Some people wear pain on their sleeve. Others let it lie beneath their clothes. The roof wears its pain plainly. Scratches in the stone, white like chalk, paired with black smudges of stomped-out smokes.
I look with half-open eyes and a half-there body. My knees bend into the cradle of my arms. My back pressed up against the wall at the ledge. I look at the shadow of two children sharing bread and stories, staring at the sky. Beside them, another pair stand over a cardboard box full of books, their souls reaching across a palpable distance.
My hands come together like a lock and key. I feel my skin travel to my wrists, the heels of my palm, through the valleys of my fingers, all the places my suns both set me afire.
Yellow dances in the wind. Time’s shadow snuffs it out with rain. As clouds muster a storm above, the broken watch catches raindrops so I don’t have to cry alone.
The door across me is lodged open with a wooden wedge. A phantom creak is all that sounds as footsteps cautiously make their way up.
My friends walk into the downpour without cover.
“I’m sorry,” I say, rain and tears pooling in my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
Their dreams of an outside world chainless and free were for nothing. And it’s my fault.
Sony sits next to me, crisscrossing her legs, red sticking to the sides of her face.
“Our everything can wait. It’s not going anywhere,” she says. “You need us right now.” She calms me like she would her cat or her kids with diligence. Her dirty white sneaker borders my shoe. The rain soaks the laces and tends to the sole’s scuff marks. “Tell us what’s wrong, Sammy.”
I’m going to lose you, I think. I’m going to lose you, and even if I knew all along, it still hurts to face it. It hurts so bad. I feel eaten from the inside out.
“We’re not upset with you,” C says. He kneels as if I’ve only just fallen like I did a year ago, knocking into his chest. His forearm-length hand covers Sony’s on my elbow. “Just tell us what happened.”
I stutter over my breaths, “You always said that you were stealing to prove that you’re still human, that your diseases don’t own you. You said the escape was the final part of the heist. I thought it’d be okay because you’d be free, and that’s all you’ve ever wanted, but–”
“But we’re not free,” C says like it’s a fact he accepted long ago. His lips thin as he realizes why my fear was so all-consuming. The understanding passes contagiously. Sony’s backpack shifts on her shoulders. Neo’s fingers make a loop around his wrist. “You can’t escape your own body.”
The guilt twists in my stomach, wringing it like a towel. Their diseases robbed them of so many moments, and I robbed them of their greatest one. I scrunch my face and try to hide again.
“Sam,” C says. “You got cold feet today. Everybody gets cold feet. Who cares? We can sneak out every day of the week, and if you get scared again, then we’ll try tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. We don’t steal and escape as some big statement to how society perceives sick people.” He presses his palm flat against his heart and shrugs. “We’re just living.”
If we were just living, we would have never met here. In C’s dreams, I see us all sitting in the back row of that English classroom. We would get detention for stealing from teachers and pulling pranks. Sony would be the cool older girl who taught us how to not smoke and not drink in the most fashionable sense. She’d crane kick Neo’s bullies senseless and pester me about my crush on Hikari. C and I would be quiet, onlooking, spacing out, and getting in trouble for it. After school, we’d escape just the five of us every day. We’d have bikes to ride along roads and the hearts, lungs, and legs to ride them across the world.
“What about your Heaven?” I ask.
C smiles. His eyes meet mine, a warm, dark color you can sink in. I see that dream there, nestled beside the flickers. They’re tired, but their essence is untouched. His eyes are as kind as they’ve always been.
“I don’t need to go looking for something I already have,” he whispers.
The rain starts to slow.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
C shakes his head. “You always overthink things.” He taps my nose and catches a raindrop. “What do you need, Sam? Whatever it is, we’ll help you get it.”
“I–I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Sammy.” Sony wraps herself around me as if she can feel me come undone and wants to keep me whole. “Why are you so afraid?”
“Because you lost someone.”
I look up.
Neo is the only one left standing. He’s soaked to the bone, but not a single shiver wracks through him.
He glares at me. “I’m right, aren’t I? You lost someone and it hurt and you can’t get over it so you’re scared you’re gonna lose us too?”
“Neo, don’t,” C warns over his shoulder.
“Who was it?” Neo’s question is like a pinprick making me flinch. “No, don’t look away from me. Tell me who it was.”
“I don’t remember,” I say, covering my ears.
“You told me when we first met that you couldn’t remember if you’d ever been in love. I knew you were lying then, and I know you’re lying now. Tell me.”
“I can’t–”
“I don’t care,” Neo bites. “Tell me.”
Behind him, I see the little boy again, sitting in the middle of the rain, little potted plants between his legs. He looks up, welcomes me into his room, yellow flares in his gaze.
“He’s not real anymore.” I shake my head till he disappears. “He’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead.” Neo steps toward me. He grabs my arms and tears them off my face so that I have nowhere left to hide. “Tell me who he was.”
“H-he was born without an immune system–”
“No, I don’t give a shit about his disease. You didn’t love his disease. You loved him. Tell me about him.”
Neo doesn’t relinquish his hold on me. He tightens it. His sleeves fall from his wrists to his elbows, old bruises rotting near the surface.
The sun stretches behind the clouds, a single streak of light pinched across the drizzles. It kisses Sony’s hair, C’s skin, and half of Neo’s face. It plays with warmth, a crease in the rain, a strangely familiar permission to finally open the gates.
“I was so alone,” I whisper. I see him there again, just over Neo’s shoulder. He’s exploring, snickering, interlacing our hands, his smile everlasting.
