My shoes smack the tiles of the hallways twisting into each other like an elaborate labyrinth. Awkward bodied, I take turns like a drifting car, C, Neo, and Sony on my tail. Sony cackles, breathless. C and Neo snicker at the doctors yelling at us to stop. Weaving through this place is second nature. Only now do I pay attention, not just to the finish line, but to the scenery of the race.
I guess that’s what happens when you let yourself live for the first time. You notice the little details that used to be invisible behind the blinders. And I may be a terrible runner, but there’s nothing like chasing the sun after a storm.
“Eric!” we all yell. “Eric!”
He flinches at his name, looking in our direction with absolute terror.
“Hey! Slow down! Quit running!” We crowd him like dogs jumping on an owner who’s just come home, all speaking at the same time, an incoherent mess of adrenaline. Sony and Neo get grabbed by their shirt collars while C is stopped by an outkicked foot. “What’s the problem?! Who’s hurt?!”
Sony called Eric ten minutes ago, telling him it was urgent he come to the hospital at once.
“We need you to steal something!” Sony yells, grabbing the front of his shirt. Nurses from my old ship’s hull overhear, their tasks slowing to a halt.
Eric’s face contorts. “That’s your emergency?!”
“Yes!” Sony breaks into a fit of giggles, her feet tapping. “Sam’s in love with Hikari!”
“Didn’t we already know that!?”
“Eric,” I say. “Can you get something for me?”
“Oh for god’s sake, Sam.”
“Eric, please–”
“No, no, no.” He drops Neo and Sony, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “You’re not dragging me into your weird robin hood club extravaganza.”
“What if we don’t sneak in beer and cigarettes anymore?” C offers.
Eric frowns at him. “You still do that?”
C clears his throat and quickly pretends the ceiling is incredibly interesting. “No, sir.”
“Yes, we do. But we’ll stop,” Neo says. “And we won’t sneak out unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“And I’ll stop sneaking in animals, I swear it,” Sony piles on, clasping her hands together.
Our promises are empty. Eric knows, but he doesn’t care. He’s in his own clothes, no scrubs, and bed-headed. He came because we needed him, not because it’s his job, even if he’d like to play it off that way. Seeing the wishfulness in our whispering pleases, Eric groans, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Fine,” he bites. “But by tonight, if you haven’t eaten dinner, taken your meds, and gone to bed, so help me god–”
“We will, we will, we will,” we all say at once, singing his praises, grabbing at his shirt, and jumping up and down.
“Sam,” Eric says. He rubs his eyes and plants his hands on his hips, staring right at me. “What do you need?”
—
To my Hamlet,
I said your name for the first time today. It was an overdue heartbeat, a breath laying at the bottom of a single lung. It was a fear surmounted.
So.
To my Hikari,
I write to you with stolen stationary and an old pen on its last ink reserves. Where? In Neo’s room. Headquarters. The place we always end up sitting a little too close, convicting bouquets of wrongful symbolism and nursing succulents back to health.
This is the place you told me you’d give me a dream.
On a step ladder notorious for being fallen off of, Neo stands on his tiptoes, his skinny fingers perfect for tying thin threaded string lights to the ceiling.
C stands just below, a hair’s breadth away from grabbing the ladder. “Are you gonna fall?”
“I’m not gonna fall.” Neo won’t let him do that.
“You sure?” C asks. “You look like you’re gonna fall.”
“Sony! Hand me those scissors so I can stab him with it,” Neo yells, just as she walks into the room with so many random objects in her arms she has to open the door with her elbow.
“I got everything!” Sony says, dropping her stolen merchandise on Neo’s bed. Her cat wobbles in behind her.
I quit my pacing and take inventory of the spoils. If you remember our first meeting, Hikari, you took me on a blindsighting adventure to gather a measly pencil sharpener. Back then, I didn’t realize the morbidity in that. Even if the ends were wrong, the means were a spark to our fire. It was the first time we stole together. The first time we shared our humanity with a bit of sin.
“Thank you,” I say as Sony organizes the arts and crafts supplies she took from the library. A pair of scissors, markers, a little paintbox, and colorful paper.
Eric lends us the Christmas lights. With them, we create our own finite constellations that cannot be overshadowed by clouds and the city’s pollution. He even gets me a cardboard box, one identical to Neo’s from one of the maintenance closets.
“Will this work?” he asks. We exchange a knowing look, one with history behind it that holds a thank you in the air like a light on a string. Then, he gives me a light smack on the head. “Don’t set anything on fire.”
“Eric!” Sony jumps and wraps her arms around his neck. Eric groans, his chin settling on her shoulder.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He tucked her hair behind her ears. “No racing. You hear me?”
“Mhm,” Sony hums and Eric holds her close for some time. Then, he says his goodnights to Neo and C, leaving me with a few parting words.
