I Fell in Love with Hope(97)

I wonder if Neo’s father will ever read the rest of his son’s letter. Although as Neo stares upward to heaven with peace, I know that it doesn’t matter.

—

Dad,

Two weeks after you raped my mother, I came down with an infection. You said it was nothing, remember? A symptom of my tantrum and my refusal to eat. Then, a week after that, I was hospitalized. My disease is so rare for boys my age that it took them a year to get the diagnosis right.

I didn’t think that was funny, but it made me laugh when the doctors asked if I played sports. With the bruises I had, I must’ve. I knew CPS would take me if I said anything so I just told them I roughhoused with my friends and I was clumsy and they believed it.

Either way, I was overjoyed.

A lifelong illness, they said.

I was so happy, dad. I don’t think I’d ever been happier.

For the last three years, I’ve been gifted an escape. A place you can’t hurt me past a little bruise here and there. A place I am free of your control.

I read and write so much here, it’s euphoric. I made friends. Strange, beautiful, funny, kind friends that you have no claim to. Friends who taught me what it feels like to belong. To be happy and to be appreciated.

I realize now, you were as happy to have a son as I was to be sick.

I just wasn’t the son you wanted.

You molded me into an image of someone I am not and if I diverted by an inch, you felt threatened. It was never me you were attached to, nor your authority. It was that image. That idea. That person that doesn’t actually exist.

That’s why I don’t blame you, dad.

But my last memories will not be yours.

They will be of my mom and the nights we healed each other. The nights she read to me and encouraged me to be who I want to be.

They will be of a beautiful, loud girl I stole clothes and a cat from–Of a witty girl with optimism to reach the stars and jokes that made my belly shake–Of a strange friend who coaxed my nightmares away and never once left my side–Of a boy with more heart than most. My last memory will be of his lips, his joy, his beauty, his optimism, and his everlasting kindness.

This letter is not for you dad, it is for me.

Because I have nothing to be sorry for. I do not need to be forgiven for who I choose to be and even less for who I choose to love.

So, thank you, Sony, Hikari, Sam…

Thank you, Coeur…

For teaching me to love myself.





great expectations





I don’t remember waking up or falling asleep. I phase into another world, another shape. It’s as if I spaced out, focused on a particular grain of sand or a low-hanging cloud, and all of a sudden remembered where I am.

Wildflowers and tall grasses sprawl across the land, not a speck of concrete jungle encroaching upon the field. Birds sing, small animals scavenge, and trees frame the pasture. The sky meets mountains at the edge of the canvas, and all else are ablutions of nature.

“Oh, good.” The wind accompanies a voice. I turn around to an ocean’s scent and umbre blues foaming at a shoreline. “You’re awake.”

Sitting next to me, staring at a different scenery, a boy cups a tiny potted plant with the sleeves of a stolen sweatshirt.

“Is this a dream?” I ask.

He nods.

“I’ve never been in someone’s dream before.”

“I don’t think it’s my dream,” he says. “I think it’s yours too. Like two paintings intersecting past their frames.”

I stare back at the field, the life and the light within it, then I turn back to his endless sea, its tart scent, and its clouds brewing in the far distance.

“I want to bring Coeur here,” he says. “It’s secluded and, other than the waves, completely silent.” He points to the undisturbed waters and dark sand. I look instead at his face as he speaks. His mouth parts slightly, the corners lifting at the thought of C walking along the stones with him in hand.

“He’d adore the beaches in France too,” he says. “He’s never been there, I know, but his parents have, obviously, so they could take us. People can be spacey in Europe, just like him. There’s this library in Paris I want to show him. He’d take pictures of it like a tourist.” A bit of amusement plays in his tone. He fidgets with the succulent, placing it delicately between us as if it contains a soul with which to watch the tide drawing in.

“Neo,” I say, breaking him out of his daydreams. “Where are we?”

He hugs his knees to his chest, and thinks for a moment.

“My dad used to bring me here when I was little,” he says. “It was another world. A place I wrote and my mom read on towels while he skipped stones.”

False figures made of shadow and wind mingle with his memory. Flashes of a pencil’s stroke and a flat-edged rock clapping against the waves. A father playfully lifts his son up in the air for play as his mother watches. The memory fades back into his mind, and reality inclines to pull us from it.

“Where are we really?” I ask.

He bites his lip, dragging a finger across blades of grass gently fading into stones.

“Child Protective Services came to see me a few hours ago,” he says. “Coeur’s parents offered to take me in whatever happens. My doctors haven’t discharged me, though, cause, well–” He tries to be lighthearted, for my sake, but it comes out dry, an ironic detail that completes a dark picture “–cause I’m laying with a feeding tube in my stomach while you and Hikari sleep at my bedside.”