I should’ve never let them.
I sprint through the front doors and onto the gray street layered by mist. Snow falls, not a single car on the road or person on the sidewalk disturbing its blanket, all but one who leaves a path of footprints in her wake.
I’m out of breath, running as I did all those years ago, yelling a different name with the same fervor.
Hikari looks out at the rushing river, her body gravitating towards it. Reddened fingertips slip atop the metal railing, her breath made of steam. In nothing but a hospital gown and a coat falling from her shoulders, her chin upturns to the sky.
The darkness creeps up behind her. It wraps its arms around her waist and lays its chin on her shoulder. Then, it pushes ever so slowly till her head hangs from her shoulders, and in her mind, there is nothing left to do but let her body fall to the water’s whims.
“Hikari!” I yell so hard that my throat hurts. The line I swore to never breach, the bridge I swore to never cross–I push past them. I climb the stone steps, and I run, and I don’t stop.
Hikari blinks. With frailness, she looks away from the river, and when her eyes find me, the shadow at her back clenches its fists.
I’m almost there, and once I have her, I won’t let go. I won’t let the shadow whisper that it is better to end her life than to endure the minute painful part of it. I won’t let it throw her to the cold and laugh as her corpse cascades downriver.
“Hikari!”
A car’s headlights breach the fog turning onto the bridge’s road.
“Sam?” Hikari’s voice travels, reaching for me as mine reaches for her. She turns away from the edge, towards me, like a magnet that has no choice in its direction. She takes one step after the other, her bare legs red and her bare feet raw. She uses the railing as a crutch, but the moment she pushes off of it, she trips off the curb.
A honk blares, and the car swerves, its wheels screeching against the ice. Hikari’s eyes shut, her arm shielding them from the light. The tail end of the car veers off course, and Hikari braces. The shadow outreaches a hand, but it only knows how to scar, how to watch, how to push.
Maybe I am a shadow too, but I know what it’s like to fall.
I grab Hikari by the arm and pull her body onto the sidewalk, sending us both tumbling back on the pavement. Hikari lands on top of me, then beneath me. I shield her, my hand on the top of her head.
When I look back at the road, the car has already gone, driving out beyond the fog, not even its tail lights left to be seen.
Hikari is breathless, the panic in her veins returning to something more familiar. All of a sudden, as she sees my face hovering over hers, everything I mean and everything I am comes back to haunt her. She struggles, tears welling in her eyes at the sight of me.
Up close, she sees her friends sick, herself sick, her friends dying, herself dying. She shuts them tight, shaking her head against the concrete, pushing at my chest.
“Hikari–”
“No, no–” she whimpers, as if I am poisonous, as if I have cursed her. I keep her down, because I know if I let her stand, she will walk into the fog, across the bridge, down the river, and into the dark.
“Hikari, please–”
“No, I can’t– I can’t–” She fights me, the scars on her arms throbbing, the one on her neck raw from the cold. The shadow is here, standing over us and whether its name is suicide, self-harm, fear, depression, abuse, or hate, it will not take her hand. Not this time.
“Hikari, it will end!” I yell, pinning down her arms. She stills, her chest pulsing. I hold on to her wrists, our weight making indents in the snow. Hikari’s lower lip trembles, her skin cold beneath my palms. It heats as emotions find her face again, as the shadow that looms over her takes a step back.
“It will end,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Everything dies and everything ends, even your pain. Don’t die for it, my Hamlet. Don’t give it the satisfaction. I promise you it will end.”
“Even if it does–” Hikari stutters, her breaths broken and wet. “Even if it does, I don’t want to live for what comes after.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I can’t. I’m always going to be sick, Sam. For the rest of my life. I’m not strong enough.”
“Then I’ll give you my strength,” I tell her. She cries for the night we lied exactly like this. When waves rather than a river were our background and stars rather than snow was our light.
“I know you miss them,” I say, wiping her tears with my thumb and cupping her face. “I know it feels like they were ripped from us by the roots and I know it hurts, but this torture you feel, this intense feeling that it will never get better, it will end.”
I smile a sad smile that I know she will not catch, but that I know she will understand.
“One day,” I whisper, “You’ll look back on your time here, and you will cry, but you’ll smile too. You’ll smile thinking of Sony’s snorty laugh and Coeur’s tangents about music, and Neo’s rare hugs. You’ll remember our nights dancing and kissing with Shakespeare and every moment in between. You’ll survive and feel your scars and remember that even if it was the hardest thing imaginable, you lived through it. You lived through it, and you met three beautiful people, and you loved them as long, and as much as you could.”
“Sam,” she cries.
“Hikari.” I press my forehead to hers as I did the night the shadows ripped out her hair and her dreams. When I part from her, she looks at me with the same pleading I once did to her in another life.
“Why do people have to die?” she asks and all of her hurt escapes in those few words.
There is no cure for grief. It is the most tangible yet intangible of pains because only one thing can make it livable. Forgetting is not an essential part of it.
Time is.
Time stands beside me now, its own shadow. My enemy that has also been my companion. It bends down and casts a gentle palm over the thin layer of Hikari’s hair. It does not promise a future, but it promises a past that cannot be stolen. It promises that it will go on for her.
“I don’t know,” I say, because it is the only truth I have. “We will look for a reason till even the sun and moon are gone because we believe that an answer will balance the tragedy.” Hikari stares up at me with desperation like glimmers in her tears. I wipe them away as mine fall with hers.
“There is no reason for tragedy,” I say. “One day, the universe will collapse, death will have no one left to claim, disease will have no one to infect, and time will come to an end, but even then, it will not have been for nothing. Because if we chose to only love what we wouldn’t lose, then we would never love at all.”
I take her face in both my hands and even if it hurts, I remember each and every moment I held her this way. I remember every moment I held Sam too.
“Love is not a choice,” I say, smiling with all the gratitude in the world that I am the pitiful creature she chose. “And even if it were, I would choose you every time.”
“Sam.”
“Hikari.”
Every memory I locked away on this bridge breaks from its confines. They fly from their glass caskets and I let them all live within me as they deserve to. The snow continues in a haze around them. Hikari’s arms wrap around me, her head tucked to my chest to shield her from the brewing storm until she finally lets the snowflakes kiss her face.
“The stars are falling,” she whispers.
“My love,” I cry. “They already fell.”
The thing about hope is that it is a fearful reaction. We are hopeful because we are afraid. Because we think on some level we are owed. But this story was never about the hope that arises in catastrophic moments. That hope is passive, not a being, but a state of being.
There is another kind of hope. The kind that is eternal, a scenery you don’t quite notice until you glance a second time. It is not a wish, it is an appreciation, a grateful desire for life as it is.
Everything has a soul. Even books, broken things, and hope have a soul.
Hope chased Despair down the street that day. It caught her by the waist, and it saved her just as she had saved it from the unbearable brightness of their own making. After all, suns cannot see their own light.
So Hope and Despair held each other close until the shadows were gone.