“Sam.” I swear Hikari, I’m not lying when I say he actually smirks, tapping the doorknob a few times as he says, “Good luck to you and Hamlet.”
Then, he leaves us to our grand gesture.
“So what are you going to say to her?” Sony asks me.
“I’m not sure yet.”
The box grows with memorabilia. It’s lined with a yellow blanket. It carries a succulent I could never bear to leave alone, the Hit List with its spiral spine coming off at the end, copies of Wuthering Heights and Hamlet, drawing supplies, and of course, a watch only we know how to read.
“Urgh,” Neo sounds, still on his ladder, using a screwdriver to mount the last of the string lights. “I can’t stand romantics.”
The step ladder shifts a bit beneath his feet when he turns.
“Be careful please,” C begs, holding onto it.
“Touch it again and I’ll stick this in your eye.” Neo thins his eyes and points the screwdriver at him.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I tell Sony. “I want her to know I’m sorry. I pushed her away because I was afraid, but…” I graze my wrist.
“Sammy, you overthinking oaf!” Sony yells.
My head tilts. “Oaf?”
“A stupid, uncultured, clumsy person,” Neo says waving his screwdriver around like a teacher with a ruler.
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, that does seem accurate.”
“You’re making this so much harder than it needs to be,” Sony flicks my forehead. “What is Hikari to you?”
“She’s my Hamlet.”
“Your what?”
“They read Hamlet together,” Neo says. “Weirdos ruined the spine of my only copy.”
“I want to tell her all the things I ever thought but lacked the courage to say. If I’m a stupid, uncultured, and clumsy person, then I want to be her stupid, uncultured, clumsy person because–”
I’ve never truly written. I’m like a cook who’s never held a knife. A tailor who’s never seen thread. So how am I meant to tell you, Hikari, that it’s because “–she made me dream again.”
The room buzzing with anticipating workers goes quiet. We’re creating a safe haven. A place with beauty in the physical and metaphorical, but it seems even the furniture and memorabilia mull over what I have to say.
The hospital keeps on working just outside the checkered windows, and through the blinds. The white noise and the oncoming night try to creep into it with their uncertainty wearing silence.
Neo breaks it. “You both care, Sam,” he says. “You just have to show it.”
An idea comes to mind then and just as my pen begins its dance across the page, Hee limps over to the infamously sensitive step ladder. She nudges it with her paw, meowing for attention. It folds, collapsing instantly. Neo falls backward, arms flailing. C catches him, both of them stumbling onto the floor.
Sony and I laugh as smoke rises from Neo’s head.
“Not one word,” he grumbles, pink shading his face as C hugs him tight and chuckles into his neck.
Neo recovers quick, proud of his work with the string lights. C plugs them into the extension cord and the ceiling comes alive. All I can think of, Hikari, is about the smile that’ll light your lips when you see them.
“Is it okay?” I ask. Neo reads over the letter I wrote you. He hums every few lines, mumbling critiques to himself.
“You suck at structuring,” he finally says, tossing it onto the box.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Doesn’t matter. It gets the point across. Even if it’s boring,” he says. “You really felt that way this whole time?”
I nod.
He rubs the back of his neck, patting the butterfly rash on his face with a wet cloth, and nudges me with his fist. “Then it’s a good thing we’re here to make you go through with this.”
“Sam! Sam!” C yells my name from outside the room, practically tripping over himself as he opens the door. “She’s not in her room,” he pants, elbows braced on the doorframe. “Her parents were there. They said her doctors had some news, but they don’t know where she went. I checked the cafeteria already, but–”
“Did you check the roof?” Sony asks.
“I tried, the door’s locked.”
“The library maybe?” Sony tries to think.
I hold the box with one hand on the edge, the cardboard digging into the crease of my palm.
Where did you run to, my Hamlet? Your want to escape is what brought us together. The roof, the gardens, the library, ledges, and bridges– I search those places in my mind for you, but they come up empty.
“Guys,” Neo says. “She never told us what it is she has. But if she’s still here after this long maybe the news her doctors gave her isn’t what she wanted to hear.”
You never told me who your killer is. I always knew it lived in your blood, but I was never quite sure just how determined it could be.
A dreaded sort of cloud settles over us.
“C,” I say, swallowing on a rough throat. “What’s in your hand?”
He unfolds it to reveal a small piece of paper with a torn outline, some smudged writing at the center. “It was on her bulletin,” he says, sliding his thumb across the promise. Tucking its edge between his thumb and forefinger, he opens the cardboard box and places it neatly beside the books.
It reads,
For our newcomer,
I’ll steal you a broken thing
“I think,” C says, “Someone who loves broken things will do.”
Hee nuzzles against my leg. She purrs, her half-ear creased backward. Sony’s cat and my friends look to me for guidance, for where to go next.
