The broken heart. You think you will die but you just keep on living day after terrible day.
~
Loneliness is a soft-spoken abuser, singing lullabies, you are alone, you are nothing, you are empty.
Hikari lies in my arms and though I vowed to protect her from small spined shadows, she has never felt lighter.
The blinds are drawn, thin lines of light drawn across the hills of our legs under the covers. I speak to her, tell her things, ask her things, but she rarely replies. She is cold no matter how close I hug her. Sickly purples ghost her under eyes no matter how many kisses I cast on her lids.
Her parents come to see her as much as they can. They’ve both taken leave from work, but Hikari doesn’t talk to them. She doesn’t speak to her doctors or to anyone else.
She speaks to me, I assume because she thinks I am the only one who understands. Because I am a prisoner of this place as she is a prisoner of her reliance on me.
I see it when she picks up the knife to cut her food and gazes at herself in the reflective plastic.
“Hikari,” I say. “Can you eat something please?”
She no longer recognizes the reflection, but she knows it is still her. Her fist squeezes the handle. The knife shakes.
I draw patterns over her knuckles when she loses herself in those thoughts. I ask her to talk to me. Sometimes she does, shakes her head, and puts the knife down. Others, she grips it harder, falls further, and tries to slash at her wrists.
She struggles as I stop her, her breaths huffed from her nose, her jaw clenched. I take the knife and throw it on the ground so she can’t get it back. Then, I hug her, cupping the back of her head as she fists my clothes and pushes me away.
She hits me in the chest, the strikes dwindling with her strength. Then, once she is still and quiet, I loosen. She slowly parts from me, muttering an apology.
Later, once she’s finished eating what she can muster and thrown it up, I help her wash herself. I redress her and apply ointment to her scars. Then, we lie together in her bed, beneath the covers.
“Did you ever find the answer?” she asks, her voice this hoarse, sad thing. “Did you ever find out why people have to die?”
I shift on the bed so that my mouth is against her neck as she faces away from me.
“No,” I whisper, caressing her hands, touching the leather and crystal of the watch on her wrist.
“Maybe there isn’t one,” she says. “Maybe death is as pointless as life.”
The dream I shared with Neo denounces that, but I can’t tell her. She needs to be heard, not fought. So, I wrap myself around her, pressing my forehead to her back, trying not to focus on the prominence of her bones or her words. I focus on her breathing, her heartbeat, any sign that she is not a corpse.
“Do you love me, Sam?” she asks. “Or are you just taking care of me because you feel bad?”
“Of course I love you,” I whisper, harshly, holding her tighter. “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” she says. The sheets rustle. She wriggles from my embrace and sits up on the edge of the bed. “It’d just be so much easier if I didn’t.”
Her bare feet meet the tiles as she unhooks her IV bag and hangs it on a wheeled stand.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I want to see Neo,” she says.
The stand serves as her support as she exits the room.
_
Neo killed himself by starvation. His heart failed.
Hikari saw his body. She was holding his hand and woke when the life had already drained out of him. It felt cold, stiff, like a rock filled with icy liquid, she said. She talked about it without any emotion, as if she hadn’t processed what happened. I just remember her saying he shouldn’t have died like that, with a tube taped to the side of his mouth, his body nothing but a gray skeleton, and a butterfly rash on his cheekbones. She said he should’ve died somewhere surrounded by his books, at peace with his own ideas and his own creations.
I told her that Neo died in the way he wanted. I tell her he sailed his ocean, and he emerged with the people he loves on the other side.
She told me I don’t know that.
Since then, Hikari has entered a state of regression. She mutters to herself sometimes, as if speaking to someone in the room that isn’t me.
She tells me, I want to see Sony, and then walks to the gardens. She sits in the grass and stares at the clouds, talking, about what I can’t hear. She tells me, I want to see Coeur, I want to see Neo, and she goes to Neo’s room and reads his stories. She puts the sleeves of C’s jacket around her shoulders as if his arms could wrap around her. She remains a part of old settings, only brought back when she sees me.
Maybe that’s why she resents me. I understand the pain, but I also remind her of it. I understand what it’s like to finally find who you think you belong with and have them ripped away.
I walk behind Hikari by a hall’s length, the same way I did the first night I ever beheld her. The difference is stunning, an insult. Her yellow dimpled dress is replaced by a dull hospital gown. Her lively, curious steps are now slow, her breaths focused on the next. She does not explore, nor smile, nor steal a thing, not even a glance. Her silhouette is bent and broken and it limps behind that of her past.
