You know I will. Until you get better, I’ll be here–”

“Do you remember that night at the shore?” I ask. “I said I had something to tell you about myself.”

Hikari blinks, after a moment, nodding with a broken rhythm, like she’s anxious for what will follow.

I grasp both her hands, trying to work up the courage to finally explain. “Ha–have you ever noticed that I am not quite the same as everyone else? That I have no parents or family to speak of or even a room of my own.”

Hikari looks confused. Though I’ve never told anyone but Sam, he wore the same expression. It’s like trying to force someone to question gravity. Their feet are on the ground and so it’s so difficult for them to look twice at something that feels so simple.

Hikari swallows, shaking her head. “You’re–you’re just–”

“I’m not sick,” I say. “I’m cursed in a sense, but it isn’t a curse you can break.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve called me strange since you first saw me, remember?”

“Yeah,” Hikari says, stepping closer, nostalgia on her teeth. She runs her thumbs over my knuckles. “You’re my familiar stranger.”

“I’m familiar because we’ve met before, my love,” I say. “We met in a past life when you had the same yellow flares in your eyes and the same soul to pair it.”

“Sam, what are you saying?”

Hikari’s hair was once yellow. Not golden or flaxen, yellow. Like dandelions and lemons. The color crowded the darkness of her roots, framing her face with big, round glasses perched on her nose.

Sam’s eyes were once yellow, bright when he was happy, even brighter when he was sad. His voice was young and high, yet comfortable no matter the listener. He held himself like a character, a hero in a novel, a knight without a self-conscious bone in his body.

And together, across different planes of time, they are the reasons I am here.

“What if I told you a part of this place came to life?” I say. “What if its soul wanted to know why the strangers it cared for slipped through its fingers? What if it was so desperate for answers, that it created a body and decided to walk amongst the living in order to find them?”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying–”

“Everything has a soul, Hikari, even those without a name. And I never had a name until someone gave me theirs.”

“A part of this place…” Hikari frowns in her thinking, connecting lines she never saw could intersect before now. It only starts to make sense when she remembers that no one has ever described me. No one has ever claimed to see me in any way other than myself. No one has ever questioned me.

“Sam,” Hikari’s eyes go wide, pinned on mine as gravity comes undone. “You’re the hospital’s soul?”

I shake my head. “What you see as a hospital is this building and the people within it. I am more than that, I think. I am the soul of an unfulfilled wish. I am what arises to keep people afloat when it seems so comfortable to sink.”

I am not a woman or a man, a boy or a girl, a child or an adult. I am not of any race or origin. I am not fat or thin or tall or short or anything in between. Yet, at once, I am all those things. I am whatever you need me to be. Whatever face you give to the shadow whose name is hope.

“I was born in the middle of a war when there was more suffering than sense,” I tell her, remembering when this body was of conditional existence, and my true frame was inanimate.