I’ve always been a follower. I don’t know how to lead. It was always you who pulled me from the backgrounds, from the edges of the frame. It’s you who always knew how to read me. On an abandoned stretcher, in a nightly garden, on a ledge, in a place where broken hearts were once healed–
“I know where she is,” I whisper.
“Where–”
I break into a run, hopping over Neo’s bed and out the door.
“Sam!”
I have nothing in hand. Not our memorabilia, not my pen, not anything. There’s a faint image in my peripheral of C grabbing the box, Sony, and Neo pushing the door to follow me.
I get to the stairwell first and hurl myself down the steps.
I know where you are, Hikari. I know the places your soul finds solace because I know you and I do not need a letter to prove it.
You are compulsively readable. Your eyes, your glasses too big for your face, they never look too far ahead so for what you can’t see, you touch. You feel with freedom in a way I both envy and adore.
Your mind is a palace greater than the one we live in. Within it, you hide secrets and the details of peoples’ lives: The line of a song that made C sink into his seat with peaceful suspire. Neo’s favorite chair in the library, the one you always save for him. The candies Sony munches on and the properties she always buys in monopoly.
Let it be said that you are a sun, but you are also a girl and you are flawed in the most smile inducing ways. You’re messy, clothes strewn about your floor with no shelf empty of a plant. You never fail to get crumbs and chocolate on your face. You can be blunt and mean, but I know you don’t mean to be. Your humor is cynical, but I’ve never met a person quite so willing to dream.
There are scary parts of you, the darker parts of you. The thoughts of self-hatred bite at your pride because you fell into a pit with a greedy animal. It convinced you to cut away at your skin till it became hilled with scars. It ate your joy, your pain, everything you had until all that was left was the shell of your body, but you survived. You crawled out of the pit and left the animal to starve while you quenched your hunger with books, risks, and a little wind. I promised to protect you from it, from all the shadows, and to never cower would I need to stand between you and their jaws.
I cowered in the face of you instead because I am weak. I am a cowardly creature who couldn’t resist your warmth but was too afraid to let myself feel it.
You are warm. You are beautiful. You are kind. You are passionate. You are resilient. And you are lonely just as I am.
I know you may not forgive me for shutting my eyes and saying I couldn’t see your pain, but I am sorry. I’m sorry for letting my past keep me from appreciating the present you gave me.
I want to share it with you, Hikari. I want to show you, even in the darkness of a hall where hearts were once healed, that we can be more than victims of almost. And even if you can’t forgive me, I promise to protect you from the shadows, anyway.
I push past two doctors who yell over their shoulders that I need to slow down.
For the first time since I can remember, my voice is alive, and it is for you.
“Hikari!”
The hall’s personnel thins the further I go. Past a corner I once stumbled in, past an old vending machine scuffed by crane kicks, past elevators that once witnessed a spilled tray. Eventually, in that old cardiology wing, my footsteps become the only sound to echo.
They halt once I see you.
Only now, the piano plays no melodies.
No winds dance in your company.
No yellow is left to catch the light.
—
Blood drips from her fingers like rain. It stains her bare legs, smudged teardrops painted red.
She sits against the wall, her shoulders slumped, arms cradling her knees, wearing a gown for examination. Her hair, for the first time in weeks, is down. The yellow strands have dulled to a sullen color. And they’ve begun falling out at the roots.
Her hair tie is on her wrist, neighbored by thin, sloppy slashes. They bleed just above her veins, performed with an instrument sharp enough to cut, but too blunt to kill.
I grab the hem of my shirt and start tearing. The sound rips through the air.
Her eyes peek out just above her arms, but they don’t see me. They’re barren, sightless, the girl who pulled me from the road nowhere behind them.
“Hikari,” I say, sinking to my knees. I take her hand, gently pry it from her legs, and wrap the cloth around her raw, inflamed wrist, a makeshift bandage. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”
I bite down as the red seeps through the fabric.
I didn’t see it till now. I didn’t realize how pale she’s become, how a sickly green underlines her jaw and trails the old scar from her collar. I didn’t question why she put her hair up more and more. I didn’t see that her hope was starting to thin, starting to fall strand by strands, until I was the one who pulled it out at the roots.
“Hikari,” I whimper. I press my hands to her frigid skin, then to her hair. Her breathing stutters as I touch the edges of the yellow in search of her.
“I thought–” Her voice may be faint, scratched at, but it’s a lifeline. I listen to her, my eyes wide and reaching. She stares at her hair between my fingers. “I thought I would just go away with time.”
“Sam?”
My friends still a few feet away. C’s arms sag with the box’s weight. Neo and Sony tread cautiously into the isolated corner of the hospital. She doesn’t look up or react to any of them.
“Hikari,” I say. “I was wrong. I’m so sorry. I was wrong about everything.”
I see our enemies crawl onto her shoulders, beckoning her with poisonous promises. They whisper in her ear as viciously as time does in mine. They lull her to their side and they try to take the most precious piece of her.