She doesn’t want me to follow, but I do. I need to. For her. For my peace of mind.
When we reach Neo’s room, she halts before reaching the door. It’s open for some reason, held by a wedge. Neo’s mother stands outside with her back against the wall. Upon sight of us, she tenses. I don’t understand until I hear the shuffling of papers and the cluttering of packing coming from inside the room.
“Hikari,” I say, standing in her way so that she can’t see. “Let’s go see Sony or C, okay? I can carry you, come on–”
“What are they doing?” She squints, looking over my shoulder, trying to make out the people moving things around in Neo’s room.
I don’t know who the other two men are. Perhaps his cousins, perhaps some other extended family that was always so fond of sending bouquets instead of showing up. In their midst, Neo’s father neatly collects every single sheet of paper in the room, every notebook, every novel, every pen, and he places them with all the care in the world, into a cardboard box with a lighter right next to it.
“What–” Hikari is at a loss for words. She tries to walk into the room. “What are you doing?”
Neo’s father hears her. He looks up, his eyes raw and red and sensitive. He doesn’t acknowledge her or me. He wipes at his tears and picks up the last of the papers: Neo’s manuscript. And an old spiral notebook with the front torn off.
“Wait.” Hikari pushes against my front, but I block her path. “Wait. Stop.”
“Hikari–”
“That isn’t yours. You can’t take it,” she says. Neo’s father throws the lighter atop the stack and picks up the box.
“No, no please!” Hikari tries to grab him past me as he walks out of the room. Like a child reaching for a book on a too high shelf, she fights with what physical strength she has left.
“Please!” Hikari cries, clawing at me, at him, ripping her own IV out just to reach. “Please! That’s all we have left of him!”
She grabs the box just over my shoulder, but Neo’s father tugs it away, a disgusted, almost frightened look knitting his brows.
I feel the urge to hurt him, to pry the box from his arms and shove him against the wall just for looking at Hikari that way, but I don’t.
I hold Hikari back as her voice breaks and she sinks to her knees. “No, no, please, you can’t take them away,” she sobs, her fists clenching my shirt, her face pressed into my chest. “You can’t take them away, you can’t, please.”
I don’t know what’s come over me. A streak of protectiveness maybe. Anger at my inability to act.
Eric appears behind me, waving off the other two nurses trying to take Hikari from my arms.
All I can do–all I ever can do is be there. Be there as what is important to her is taken away. Be there as she is too sick to even fight it. Be there as the person I love cries and suffers and loses her right to grieve.
“Sam,” Eric says. “We have to take her to her room–”
“I have her,” I interrupt, my voice hardened.
“Sam, just let us–”
“I have her!” I yell.
I pick Hikari up off the floor and not knowing where to go, stuck in my own paralysis, I walk, cradling her like an infant, to wherever loneliness and hurt cannot touch us. All the while, I think of Neo’s mother tightening her fist around her necklace the way you tighten a loop around the wrist.
I don’t know if there is a God.
I’ve seen too many be manipulated, exploited, and cheated by those claiming to know God’s will to know for certain. I think God can be a good thing, a good idea. God is the greatest provider of hope among those who cannot find it in themselves.
God has never spoken to me himself, herself, themself, whatever God may be. The closest I have ever come to it is the hospital’s chapel. It’s a rather rundown room with a cross hanging on the far wall and benches sitting in rows for worship.
I gaze up at the cross in the center, the podium back cast by faux glass stained windows and I wonder if time and disease and death are his accomplices or if they are his enemies too.
I know one thing for certain.
If God has ever spoken it is through the yellow flairs in Hikari’s eyes. The yellow flairs in Sam’s eyes. The affection so strong in my core that I am willing to challenge the curse God placed on me when I was born.
But today, Hikari’s eyes are dull and God is silent.
“You warned me,” she says. I laid her down on the bench furthest from the door. She stares at the ceiling–no–past it, her tears trailing down her temples without sound. “You told me hope was useless. I should’ve listened.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, I was wrong back then. I was just angry at the past. You know that.”
“How are you like this, then?” she asks, as if she’s accusing me. “How do you choose to feel nothing so easily?”
“I do feel. I’ve been through this before, and it’s tearing me apart. I’m just– I love you. I need to be here for you.” I take her hand, the one hanging limp off the side of the bench, dragging my thumb over her pulse point. “I love them too, and I hold on to that–”
“Loved,” she corrects.
