I Fell in Love with Hope(115)

The parting hurts. It feels like a part of me is severing as I bleed out onto the stone, and when Hikari leaves, I know she will cry for me as I cry for her.

But she knows.

She knows that when she returns decades from now, I will hold her in my arms and keep her close as the shadows close in and death takes her gently into another realm. And if time is willing, it will give her and me one more than just goodbye.

“I promise.”





hikari




Two centuries ago, a hospital was born. Men built it of stone, lumber, and faith that could move mountains. Within it, something came to life past the realm of understanding. A creature of sorts, a soul made of the dreams the people who built the hospital held onto. That soul gave me this story, and now I pass it onto you.

The hospital’s infancy was long. It was difficult to care for, to upkeep. As it grew and evolved, it became a place everyone knew. It became a place people came to be saved.

Mine workers and tailors with cuts and broken fingers arrived, patched up within an hour’s time. They left, sore, but grateful. Though it was but a bit of space with no human body of its own, that soul within the hospital saw joy in their expressions as they waved goodbye. Others came in need of help. Some were too withered to survive, so that lonely soul held their hands till their breathing ceased. It always made the hospital sad having to say goodbye that way.

Soon, though, it met children. Children were the most beautiful of them all. They were loud, colorful, and attracted to all things they did not know. Children, it learned, suffered from curiosity just as it did. They laughed at anything and ran across its halls to play, pure and kind and hopeful to the bone.

It loved them all, that creature. It loved the babies whose fists curled around fingers and cooed in their parents’ arms under its roof. It loved their sleepy breaths, jaws slack, dreams amok in their wild, untamed minds.

Time went on. Children grew. They became people. And if the soul was lucky, they lived long, happy lives and returned to it with babies of their own.

Of course, that luck had to run out.

Disease never came before or after. Disease was a staple of forever, but disease was undoubtedly in a coup with violence. Disease took the children with its bare hands. Disease murdered babies in their cribs before they’d had a chance to catch light in their eyes. It murdered miners, tailors, nurses, and doctors too.

They were all taken away, given to Death; a whale with a wide open maw, never satisfied. It swallowed the hospital’s people. Its children. Its babies. And all it could do was watch as the years went by under Time’s control.

The older that hospital grew, the more tears stained its floors. Mothers’ tears, fathers’ tears, lovers’ tears. It became a place of last resort. A place where people come to lose those they love. Their bodies were given to the ground and their memories to grief.

It remembered every suffering stranger, but decades went by. Then a century. There came so much pain that it forced itself to forget. It tried not to feel at all. No pain, no warmth, no joy. Only morbid curiosity forever searching for a reason to all that carnage.

It was that way till a child, unlike the rest, emerged.

He was an eternal being told by God, but he was also just a boy. A lonely boy who reached for hope’s hand when it was lonely too and as they found solace in each other, that soul, that creature, gave itself a means of being with him.

No matter how many died, no matter how many lives it couldn’t save, it had Sam. It created a body made of flesh and bone. It made itself tangible, real, becoming a part of the world it’d spent so long watching.

Sam was its first love. In one way or another, all first loves are lost.

Sometimes death is more merciful than life, and he chose its mercy over mine, it said.

Although it didn’t just lose him. It lost everything attributed to him. Everything they shared. So, it cried atop the pain of memories buried in snow. It fell in love with Sam because it thought they’d be together forever.

Forever is an illusion for mortal things, but time felt sorry for me, it said. Time patched up my wounds, dried my tears, and did the best it could simply by passing.

Time let it forget, but that soul kept Sam’s name. It kept its curious body. It walked through its greater frame, the one made of wood and stone, and it searched for answers in those who came through its doors. It chose not to feel as it chose not to suffer, and it chose not to want as it chose not to lose.

It never let love in again.

Of course, you can’t control that. Whether you’re a human, a book, a cat, or hope itself, love is not a choice.

It was just like falling.

It fell in love with Resilience.

Resilience is tough, skinned with taut language made of iron. He was forged by hate, dented, but never broken. Beneath the impenetrable, fragile bones built his body. He was small, not broad as a shield should be. None of that mattered though. Resilience is in the mind. He was made of poetry and broken things. Of stubbornness and dry humor. Of memories written, not as proof of survival, but as proof that he lived.

It fell in love with Kindness.

Kindness was always meant for a brittle, bleeding heart. Perhaps not very bright, nor very ambitious, kindness grew, never decorative, but always present. He knew, carrying resilience in his arms, hugging passion around the belly, and caressing hope’s missing color that he was needed. The melodies he shared drew smiles greater than artists ever could.