It takes time.
But over the course of winter’s coldest months, Hikari begins to heal. Her body, and thanks to time’s grace, her mind too.
Her parents agreed to go to therapy with her, a recommendation from her doctors. They learn to listen as Hikari learns to communicate. I see her mom hugging her more often, and reading with her. Her father looks at her drawings and talks to her about them. Their relationships, however wounded, mend with every subtle, contagious smile.
Every day, when the broken clock above the door should strike noon, Hikari takes me by the hand, her notebook in the other, and together we make our way to the library, the gardens, all of our places. She begins to meet other patients close to her age. At first, Hikari is reserved, afraid, as she was in the past. But with me beside her, she regains her confidence. Those that appreciate Hikari’s creativity, brazenness, and little strokes of mischief become friendly with her. After a few weeks of encouragement, every chance she gets, Hikari gifts a little bit of her time, a little bit of her kindness, and a little bit of herself to someone new. She learns, as she did with our three thieves, that there are people who understand her, and more than that, people who will try even if they don’t.
And her and I?
We are her and I.
We go through the Hit List together sometimes, reminding each other of good days as her worst ones begin to better. We steal apples and share them in the night over books. We dance like actors and sing like playwrights to the voices of Shakespeare.
I consider myself the luckiest creature in the world to be graced by her. Hearing the laughter that reddens her cheeks and thins her eyes, feeling her hands mirror and meet mine, and all the little moments. The everything moments.
Hikari has come to terms that there will never be a time she is not haunted by shadows. She will live with her depression and her disease for the rest of her life.
Chronic illnesses are just that. Chronic. Reoccurring. Forever. They are not annoying, occasional pains to get rid of with a pill. They are persistent in their pursuit of your sanity.
Their symptoms accumulate, and their severity fluctuates. They stack up like dominoes falling with random patterns. They can be deadly as they were in Sony and Coeur. They can be deadly in other ways as they were in Neo.
A chronic illness is not difficult to live with because it is endless. It is difficult to live with because it is unpredictable. But like grief, every flare ends, and though the looming threat is constant, you learn to live beside it. A shadow of mixed blessings. It does not heal as wounds do, but it teaches you of your own strength till you can wear it like a battle scar.
Hikari knows that better than anyone.
She will be discharged tomorrow. She will go home with color to her skin and wounds licked clean. Her older features, those full cheeks, and her ever-humored smirk return with every passing day. Her emptiness fills with the support of those around her till she is full enough to stand and walk and touch and be.
The day those yellow flecks in her eyes shine like they did the first day I saw her, a bittersweet relief rushes through me.
“You’re so affectionate,” Hikari says as I sigh into our embrace.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” I ask, her scent filling me. My face settles in the crook of her neck, her hands playing up and down my back.
“At the beginning, you were so afraid to touch me, remember?” she whispers. “You were scared I’d burn you.”
“I was scared you’d burn away into nothing,” I tell her. When I raise my head to meet her gaze, my jaw grazes against the same eclipsing heat that now warms my heart. “I wanted to save you.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Hikari laughs.
“You didn’t need to be saved,” I say, kissing her nose just below the bridge of her glasses. “You just needed to be reminded that you aren’t fighting alone.” I press my lips to her shoulder as the elevator rises.
“In the end,” I whisper into her hair, “You eradicated my loneliness.”
“Because you eradicated mine.”
“With my rude, affectionate arms?”
“With your tomorrows.”
I want to savor this moment. This little blip in time when she is mine, and I am hers, and the rest of the world outside of us may as well not exist.
“Are you alright, my Yorick?” Hikari asks, dragging her fingers tenderly down my face.
“I have something to give you.”
The elevator doors open with a ding. I take Hikari’s hands in mine, walking her up our stale, concrete stairwell.
“Another grand gesture?” she asks.
I glance over my shoulder at her. “Not quite.”
A creak and a gust of wind welcome us to the rooftop, our meeting place, our graveyard, and our ledge. Only it isn’t barren and gray tonight.
Tonight, string lights adorn the walls, a yellow blanket at the center set up like a picnic. Atop it, a familiar cardboard box with memorabilia sits, its crown a little succulent that no longer needs my care.
Hikari marvels at the scene, the light reflected in the crystal of the watch on her wrist. She fidgets with it, smiling as her feet border the blanket.
“Is this a going away party?”
“You hate parties,” I remind her, a pastry bag ruffling as I pick it from behind the cardboard.
“I like food.” She tries to take it from me, but I hold it over my head.
“And grand gestures?”
“Sam,” she whines, laughing as I take a bite of the chocolate, buttery thing she can never get enough of. Rather than scold me or steal away the pastry, she kisses me hard on the mouth, getting a taste for herself.
