I Fell in Love with Hope(36)

Hikari, Hikari, Hikari.

She can’t hear me. She can’t feel the blanket I move over her wrist or my fingertips slipping over the material. Beneath the blanket, her joints lead to her wrist like a spider web, our watch taking shape like a tiny bridge. I close my touch around them.

I am not touching her. There is still a barrier. She is not real.

Hikari, I say, not enough courage to voice it out loud. I wish we met anywhere else in the world. I wish I were not me. I wish I could touch you and be with you and treat you as you deserve. I wish, more than anything, that I were brave enough to love you again.





Nights till the escape: 1





Hikari wakes in the early hours of the morning. It’s still dark out, our escape not due for a few hours. She and I walk back inside and find a stretcher in an unoccupied hall, above it, solemn windows, black and reflective.

I tell her that sometimes stretchers are left scattered about and reorganized come morning. She caresses the straps and cushioned edges like she feels sorry for all lonesome carriers of grim cargo. Then, she tells me to sit and wait for her.

I do.

She returns, running with our copy of Hamlet.

“Let’s finish it,” she says.

“Now?” I ask.

“Now.”

___





“What happened? I don’t–” Confusion plagues me. I hold in my hands what people call a masterpiece, absolutely dumbfounded. “What is it even supposed to mean?”

I hold up the last few pages for Hikari to see. She sits cross-legged, fidgeting with the stretcher’s straps, amused by my reactions.

“It means a lot of things,” she says. “Mostly, I think it’s about an annoying narcissist who’s obsessed with death till it actually knocks on his door, but–”

“He-he lost everything in the end, and–and he did die.”

“That’s why it’s a tragedy.” No. I refuse. That is a horrid ending. “Sam, are you pouting?”

“I don’t like it,” I say, frowning, flipping through to make sure there isn’t another act we missed. I fail, shutting the book with fury. “And on top of it all, it’s violent.” At least Wuthering Heights had good qualities to compensate for that particular flaw.

“You don’t like violence either, I take it?”

“No. And why does Hamlet not like Yorick’s skull in the end?” I scowl at her like it’s her fault.

“Oh my god,” Hikari puts a hand to her mouth. “You’re offended.”

“Don’t laugh at me. This is serious. You don’t like me in the end, and you die because of a stupid vengeful plot that I told you from the begining wouldn’t work.”

“I’m sorry, next time, I’ll be a far less impulsive and self-obsessed character. How about Romeo?”

“Ophelia would’ve never treated my skull this way. Next book, I want a happy ending, and you have to like me.”

“Everyone likes you, Sam. A lot of people better than Hamlet.”

There it is again. She doesn’t think I catch her turning the other cheek to compliments. She doesn’t think I notice her interruptions, our moments cut in half by her lip chewing and pulling away. She doesn’t think I care that she’s in pain or that she cuts herself, and she doesn’t think she’s made me happier than I’ve been in a long time.

Suns can’t see their own light.

I put the book down and stand up off the stretcher. Facing her directly, I shove the distance aside and press my hands down on either side of her legs. I become her field of vision, all she can see.

“You’re not Hamlet,” I bite. “You’re my Hamlet.”

She looks me up and down and thinks I’m kidding.

“I mean it.” My voice echoes. “He’s not like you. He wouldn’t get up early just so Sony would have someone to wake up to. He wouldn’t make Neo laugh. He wouldn’t listen to C’s monologues about music. He wouldn’t believe in artists, draw endless universes or raise little plants. He’s not like you.”

Under my voice, Hikari’s face blanks. The shape of her hand beneath that blanket engrains itself into my wanting. I want to touch her again. For real this time. I want to draw to the surface of the water and breathe again if it means I can breathe her. Reality be damned.

“I never feel anything,” I whisper. “But every time I remember how little you think of yourself, I feel angry. I feel like banishing anyone and everyone who ever made you believe you deserve to be alone. Because that kind of pain, it– it can ruin people, it can make them lose faith in everything, just like Hamlet did, but you? You look at me more than anyone ever has, and no one ever looks twice at me. I’m a skull in a graveyard. I’m empty.”

Hikari’s breath shakes in her mouth as she leans forward. “You’re not empty, Sam.”

“I am.” That is an undeniable truth, not a stale one, “yet somehow you find a way to see something in me in a way no one ever has.”

“Sam.”

“Yes?”

I lean to meet her on the very edge of this verging distance we are but a moment away from obliterating. And then she asks, “Can I kiss you?”