“Hikari. Love doesn’t fade when people do.” I reach across her chest, to the black pattern of a moon crested as a partner to mine. “Time will stop, disease will fester and death will die.”
“They’re dead, Sam!” she yells, throwing my hand off of her. She shakes, pulling herself upright by the bench’s back to put space between us. To create distance. As if the mere touch of my skin will burn through her like paper.
“Our enemies won. They took them and they’re gone now.” Hikari’s hands curled around the edge of her seat, her eyes wide and downcast.
“Coeur and Neo will never get to finish their story,” she says. “Neo will never get to run his fingers over a cover with his name on the spine. Coeur will never get to wrap his arms around him and smile into his neck while he does. Sony will never be there to give them her sweatshirts and she’ll never get to bring those stories back to her kids.”
Her words beckon shadows I banished. They creep past the threshold of what is meant to be a sacred place. They infest it, patient predators, that have been waiting for this moment. They crawl past Hikari. They already view her as something of theirs. They set their sights on me.
“They’ll never grow old,” Hikari says, but she is so empty her voice is only air. “They’ll never get married. They’ll never have children. They’ll never see the world or live the lives they were meant to have and they’ll never leave this place.”
Hikari looks at me as if I am one of the shadows, as if I belong with all the little spined monsters that reap us of our lives. She looks at me as if I am seated amongst them, and just as much to blame.
“They’re gone. We didn’t save them. It’s over, Yorick,” she whispers. “People die, disease spreads, and time goes on.”
Her eyes draw to the tattoo peaking beneath the crown of my collar as they draw to her knife during meals. She rejects the reflection as a thing of the past. And this time, when she stands to leave, I know I cannot follow…
Am I a shadow, God? I ask once she is gone. Am I loneliness and fear foolish enough to believe they are light?
I wait for an answer, but without Hikari, my loneliness coils me. Don’t misconstrue. I do not care for Hikari because she is a body to fill a space. I am not afraid of being alone. I am afraid of being alone without her.
“I won’t tell you again. Give that back to me.”
“Are you going to hit me? Here, of all places?”
“You’re grieving. You’re not thinking straight. Just let me handle all this–”
“No. No, I’m not letting you eradicate him like this–”
Just outside the chapel, a man and a woman argue. When the man raises his voice, I stand up. He’s been escorted out by security for harming a patient before. Whether that patient was his child or not is irrelevant. If he isn’t careful, he’ll get forcibly removed, and this time for good.
Neo’s mother knows that. She uses it to her advantage as her footsteps clap against the chapel floor and her husband, muttering things under his breath, storms off down the hall.
She walks in with panic, her body practically shaking all over. Her hair is down, a short cut the same color as Neo’s, but when she casts it back to recollect herself, dark violet cups her jaw and cheekbone.
“Ma’am?”
She jumps at my voice, mildly recognizing me. She’s holding something in her arms. Papers, I think.
“Hello, um–” She stops in her tracks, a submissive edge to her voice. I know from the look on her face that she can’t tell if I’m a girl or a boy. The existence of anything in between doesn’t make sense to her, so she waits for me to fill in the gaps.
“My name is Sam,” I say.
Her face lights up.
“Sam,” she repeats. “He talked about you. When he came back for his treatments, I didn’t understand what the doctors were saying. He said to me that it was alright, that he wouldn’t be alone, that Sam would be here for him.” She recounts the story with fondness, then, with a hint of sorrow.
“Did you read his um–Neo’s writing?” she asks.
“I did.”
She nods at that, licking her lips. “Since he was a boy, he was so quiet. He rarely smiled, but he was so happy when I read to him,” she says, regret fleeting past her face. “I wish I’d kept doing that, despite everything… You were his friend, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Was he happy here?” she asks. “Did he smile?”
I think of Neo the day I met him. It doesn’t feel like three years ago. It feels like I’ve known him his whole life. I remember his scowls and his complaints and his constant need to be negative about everything under the sun. I remember how those scowls softened, how treasured his little acts of compassion here and there were, how his trust in me was something I never understood the worth of till now.
I owe it to him to tell the truth. I owe it to the smile he gave me before walking into the ocean.
“Every day.”
His mother stutters over her next breath, her arms hugging the papers as if they carry Neo in them.
“Thank you,” she says, embracing me, smiling as she cries. “Thank you, Sam.”