“Here.” I hand her the bag and it takes all of two bites for the chocolate to stain her face.
“Thank you for all this,” she says as I wipe her bottom lip with my thumb. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to appreciate it the first time.”
The first time, I would’ve handed her a letter under false stars. Tonight, I give her my words under real ones. I think she is happier with that. That makes me happy too. My universal puzzle piece that could fit in any landscape is a natural part of this painting and, at once, the most striking color in it.
“What is it?” she asks, her head cocked to the side, her dark, smooth hair long enough to move with her.
“You’re beautiful,” I say.
She purses her lips, narrowing her eyes at me. “That’s my line.”
I bow dramatically, outreaching an arm with attempted elegance, as much as an oaf can have. Hikari laughs and plays along, allowing me a kiss to her knuckles.
“In whatever form you grace me, my Hamlet, you never fail to infatuate my heart.”
“So poetic tonight, Yorick,” she kids. “This isn’t you saying goodbye, is it?”
She’s joking. Teasing me. But the nervous end to that question isn’t helped by the silence that follows. Hikari looks at the box, then back at me, waiting expectantly for me to say something else, to give her the denial she wants to hear.
You wouldn’t be able to tell from the smile I wear for her, but even as I admire her words, her touch, her everything, every day, there is a reason I am trying to memorize them.
“You’ve healed, my Hamlet,” I say, my voice gone faint. “You’re ready to leave me now.”
“Hey.” Hikari puts the bag down, walking to me with concern knit on her brow. “I’ll come visit you. Every day. You know I will. Until you get better, I’ll be here–”
“Do you remember that night at the shore?” I ask. “I said I had something to tell you about myself.”
Hikari blinks, after a moment, nodding with a broken rhythm, like she’s anxious for what will follow.
I grasp both her hands, trying to work up the courage to finally explain. “Ha–have you ever noticed that I am not quite the same as everyone else? That I have no parents or family to speak of or even a room of my own.”
Hikari looks confused. Though I’ve never told anyone but Sam, he wore the same expression. It’s like trying to force someone to question gravity. Their feet are on the ground and so it’s so difficult for them to look twice at something that feels so simple.
Hikari swallows, shaking her head. “You’re–you’re just–”
“I’m not sick,” I say. “I’m cursed in a sense, but it isn’t a curse you can break.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve called me strange since you first saw me, remember?”
“Yeah,” Hikari says, stepping closer, nostalgia on her teeth. She runs her thumbs over my knuckles. “You’re my familiar stranger.”
“I’m familiar because we’ve met before, my love,” I say. “We met in a past life when you had the same yellow flares in your eyes and the same soul to pair it.”
“Sam, what are you saying?”
Hikari’s hair was once yellow. Not golden or flaxen, yellow. Like dandelions and lemons. The color crowded the darkness of her roots, framing her face with big, round glasses perched on her nose.
Sam’s eyes were once yellow, bright when he was happy, even brighter when he was sad. His voice was young and high, yet comfortable no matter the listener. He held himself like a character, a hero in a novel, a knight without a self-conscious bone in his body.
And together, across different planes of time, they are the reasons I am here.
“What if I told you a part of this place came to life?” I say. “What if its soul wanted to know why the strangers it cared for slipped through its fingers? What if it was so desperate for answers, that it created a body and decided to walk amongst the living in order to find them?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying–”
“Everything has a soul, Hikari, even those without a name. And I never had a name until someone gave me theirs.”
“A part of this place…” Hikari frowns in her thinking, connecting lines she never saw could intersect before now. It only starts to make sense when she remembers that no one has ever described me. No one has ever claimed to see me in any way other than myself. No one has ever questioned me.
“Sam,” Hikari’s eyes go wide, pinned on mine as gravity comes undone. “You’re the hospital’s soul?”
I shake my head. “What you see as a hospital is this building and the people within it. I am more than that, I think. I am the soul of an unfulfilled wish. I am what arises to keep people afloat when it seems so comfortable to sink.”
I am not a woman or a man, a boy or a girl, a child or an adult. I am not of any race or origin. I am not fat or thin or tall or short or anything in between. Yet, at once, I am all those things. I am whatever you need me to be. Whatever face you give to the shadow whose name is hope.
“I was born in the middle of a war when there was more suffering than sense,” I tell her, remembering when this body was of conditional existence, and my true frame was inanimate.
“I cared for people, and people died. But it took a long time to understand that even if I am cursed to remember people longer than I had a chance to know them, I was blessed with meeting a lot of people I wouldn’t have had the chance to know.”
