I Fell in Love with Hope(114)

“I cared for people, and people died. But it took a long time to understand that even if I am cursed to remember people longer than I had a chance to know them, I was blessed with meeting a lot of people I wouldn’t have had the chance to know.”

Hikari presses her hand to her mouth, in disbelief, in shock, in sadness, in all things I mirror now.

“Hikari” I try to coax her back to me. “If I wasn’t cursed, I never would’ve met you.”

She shakes her head, trembling. “You aren’t real.”

“I am.”

I am as real as any person you can see and touch and hear. I am simply different, younger yet older at the same time, stronger and weaker, an illusion, an unnatural entity who transcended its purposes and chose to crawl into the pages of the story.

I shed the same single tear Hikari cries. “I’m just not real in the way you need me to be.”

“But–but you can leave this place,” she says, clinging to my existence as she knows it, not because it breaks some kind of narrative, but because she is slowly creeping towards the same realization I did when I put her life ahead of my own. “You escaped with us, you–”

“I can stretch as far as the hospital’s influence goes,” I tell her. “but I can only stretch so far until I must come home.”

“Sam.” Her voice thins, pinched to a whimper.

What I give her tonight isn’t just the truth of who I am. It is the truth of our relative impossibility. I clung to it with Sam as I clung to it with her. This dream of becoming one being together forever.

I knew that there would come a day of no tomorrows.

I knew, and I cry anyway.

“I love you,” Hikari says, my hands clutched in hers like a plea of their own. “I don’t want to live without you.”

I pull her into me again, the weight of her body, the ridge of her bones, and the plush of her flesh all burned into my memory. Forever is an impossible dream, but it’s what makes you hold on this way. It’s the hope of it that binds you to the other person with memories of all extraordinary and all mundane moments you spent together.

“You will have so many loves, Hikari,” I whisper. “You will have a life for far more than me.”

I see her with the friends she’s made, going to a beach and letting the sea soak her sundress. Her laughter rings as she watches a movie with her parents, drawing her favorite characters on random surfaces. She will find boys and girls who excite her, who make her stomach rise with butterflies, and who treat her as if she is the most precious thing in the world because she is. She will have a family of her own choosing. She will see the world and read and write for it, listening to our old favorite songs with tangled earbuds.

She will think of me on the lonely days grazing her fingers over a spine with Shakespeare’s name. She will ask me to haunt her, and I will in memory and in vision. She will have hard days she doesn’t feel like standing back up, but she will anyhow. She will take long car rides with rock music blasting through open windows as the breeze flirts with her hair.

I crush her to me, shuddering against the heat of her skin.

She will have a life for far more than me. “And I am so glad that you held on for it.”

“What about you?” Hikari cries. “What about your life?”

The wind passes between us, reminding us of its existence. It travels from the first floor all the way up to here where we touch the sky. Through its carry, I feel every person in the hospital’s walls, and I remember that even if I will never be alone, “You know that you’re the only life I ever needed.”

Hikari’s eyes well, the yellow glossing like suns reflecting the moon. She touches the tattoo on my chest.

“If what you say is true, then no matter how many lives I lead, you’ll lose me every time.”

“Yes,” I say, crying with her, moving aside her collar to catch the arrowhead edges of her half sun. “But it also means that I will always find you first.”

Two lonely souls across different boundaries sharing a single universe cannot be kept apart by anything. They cannot be stolen from each other. And as long as I am here, I will never break my promise again.

“All my tomorrows are yours, Hikari,” I say, our noses brushing, the salt of our goodbye meeting in a stream.

Her breath hitches against my lips. Tucking her hair behind her ears, I kiss her, every kiss we’ve ever shared held in it. I’ve had my life with her, and I could not be more grateful for the time we were given. It stands behind me, ready to lead my body away as the wish that Hikari and I could become one comes apart at the seams.

“Will you come back, my love?” I ask. “When you’ve lived this life and had your loves, and you’re ready, will you come back to me one last time?”

I slip a torn piece of paper into her hand, stolen stationery. I bared my heart on the night we first kissed in the old cardiology wing. On it, another dream sits, ready for the taking, another promise. Hikari reads the words as her tears trickle onto their page. One last time, she graces me with her contagious smile, and even if it is bittersweet, it will be that smile I cling to when she is gone.

“Yes,” Hikari breathes. Her palms slip from my face till all they hold is the shape of wind. “I’ll come back to you.”

The body I created decades ago fades till it is nothing but an idea resting in peace. I spread through my greater home, my soul tethered to the place it was born in.