I Fell in Love with Hope(59)

I dig through the box, a pair of scissors at the bottom. I pick them up, all else blurred and muffled. Without method or rhythm or pattern, I start to cut away at my hair. I fist tufts of it, tearing and sliding the blades across like clearing grass from a field.

My friends panic. They all start to yell, grabbing at the scissors, then at my hands, my arms. I fight to get them back. Neo takes the scissors and throws them across the hall. Sony and C both push me to my knees, their terrified voices in my ear, telling me to calm down, to sit, to stop.

I don’t really hear them. I hear a familiar liquid, viscus and hot, trailing down my forehead.

Pain and I had a neat arrangement. As long as I promised never to feel anything else, it stayed at bay. I broke the contract when I sealed my lips to Hikari’s. I broke it when she pulled me from the road. Now it stings and ravages as it pleases.

“Sam.” I flinch. Not away from the voice. Towards it.

Hikari stands over me. She kneels slowly til she’s close enough to reach out and gather a drop of blood from the hook of my brow.

“You hurt yourself,” she says.

I stare in wonder as I did the first time she walked into my life. Her yellow sings, still alive. The shadow recedes as she looks with worry at the red on her fingers that belongs to me.

“This body never felt like mine anyway.”

Our eyes meet. Hikari’s begin to well. She witnesses the carnage wrapped in my torn shirt and her hair still falling.

“I’m scared, Yorick,” she cries. I take her in my arms. Her weight settles against my chest.

“It’s okay. You’re okay,” I whisper. “Fear is just a large shadow with a little spine. I won’t let it take you.”

There are no string lights or stars or grand gestures to be had. Hikari’s illness has not relinquished, but she did not become it. I form a shield around her body pulsing with cries as she lets herself feel the pain of it all.

“I don’t want to die,” she sobs. “I don’t want to be alone.”

I keep her close, the distance squandered to nothing. I don’t look away. I pull her from the road where she would’ve been swallowed by greedy souls. I give her back that hope she gave me.

“You’re not alone, Hikari,” I say. Sony hugs her round the back, interlacing her hand with mine. C pets what is left of her hair, him and Neo wrapping around us. “You’re not alone…”

She is a part of our story now.

I have stolen her.

She is real.

Flesh and full and fallen and I will love her.

Even if in the end, on the very last page, I will lose her too.





the whale





BEFORE


Sam was born with a body unfit for the outside world. They say he was pulled from the womb with crumbling bones, blood oozing from his eyes, nose, and mouth, skin so thin it slipped from his flesh, wailing ear splitting cries, and cursing all those who touched him.

Those stories aren’t true. They’re tales children who Sam isn’t allowed to play with make up. They say he is separated from them, because he’s dangerous, a beast, that he’ll swallow them whole.

Disease likes to repulse, both in mind and body, tying fear’s nooses. Those children snicker into the back of their hands and spread their story. Like a disease of its own, it takes hold to whoever will listen.

In reality, Sam is just a boy. He was born naked and crying his lungs out like all babies. His body was a bit small, his head was a bit large, but he was nothing monstrous, nothing like what some made him out to be.

His mother only held him once. She cared about him, I think, however much you can care for someone you don’t want to know. The doctors told her he would need constant care, medication, therapies, and that he may not grow up to be like other children. She spent the night on the edge of the cot, blood she refused to have cleaned between her legs. Sitting there, she pulled the hem of her dress over the red. She looked into the crib where her baby laid wheezing. Her knuckles caressed his cheek and her lips laid a kiss to his forehead long enough for a goodbye. She left before the sun rose and no one ever saw her again.

By his second day of life, Sam was alone.

The reason he can’t play with the other children is simple. It is the same reason he can’t interact with other patients except through a glass partition. It is why all who come into his room must wear masks and gloves.

Sam’s body can’t protect itself. It has no shields. A cold that would pass in a week could kill him in a day.

The hospital is all he knows. It is all he can feel without something in the way.

Sometimes, I gaze over while we play with his potted plants and wonder if he’d rather be elsewhere. Sam’s fairy tales take place in magical places, places far less clinical and repetitive. I ask him, “Sam, do you want a castle? Do you want enchanted forests and high seas like in your stories?”

Sam hums at my question, adjusting the pots on his window sill.

“We already live in a castle,” he says. “The forests are for our adventures.” The adventures he wants to have with me. “And we don’t need a sea. The sea is scary. I read a book about it. The sea has a giant whale.”

“A giant whale?”

“A giant whale.” He hops to my level. “In the book, it ate a whole boat and all the sailors too.”