Hikari presses her hand to her mouth, in disbelief, in shock, in sadness, in all things I mirror now.
“Hikari” I try to coax her back to me. “If I wasn’t cursed, I never would’ve met you.”
She shakes her head, trembling. “You aren’t real.”
“I am.”
I am as real as any person you can see and touch and hear. I am simply different, younger yet older at the same time, stronger and weaker, an illusion, an unnatural entity who transcended its purposes and chose to crawl into the pages of the story.
I shed the same single tear Hikari cries. “I’m just not real in the way you need me to be.”
“But–but you can leave this place,” she says, clinging to my existence as she knows it, not because it breaks some kind of narrative, but because she is slowly creeping towards the same realization I did when I put her life ahead of my own. “You escaped with us, you–”
“I can stretch as far as the hospital’s influence goes,” I tell her. “but I can only stretch so far until I must come home.”
“Sam.” Her voice thins, pinched to a whimper.
What I give her tonight isn’t just the truth of who I am. It is the truth of our relative impossibility. I clung to it with Sam as I clung to it with her. This dream of becoming one being together forever.
I knew that there would come a day of no tomorrows.
I knew, and I cry anyway.
“I love you,” Hikari says, my hands clutched in hers like a plea of their own. “I don’t want to live without you.”
I pull her into me again, the weight of her body, the ridge of her bones, and the plush of her flesh all burned into my memory. Forever is an impossible dream, but it’s what makes you hold on this way. It’s the hope of it that binds you to the other person with memories of all extraordinary and all mundane moments you spent together.
“You will have so many loves, Hikari,” I whisper. “You will have a life for far more than me.”
I see her with the friends she’s made, going to a beach and letting the sea soak her sundress. Her laughter rings as she watches a movie with her parents, drawing her favorite characters on random surfaces. She will find boys and girls who excite her, who make her stomach rise with butterflies, and who treat her as if she is the most precious thing in the world because she is. She will have a family of her own choosing. She will see the world and read and write for it, listening to our old favorite songs with tangled earbuds.
She will think of me on the lonely days grazing her fingers over a spine with Shakespeare’s name. She will ask me to haunt her, and I will in memory and in vision. She will have hard days she doesn’t feel like standing back up, but she will anyhow. She will take long car rides with rock music blasting through open windows as the breeze flirts with her hair.
I crush her to me, shuddering against the heat of her skin.
She will have a life for far more than me. “And I am so glad that you held on for it.”
“What about you?” Hikari cries. “What about your life?”
The wind passes between us, reminding us of its existence. It travels from the first floor all the way up to here where we touch the sky. Through its carry, I feel every person in the hospital’s walls, and I remember that even if I will never be alone, “You know that you’re the only life I ever needed.”
Hikari’s eyes well, the yellow glossing like suns reflecting the moon. She touches the tattoo on my chest.
“If what you say is true, then no matter how many lives I lead, you’ll lose me every time.”
“Yes,” I say, crying with her, moving aside her collar to catch the arrowhead edges of her half sun. “But it also means that I will always find you first.”
Two lonely souls across different boundaries sharing a single universe cannot be kept apart by anything. They cannot be stolen from each other. And as long as I am here, I will never break my promise again.
“All my tomorrows are yours, Hikari,” I say, our noses brushing, the salt of our goodbye meeting in a stream.
Her breath hitches against my lips. Tucking her hair behind her ears, I kiss her, every kiss we’ve ever shared held in it. I’ve had my life with her, and I could not be more grateful for the time we were given. It stands behind me, ready to lead my body away as the wish that Hikari and I could become one comes apart at the seams.
“Will you come back, my love?” I ask. “When you’ve lived this life and had your loves, and you’re ready, will you come back to me one last time?”
I slip a torn piece of paper into her hand, stolen stationery. I bared my heart on the night we first kissed in the old cardiology wing. On it, another dream sits, ready for the taking, another promise. Hikari reads the words as her tears trickle onto their page. One last time, she graces me with her contagious smile, and even if it is bittersweet, it will be that smile I cling to when she is gone.
“Yes,” Hikari breathes. Her palms slip from my face till all they hold is the shape of wind. “I’ll come back to you.”
The body I created decades ago fades till it is nothing but an idea resting in peace. I spread through my greater home, my soul tethered to the place it was born in.
The parting hurts. It feels like a part of me is severing as I bleed out onto the stone, and when Hikari leaves, I know she will cry for me as I cry for her.
But she knows.
She knows that when she returns decades from now, I will hold her in my arms and keep her close as the shadows close in and death takes her gently into another realm. And if time is willing, it will give her and me one more than just goodbye.
“I promise.”
