I Fell in Love with Hope(54)

The sun stretches behind the clouds, a single streak of light pinched across the drizzles. It kisses Sony’s hair, C’s skin, and half of Neo’s face. It plays with warmth, a crease in the rain, a strangely familiar permission to finally open the gates.

“I was so alone,” I whisper. I see him there again, just over Neo’s shoulder. He’s exploring, snickering, interlacing our hands, his smile everlasting.

“I wasn’t supposed to be alive. I was just the background of a play wherein people suffered.” My breath hitches, the recollections like acid in my veins. Blood and screaming and death crawl through them, so dense they may as well be solid.

“I never understood why people had to die, and I thought that maybe he held the answer.” A little boy who always said that things would be okay. A little boy who saw the good in everyone and everything. A little boy who lied to me.

“He taught me how to live even though I thought I wasn’t meant to. He taught me about the world. He taught me how to dream.”

Those memories flow with ease. They’re soft in nature with hints of faraway noise. His shrieky laughter in the distance, his shy kiss on my cheek, the flushed skin on his face.

It’s always like that. The pain-ridden seconds are eternal. The year’s worth of joy are fleeting. Another one of Time’s tricks.

“He killed himself in a snowstorm.”

C and Sonys’ faces fall. Neo doesn’t react. The little boy behind them recedes into the shadows that stole him from me.

“It’s not like people say it is,” I say, wiping my face. “When he died, he didn’t take a piece of me with him. He left a piece of himself behind. A hollowness. A reminder that I could never let myself love again without pain to follow. So after the storm passed, it was easier to just pretend it never snowed at all. I stopped asking questions. I stopped looking for reasons. I stopped caring about everyone. And somewhere along the line, I stopped trying to exist too.” Because all the corpses of my stars couldn’t compare to the one that faded into the dark.

“But it’s okay,” I admit. I smile up at my friends as if it will make any part of our story sound less despairing. “The narrator isn’t supposed to sneak into the words and dream with the protagonists. Not living meant not suffering. Not wanting meant I had nothing to lose.”

With the memories I buried that Hikari arose, I see Neo three years ago. He flirts with the line between living and dying, yet he’s grown. His face is that of a boy becoming a man. Sony is a woman. C, despite his heart, grows with them. For all the times I looked away from their dying, I forgot to notice that they were still alive. They are still alive.

“But I care about you,” I say, the only rain left streaming down my cheeks. The sky turns back to a measly gray, no sun to shine through it. “I want to save you. I want you to be happy.”

The truth of my existence settles.

Stale and as hard to accept as it always has been.

“But I couldn’t save him.” I sob, a noiseless, pathetic sound. “I can’t save anyone.”

“Sammy.” Sony moves past Neo. She squeezes me tight, her breathing shallow. My cries pulse through my empty body. Cries I held in for the years since that blizzard.

Neo stands up and turns around. His feet clap gently against the water. They stop on the outskirts of a puddle, Hikari’s broken watch at the center. Wet strands make a curtain as he looks down at it. Neo casts it back, making a noise that almost sounds like a scoff. A snort of derision. Something meant to mock me.

“You know Sam, I never understood you,” he says. He looks back at me over his shoulder, blank and impenetrable. “I mean, I should’ve known. You were strange from the beginning. You never had parents or family come around. I’ve never even seen you leave the hospital for more than an hour.” He walks back to me, slower, but harder, the water cast aside in ripples.

“Neo, don’t be cruel,” Sony says, but he ignores her.

“You don’t even have a personality,” he bites. “You’re as stupid as a rock and as barren as a wall.”

“Neo!” C yells at him, but Neo doesn’t look away from me.

He stares me down like I disgust him. “All there is to you is this insatiable curiosity that always gets you in trouble and some cowardice to go with it.” He’s so close he may as well be spitting in my face. Brutality blooms in his words. He’s right. I know he’s right. I shut my eyes and bury myself in the cocoon of my elbows.

But then I hear Neo’s shoes skid against the concrete. His knees touch the ground. His hands reach from my jaw into my hair, forcing me to look at him. “And you’re the most caring person I’ve ever met.”

At a glance, Neo seems the type not to care because it is easy, but if you read him long enough, you eventually find those poems italicized in his heart. For all the harshness he spouts, there is a line soft and resounding at the end.

“You already saved me, you idiot,” he says. “You saved all of us.”

I stare with a loose jaw and wide eyes.

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re going to die,” Neo says, “So what? Everyone dies, and everything ends. Sometimes endings are abrupt. They hit you in the face and it’s too soon and it’s unfair, but that doesn’t matter. The last page doesn’t define the book. Time will cease, Disease will fester, and Death will die. We promised we would kill those bastards, remember? So get over yourself. Get over this fear you have of existing and stop walking behind us. You’re not just our narrator, you’re a part of our story. You’re my friend,” he says, furious, as if my greatest sin was believing that I am a skull and not a soul.