Years ago, I fell into the road.
Friction turned my legs to ruinous scrapes, dirt soaking my blood like cotton. Tears stung. The soil mingled with open wounds. I hovered my fingers over the tear in my pants.
That whole day was a tumble. My stomach twisted up. The desire to vomit, to claw at myself was overwhelming.
I had to watch someone die.
I had to listen to her mother scream. I had to see the life fade from her eyes with the person behind their color. She had yet to take her first steps. She was in an era of her life without language. She held her mother’s fingers in fists and became enamored with anything that caught the light.
She was the first baby I ever held, and I had to watch her die.
The sadness was sudden. It was forceful, a propulsion. I wanted to open myself up and let it escape like steam.
I ran away from the hospital grounds. I ran away, and I fell. The cuts hurt, but they alleviated some of the inner pain. It was as if my body felt the damage my heart took and wanted to share some of the burden.
“Sam!” I heard my name as I sat defeated on the road. The sun gleamed off the hood of a car. “Sam!”
There was a noise, wheels swerving out of the way. I turned to look. A large metal thing hurled in my direction. Then, I was whiplashed. Someone grabbed ahold of my wrist and hoisted me out of the way.
I was on the side of the road, a body on top of mine, shielding me. He was out of breath, his head in the crook on my neck and shoulder, one of his knees between my legs like he’d fallen, getting me out of the way.
“My sweet Sam,” he panted, raising his face to look down at me. He dried my tears, his still fresh, burning as they dripped onto my cheeks. “I’ve got you,” he said, shushing me as I began to cry. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
“Why did she die?” I sobbed. He pulled me up into his arms. I kept crying till night came, and he was all I had left to hold. “Why did she have to die?” I asked again, over and over. “Why does everyone die?”
He never answered me.
The emptiness that question left behind still sits like a hollow place where my heart should lie.
—
The memory flashes by in a second. That’s all it takes. The same force that pushed me down back then does again. Only this time, it’s not on a dirt road. It’s one made of asphalt and concrete, busy as the sidewalk traffic. The sun flashes, a car honks. My eyes shut tight, ready for the impact.
“Sam!”
But the car never hits. Instead, I feel a warmth like no other tense around my wrist. My breath hitches. It’s as though I’m breaking the water’s surface, being pulled from the bottom of a pool. The road fades out behind me, becoming an echo of gasps and angry drivers. I land with my feet on the pavement, my body stumbling into another’s.
Hikari’s face comes into view, as close to mine as it was last night. She is as breathless as I am. She was running behind me. I fell into the road, but she caught me. She saw the car, she reached for me, she saved me.
The crowd goes on around us as if nothing’s happened. The traffic resumes behind us.
She saved me.
Her pulse races beneath my palm. Her nose brushes mine, wisps of her hair like fingers caressing my temples.
I feel her. Skin, rougher than I imagined, hilled and scarred, hot beneath the surface. She touched me. The illusion is destroyed. The glass wall made of our almosts is shattered.
She’s real, tangible, right there in front of me.
It makes me shudder.
“You’re okay,” Hikari says, “I’ve got you.”
“Let me go.” The words leave me before I can think of them. They’re not spoken, they’re spat, bitten, aggressive. Hikari opens her eyes, confusion strewn about the flares. I look at my feet, unable to look at her.
“Let me go!” I yell, and this time, she does.
“Sam!” Sony. She sounds like she’s running. No, she can’t be running. C is right behind her, Neo limping along with him. “Sam, are you okay!?”
Hikari rushes backward when they arrive, like a wave that collides with a cliff and recedes back into the sea.
“Sam,” Neo says softly. He checks my back for scuff marks, my neck, and head for blood. Sony stands next to him, her oxygen tank still on her back, her freckles still dancing on her nose. C can see the dread in my eyes. His forehead wrinkles, but he doesn’t reach to touch me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. That’s all I have to say. At this moment, it’s all I know how to say.
My friends are okay. They didn’t cross the bridge. They came back. Yet this urge to hide and run away doesn’t dissipate. It multiplies. I put my hand to my mouth like I’m about to be sick.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, but before they can say anything else, I run back to the crosswalk and into the safety of my hospital.
—
Her touch is like a burn. The mark radiates heat. I walked into the lobby, staring at it. I bypassed the elevators entirely, climbing the stairs up to the roof.