“I wasn’t supposed to be alive. I was just the background of a play wherein people suffered.” My breath hitches, the recollections like acid in my veins. Blood and screaming and death crawl through them, so dense they may as well be solid.
“I never understood why people had to die, and I thought that maybe he held the answer.” A little boy who always said that things would be okay. A little boy who saw the good in everyone and everything. A little boy who lied to me.
“He taught me how to live even though I thought I wasn’t meant to. He taught me about the world. He taught me how to dream.”
Those memories flow with ease. They’re soft in nature with hints of faraway noise. His shrieky laughter in the distance, his shy kiss on my cheek, the flushed skin on his face.
It’s always like that. The pain-ridden seconds are eternal. The year’s worth of joy are fleeting. Another one of Time’s tricks.
“He killed himself in a snowstorm.”
C and Sonys’ faces fall. Neo doesn’t react. The little boy behind them recedes into the shadows that stole him from me.
“It’s not like people say it is,” I say, wiping my face. “When he died, he didn’t take a piece of me with him. He left a piece of himself behind. A hollowness. A reminder that I could never let myself love again without pain to follow. So after the storm passed, it was easier to just pretend it never snowed at all. I stopped asking questions. I stopped looking for reasons. I stopped caring about everyone. And somewhere along the line, I stopped trying to exist too.” Because all the corpses of my stars couldn’t compare to the one that faded into the dark.
“But it’s okay,” I admit. I smile up at my friends as if it will make any part of our story sound less despairing. “The narrator isn’t supposed to sneak into the words and dream with the protagonists. Not living meant not suffering. Not wanting meant I had nothing to lose.”
With the memories I buried that Hikari arose, I see Neo three years ago. He flirts with the line between living and dying, yet he’s grown. His face is that of a boy becoming a man. Sony is a woman. C, despite his heart, grows with them. For all the times I looked away from their dying, I forgot to notice that they were still alive. They are still alive.
“But I care about you,” I say, the only rain left streaming down my cheeks. The sky turns back to a measly gray, no sun to shine through it. “I want to save you. I want you to be happy.”
The truth of my existence settles.
Stale and as hard to accept as it always has been.
“But I couldn’t save him.” I sob, a noiseless, pathetic sound. “I can’t save anyone.”
“Sammy.” Sony moves past Neo. She squeezes me tight, her breathing shallow. My cries pulse through my empty body. Cries I held in for the years since that blizzard.
Neo stands up and turns around. His feet clap gently against the water. They stop on the outskirts of a puddle, Hikari’s broken watch at the center. Wet strands make a curtain as he looks down at it. Neo casts it back, making a noise that almost sounds like a scoff. A snort of derision. Something meant to mock me.
“You know Sam, I never understood you,” he says. He looks back at me over his shoulder, blank and impenetrable. “I mean, I should’ve known. You were strange from the beginning. You never had parents or family come around. I’ve never even seen you leave the hospital for more than an hour.” He walks back to me, slower, but harder, the water cast aside in ripples.
“Neo, don’t be cruel,” Sony says, but he ignores her.
“You don’t even have a personality,” he bites. “You’re as stupid as a rock and as barren as a wall.”
“Neo!” C yells at him, but Neo doesn’t look away from me.
He stares me down like I disgust him. “All there is to you is this insatiable curiosity that always gets you in trouble and some cowardice to go with it.” He’s so close he may as well be spitting in my face. Brutality blooms in his words. He’s right. I know he’s right. I shut my eyes and bury myself in the cocoon of my elbows.
But then I hear Neo’s shoes skid against the concrete. His knees touch the ground. His hands reach from my jaw into my hair, forcing me to look at him. “And you’re the most caring person I’ve ever met.”
At a glance, Neo seems the type not to care because it is easy, but if you read him long enough, you eventually find those poems italicized in his heart. For all the harshness he spouts, there is a line soft and resounding at the end.
“You already saved me, you idiot,” he says. “You saved all of us.”
I stare with a loose jaw and wide eyes.
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re going to die,” Neo says, “So what? Everyone dies, and everything ends. Sometimes endings are abrupt. They hit you in the face and it’s too soon and it’s unfair, but that doesn’t matter. The last page doesn’t define the book. Time will cease, Disease will fester, and Death will die. We promised we would kill those bastards, remember? So get over yourself. Get over this fear you have of existing and stop walking behind us. You’re not just our narrator, you’re a part of our story. You’re my friend,” he says, furious, as if my greatest sin was believing that I am a skull and not a soul.
“You have the right to live,” he says, banishing any other notion. “You live by going after what you want. Tell us what you want, Sam.”
Neo is a writer. His words ring true, give a certain chill. He has the power to make you fall into them. I take both his hands on my face and remember a time when he was the one on the ground, hollow and crying.
I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to be there for him. Just as I wanted to be there for Sony when her mother died. Just as I wanted to be there for C when he needed the courage to claim Neo’s heart.
All I ever wanted was to understand. I wanted the people I came to see pass through these halls to survive. Now, looking at the sun kissing my friends with such adoration in the light, I know I want to see them, not just survive, but live. And selfishly, at this exact moment, I want something for myself.
I learn to stand back up from my fall. I trudge through the puddles where the watch lays and pick it from the ground, wiping the tears off the crystal.
“Hikari,” I say, effortlessly, as if her name was always mine to speak.
The moments she touched this watch, the moments she gave me, and all the moments from here on that I want to give her seep from the stock-still arrow. I turn back around and face my friends. My fist closes around the gift, renouncing the line it drew. What’s left of the rain washes it away.
“I want to save her too.”
