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.”
I shudder thinking of his bony body eating itself in more ways than one. He notices. “It doesn’t hurt, not here.”
As the air cools around us, his stare hardens upon his ocean. It becomes transfixed, so much that my side of the dream does not exist to him anymore.
Something akin to fear and affection tied to a stone works its way up my throat. It ruminates in the silence.
“Neo,” I say. “Are you going to die tonight?”
He lets the question flow past him like a loose gust of wind.
The clouds above us sink, like whales dipping below water and resurfacing for air. They draw patterns, submerging us before letting the light seep through again.
“Life is so full of shadows,” he sighs, removing a book from under the hoodie. The spine is damaged. The pages are thin and pale but overflowing with text. “It’s easy to forget that some people prefer the dark.”
The book mimics the sea in a sense, gray and blue and rather daunting. He flips through it, each word like a cell, each sentence a line of muscle.
“On the surface, this story’s about the value of affection over social class, but at its roots, like most things, it’s simpler,” he says. “It’s about guiltless affection that is unasked and expects nothing in return. It’s about not letting that sort of bond pass you by.”
Then, with a disdainful snort, he throws his legs out and lays down, holding the novel over his head. “I hate this book.”
I can’t help the smile. “Do you?”
“Yeah. Pip’s an idiot.” He puts a hand out like a mocking actor. “‘I love her against reason and against all discouragement that could be.’ He sounds like you.” He says it to make me laugh and though it works, the two of us retain quickly to where we are. The water and the wind serve as gentle reminders that our time here is limited. It will end and when it does–
“I think that part of Pip lives in all of us,” he says. “We’re similar in the end–people, I mean. We all want a little piece of extraordinary. Unfortunately, most lives go by without anything extraordinary happening, and even if it does, it’s the ordinary moments that we should’ve appreciated.”
There is no regret in his voice. No resentment of an unfair, uneventful existence. As if his life has just begun and he is declaring that he will not let it pass him by.
But I have learned enough to know it is the opposite.
“People have this delusion of inherent purpose as if fate is written in stone when really the pen has always been in our hands.” His fingers close around the pages, crinkling the edges. Then he lets it go, sitting up and letting the book sit with him. “We are all passive protagonists until we learn how to write.”
“Then what are we when we put the pen down?”
“Then we’ve reached the end of our story.”
“And is this what you always intended?” I raise my voice, my fists clenched. He glances my way as I glance his. “When you created a sea of inked pages and wrote till your fingers bled, did you want to never reach the end?”
“Sam–”
“You can still live, Neo,” I say and the words echo, but I don’t think he truly hears them. He hears his illnesses, the bevy of them, whispering like sirens in his ear.
You must’ve seen it.
From the very beginning, you must’ve known.
When Neo caressed his bandage on the rooftop when he turned the other cheek to treatments. The subtle frustration he held whenever someone pointed out that he was getting better. Every single thought that ran through his head, a narrative that twisted his disease into a fantasy.
Whatever it is in this world that hurts Neo, he lets it.
The great abuser of Neo’s life was not his father, but the sickness in his veins. It was a bond Neo forged, unasked, expectant of flesh and sanity, but for all the pain it caused him, it never came close to the pain of pretending to be someone else.
So, he fell in love with it.
“You were making yourself sick all these years, weren’t you?”
He doesn’t answer me, because I already know the answer. For every meal Neo left uneaten and every pill he faked swallowing, he counted the days it would add to his sentence. Every episode, every flare-up, every instance he came close to death was just a symptom of what he chose.
“What about your story?” I ask, trembling at the thought of him asleep with a tube taped to his mouth, at the thought that he is okay with dying in such a way. “What about all the stories you have to tell?”
“Only one matters,” he says, taking my hand, stilling it. “And I trust my narrator will finish it well.”
“Neo, please–”
“Life is made of so many goodbyes welded together.” He squeezes, his touch as tangible as the day I first felt it. “So dread the endings. Cry and rage and curse them.” A sad smile plays on his lips. “Just don’t forget to cherish the beginnings and all that comes in between.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve always adored love stories, Sam, so go after yours,” he whispers. “Love her. Love her. Love her. And against all discouragement that could be, let her love you too.”
I choke on a cry wishing Hikari were here.
I hold his hands, the cold, thin, artful instruments that learned to be held rather grasped. I bring them my face, memorizing all the times they handed me books and held me close in fits of laughter, tears, and anything in between.
“Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?” I ask.
He leans in, twiddling his fingers like loose screws. They travel down my arms, holding them as they did on the days I helped him learn to stand again.
“You know you never wanted us to be happy, Sam. Happiness is a brittle, fleeting thing,” he says, looking into my eyes, I think, so that I can see he is not sad. He is not in pain, nor is he regretful, resentful, or anything other than at peace. “You wanted us to feel loved, and we did.”
Looking out at the sea, his gaze reaches across its endlessness. He picks up his book, fidgeting with the strings of his stolen sweatshirt.
Then, he stands up on his own. He walks across the tether of our dreams and roams into the ocean. Great Expectations soaks up the sea and sinks to the floor, its ink dissolving into nothing.
He climbs into the rowboat, pushing it from the muck with one foot below settling in its center. As he begins his journey, I stand and though I cannot follow him into the dark, I cry and realize he was never in love with being sick. He was in love with the home we gave him. He sails to the heart of that home through waves and storms and a layer of darkness so thick it can be breathed.
On the other side, I like to imagine that he finds a shore. There, the shape of a boy and a girl draw in the sand with sticks and seashells.
He cannot contain his joy. He jumps from the rowboat, swimming the remainder of the way. He trips in the shallows, the mud to his ankles, yelling their names. He runs up the beach, overcome with rejoicing laughter.
Coeur hears his voice and turns around. Heaven casts light upon him till the only shadow that remains is that of Neo jumping into his arms and kissing him just as he promised.