The roof is cool and quiet, and my mind is anything but. In my mind, Sony has blood on her tongue and sleeve, Neo thins away into nothing, and C’s heart ceases between his ribs. In it, blue settles over the building, drowning everyone in it.
Hikari’s touch lingers. Reverting to old habits, I pace. I hover over the spot on my wrist as if Hikari left paint there and it would rub off on my fingers. Every time I replay the moment she pulled me back into reality, I feel the sunlight on my face. My fear burns into ash, and I see all the lies I fooled myself into believing:
Neo and C together in school, writing their book together. Neo is bruise-less, the torments of his father no more. C’s skin is scarless, stormless. He takes Neo to the beach for swims on the weekends and takes Sony along. Sony has her children in her arms, a husband or wife, or anyone in the world she desires. She carries them across the sand into the water, making grimaces and kissing them as the waves gently wash in. Their disease, their stolen time, their deaths are all a thing of the past. They survive, and they are happy, and they live.
But it’s a lie. It’s all a lie, and Hikari made me believe it could be true. With her one day and her constant game of pretend that she plays with the future as if it’s set in stone. She made them all think it could be true.
“Sam?”
I flinch. Hikari stands in the doorway, alone. My anger rises like smoke from the place she touched.
“Are you okay?” Her voice is edgeless. She’s worried about me. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that.” She walks to me without caution as my jaw works on its hinges. “I just couldn’t let you fall–”
“Why did you say that to Sony?” I ask. My fists clench at my sides.
Hikari halts, our distance the same as the day we met.
“What?”
“You said, you’re going to make it. Why did you say that to her?”
Hikari shakes her head like she’s been hit.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re acting like a motivational poster. Like those tapes, they remake every ten years telling sick kids to keep fighting as if any of it is in their control.”
“Because it is–”
“Sony’s body eats away at the very thing that breathes for it, and no one in their right mind will give her a pair of lungs she’s only going to destroy. She will die. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Do you have any idea what it’s going to do to Neo and C if they start thinking she’s actually going to live?”
“You don’t know that she isn’t.”
“Yes, I do.” The more I speak, the more Hikari’s expression falls. “You make fun of me because I draw lines–”
“I never made fun of you–”
“You think I’m wrong!” I yell. I remember when she told Neo the whole world would read his stories, that C would be there with him, that Sony would get to run races again. I would look the other way like I did when I saw death pulling at their necks.
I can’t anymore. “You dangle futures that don’t exist in front of them like bait. You’re making their pain inevitable.”
“They’re already in pain,” she says, and the truth of that stings more than it should. “They deserve to have hope for each other.”
“Hope is useless.” My voice drops. The mere word crawls beneath my skin, makes me wince at the sound. “It’s nearsighted and blind to the fact that it always fails.”
Hope is the name that should be at the top of the Hit List. It’s worse than our enemies. Our enemies are thieves, but they come as advertised. Hope is ignorance, a liar, an accidental creature made of fear. And it failed my first love just as it failed me.
“You lost someone,” Hikari says, her voice traveling to realization.
When I face her to meet it, I don’t see her at all.
I see him. It’s only for a moment, but there he is, standing atop the stone, reaching for me, dark-haired and golden-eyed. It’s colder than it is now. The past is always colder. Suddenly, he’s crying, telling me that he’s sorry. He gets on his knees, his head against my stomach, begging me to forgive him, begging me to just hold on, to hope.
He falls apart into ashes. I wave him away like fog.
“I’m not going to pretend I can change the past,” I say. “Or the future.”
“Hoping for a future is not pretending.”
“It is. That’s all hope is. It’s a lie we tell ourselves so that we can break watches and pretend time is dead.”
“Is that why you gave me this?” Hikari fingers the glass, the arrow that doesn’t tick. She laughs at my audacity. It isn’t a laugh I once cherished. It’s dry and hurt and disappointed. “To mock me?”
“No.”
“‘I hear you.’” she says. “‘I’m always listening. And I’ll always believe you.’ You said that. Do you remember? Was it a lie?”
“No!” I shake my head, remembering the joy on her face. “No, I care about you. I just wanted to make you happy.”
“Why? Because you think I’m going to die?” she asks. She grips her wrist like Neo does. She tightens the loop with her thumb and forefinger as if she could squeeze the watch off her wrist. “Or because you love me?”
She looks the same as she did sitting on the stretcher when I pulled away from our kiss. The question weaves into the wound on her neck and the illness in her blood. Her voice turns faint, weaker with every breath.