“Hikari, please,” I say. Her cheeks are soft, the weight of her head as much in my hands as on her neck. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look at anything. She listens to the poison as I once did.
“I know you’re hurting, my Hamlet,” I whimper, our noses touching. “But don’t leave me yet, I’m begging you.”
My fingers reach into her hair, the brittle strands coming undone, limp like leaves falling from a tree.
I clench my eyes shut, my forehead falling against her chest. Her heart is slow, beating with lethargy. Her blood runs tiresome. Her body acts like a cadaver waiting to be emptied.
“I should’ve been there for you,” I whine, regret hot at the back of my eyes. “I shouldn’t have run away.”
“Sam.” C tries to pull me away from her.
I twist out of C’s grip, getting closer, afraid to be torn away. I remember all the times I should’ve let my touch travel to hers. All the times we stole together, read together, every moment she coaxed a little life from my bones.
“I’m here, Hikari. I’m here. I’m listening. I believe you,” I whisper, my lips barely a breath from hers. I run my fingers to the back of her scalp, shielding it from the wall as I press my forehead against hers.
Hikari doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t say a thing. The numbness has taken her. The animal in the pit maws at whatever pain or joy it can scrounge. I see their shadows folding over her, claiming ownership.
I won’t let them.
Casting aside the smudge of red on Hikari’s cheek, I feel the rim of her glasses against my fingers and the ridge of her nose. Then, I cup her face and press my lips to hers.
They’re soft yet chapped at the edges, full and remnant with her smiles, her smirks, and all her teasing. I kiss her, long and indulgent, like drawing a breath after drowning. Her glasses brush against my brow. Our noses don’t quite fit. But it feels right. It feels pure. It feels like the warmth we shared in our past lives.
I part from her with noise, caressing her face, letting the heat of my breathing keep her from the cold.
But Hikari doesn’t look at me.
She doesn’t say a thing.
Time’s mocking laughter echoes at my back, telling me I am too late.
The cardboard box sits beside me, watching, on the threshold of our distance. Within it, I see all I should’ve appreciated while it was still mine. I hear the door creak to the roof, Hikari’s light shining onto a gray rooftop. Her mischief escapes her lips as she parades her first stolen spoils, me her accomplice. She sits boyishly on Neo’s windowsill, marking our tether with a potted plant, her first gift to me. She dances, holding her hands up to give me a sense of comfort, a yellow blanket on her bare legs. Her affection drifts tangibly, her gratitude following on its wing as she held my first gift to her heart.
I dig through the box, a pair of scissors at the bottom. I pick them up, all else blurred and muffled. Without method or rhythm or pattern, I start to cut away at my hair. I fist tufts of it, tearing and sliding the blades across like clearing grass from a field.
My friends panic. They all start to yell, grabbing at the scissors, then at my hands, my arms. I fight to get them back. Neo takes the scissors and throws them across the hall. Sony and C both push me to my knees, their terrified voices in my ear, telling me to calm down, to sit, to stop.
I don’t really hear them. I hear a familiar liquid, viscus and hot, trailing down my forehead.
Pain and I had a neat arrangement. As long as I promised never to feel anything else, it stayed at bay. I broke the contract when I sealed my lips to Hikari’s. I broke it when she pulled me from the road. Now it stings and ravages as it pleases.
“Sam.” I flinch. Not away from the voice. Towards it.
Hikari stands over me. She kneels slowly til she’s close enough to reach out and gather a drop of blood from the hook of my brow.
“You hurt yourself,” she says.
I stare in wonder as I did the first time she walked into my life. Her yellow sings, still alive. The shadow recedes as she looks with worry at the red on her fingers that belongs to me.
“This body never felt like mine anyway.”
Our eyes meet. Hikari’s begin to well. She witnesses the carnage wrapped in my torn shirt and her hair still falling.
“I’m scared, Yorick,” she cries. I take her in my arms. Her weight settles against my chest.
“It’s okay. You’re okay,” I whisper. “Fear is just a large shadow with a little spine. I won’t let it take you.”
There are no string lights or stars or grand gestures to be had. Hikari’s illness has not relinquished, but she did not become it. I form a shield around her body pulsing with cries as she lets herself feel the pain of it all.
“I don’t want to die,” she sobs. “I don’t want to be alone.”
I keep her close, the distance squandered to nothing. I don’t look away. I pull her from the road where she would’ve been swallowed by greedy souls. I give her back that hope she gave me.
“You’re not alone, Hikari,” I say. Sony hugs her round the back, interlacing her hand with mine. C pets what is left of her hair, him and Neo wrapping around us. “You’re not alone…”
She is a part of our story now.
I have stolen her.
She is real.
Flesh and full and fallen and I will love her.
Even if in the end, on the very last page, I will lose her too.