“Do you love me?” She motions to the hospital below us. “Do you love any of them? Any of the people you claim to watch over?”
“I’m not supposed to love,” I say. “I’m not supposed to even exist.”
“Are you that afraid?” she asks, only now it’s a dare. A push. “Are you that afraid to lose again?”
“I already lost everything. I will always lose everything. No matter how many times I try to steal it back.”
Hikari cups her hands around her nose and chin in the form of a prayer. Horror works across her face. She looks down as if three graves sit between us. She looks at me as if I’m holding our friends’ hands as they lay down inside them.
“That’s why you spend so much time with them,” she says. “That’s why you do so much for them.”
I already know what she’s thinking.
“No. No, that’s not true.”
Hikari adopts my anger and takes it as her own. “What are they to you, exactly? Lonely dogs in the back of a pound whose days are numbered?” Disgust works through her tone, thinning her eyes heavy with judgment. “You’re just as bad as people who look at sick kids and see lost causes only alive thanks to pity.”
“You don’t understand!” I yell. “You don’t understand because you haven’t only existed in a world where people rely on hope like crutches to keep them upright. You’ve never held a boy who was just skin and bones crying for any god to see him for who he is. You’ve never had someone die right in front of you as you try to push the blood back into their body. You’ve never watched those you care about wither day by day. You’ve never lost anything, so don’t pretend to know what it feels like.”
I lose my breath. I feel like I’m running across that bridge, only it’s endless. I’m running after my friends, after our enemies who lead them into the dark. I’m running after him, away from him. Only I’m standing still on a rooftop, just praying that the stars won’t fall from the sky if I look up.
“I’ve been here my entire life,” I breathe, looking back to Hikari. “Never once has hope saved anyone.”
“Hope isn’t meant to save people,” she says, reticent now.
A wall rises, made of glass. Her color dims behind it, and the burning sensation on my wrist fades to nothing. She isn’t angry when she speaks, but she can’t look me in the eye anymore. “And just because it failed you doesn’t mean the rest of us have to give it up.”
The reason I’m afraid of her comes to fruition. It brings all the things I promised never to feel again to life. Hikari knows, I think. She knows what I really think. She knows why I can’t bear to touch her.
I am not afraid of her. I am afraid of loving her.
Because I wouldn’t just have to admit she was real.
I would have to admit that I’m going to lose her too.
Hikari wipes her nose. She runs her hands up and down her arms from the cold.
“You want to pretend you know me?” she asks. “Because we’ve spent the past month flirting on rooftops and exchanging secrets? Here’s a secret for you, Yorick. Hope did fail me once.” She traces the wound between her collarbones all the way down to the scars on her wrists. “You don’t realize how powerful loneliness can be till even hurting yourself isn’t painful enough to sate it.”
The gray skies form thunder clouds and lay her past out before us like a screen. The sensations of her memories play across her body, her mind, her eyes, till the words fall from her mouth like stones.
“I had a plan and everything,” she says. “After my parents left for work, I was going to walk down the road and swim into the lake. The water is practically black. It reflects everything. I was just gonna–” she stops, finding the right words. “–let the dark swallow me.”
I remember the day we met more clearly now. Something had happened, something her killer wasn’t responsible for, I was sure of it. I remember how she tucked that screwdriver and sharpener into her pocket. I remember the bandages on her arms. I remember everything she tried to hide.
Her injuries aren’t from her disease. They’re all her own.
When our eyes meet again, I can hardly breathe. Because how could I have missed it till now?
Hikari beams. She brings things to life, plants, broken things, and sick people who need a contagious smile to catch their lips. She gives people life only to deny it for herself.
“Hika–” I start to say her name, reach out, walk across the distance, but I can’t. She doesn’t want me to anymore.
“You might have seen more, suffered more, but don’t tell me I have no clue what loss feels like,” she says. The watch unclips from her wrist and falls onto the concrete. Thrown across the line she draws. “I’ve had enough people tell me it’s all in my head.”
She smiles. An empty smile with tears trailing down to the corners of her mouth. Then, she turns around, back from where she came, another sun setting, my fingers caught in the cold air.
The pain is sudden. It’s forceful, a propulsion. I want to open myself up and let it escape like steam. I fall into the concrete, letting my knees scrape against the ground.
My ghosts escape their caskets.
My memories come flooding down the river.
And I feel so empty I could die.