Neo’s mother places the pieces of paper she managed to salvage in my hands. Though they are wrinkled, they are intact and overflowing with ink. Neo’s father will burn the rest, I’m sure, but at the very least, beneath those stray sheets, the words Hit List stare back at me. Metal spirals catch the light, little notes in the margins with time stamps shown off as if the notebook itself is telling me it has not been stolen just yet.
The last of the survivors is a single envelope that Neo’s mother keeps for herself.
I’m not sure what Neo wrote to his mom. I am not sure if he has forgiven her or condemned her, or simply said his goodbyes. I am not sure if she ever reads it. I only know that she walks out of the chapel holding it against her heart rather than toying with her cross, and when she leaves, whatever direction her husband took, she goes the opposite.
—
“Hikari!” I run into her room. It’s dark, night drawn over the city, but she isn’t in bed. I unfurl the Hit List, not bothering with the light switch. “Hikari, look, Neo’s mom, she–”
I stop, catching my breath, realizing she isn’t here. Her dinner tray is on her bed, but none of the food has been disturbed. Instead, all that’s missing is the knife.
“Hikari?” I ask, more cautiously, waiting for a noise of some kind, an answer, anything to know where she is. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the door to her bathroom is open. Inside, a girl bears her weight on the sink, her head hanging between her shoulders. Her figure fades with the dark blue background, like watercolors. The glint of teeth on a blade trembles in her fist.
“Hikari,” I breathe, afraid to take so much as a step. “Hikari, put it down, please.”
She doesn’t answer or even turn to look at me. She shuts her eyes tight, and I know the moment I run at her, she will cut herself. A plastic knife takes time to reach blood, but she has the motive to dig.
“Please,” I beg, not moving, feeling the heat at the back of my eyes swelter and form a glossy layer of water.
Hikari lets loose a whimper.
It would be so much easier if she didn’t love me, she said. But at least she loves me enough to throw the knife in the sink. The moment it clinks against the ceramic, I run to her, pulling her into me.
“Don’t touch me,” she says. “No, no, stop it. Stop it. Don’t touch me!”
Hikari starts hitting me in the chest in the stomach, trying to push me away, but she’s become so weak. If I let her go, she’ll collapse again. I cup the back of her head and wrap my other arm around her back. She hits my shoulders with her fists, crying. It stings, but I’d rather she hurt me than herself.
“I’m sorry,” she cries, her pain-fueled violence fading into defeat. “I’m sorry I’m like this.”
“It’s okay,” I whisper, kissing her hair. “I’m not angry. I’m right here. Do you want to read some Shakespeare with me?” I ask. “We can draw together if you want.”
Hikari hasn’t opened a book or a sketchpad since Sony passed on. She shakes her head, so I carry her to bed, and before laying the covers over her, I reach one more time.
“Hikari,” I whisper, caressing the cool, weightless ridges of her hand. “Do you want to go see our stars?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she stares at the dying plants on her windowsill. I try to water them every day, but without Hikari’s care, they wither anyways.
“Sam,” she says, breaking the silence.
“Yes?”
“At the beach. You said you had to tell me something. What was it?”
Settling back on the bed, I can’t help but think that Hikari and I’s grief has become cyclic. She clings to things of the past, objects, moments, and places as if she could crawl into time’s body and tear it apart from the inside if only to emerge where her friends are still alive.
So she feels her pain, her loneliness, the excruciating feeling that she is dying, but at once not dying soon enough. She grapples with her guilt and her fear and her love for me. They torture her until she can no longer bear it and must feel the pain with blood. When I stop her, she resents me. She resents me for keeping her alive. Then, it begins again, till all that’s left of her to torture is her mind thinning away with her body.
“It can wait,” I say, laying under the covers with her.
As Hikari falls into sleep, a selfish fantasy of mine rears its head. I dream that Hikari and I become one person. I dream of being so utterly close that we melt into each other. That way, I could take all this pain she has, every drop of this misery, and nurse on it. I could rid her of the shadows. I could bear every single suffering note till her smiles and her mischief and her curiosity and all the things that are hers return.
I beg the possible to gift me this one impossibility. I beg as I once begged the dead to haunt and wallow in the silence. Because if she and I were one, then I could never lose her.
“I know you’re hurting, my Hamlet,” I whisper, trembling, I hold her so tight. “But please, hold on. Just hold on for me.” I kiss her again. I kiss her till I realize she has already become as empty as I used to be. I kiss her till it feels like my fantasy could come true and even if she dies tonight, I will pretend I have died with her. I will crawl beneath the ground as soil is spread onto our bodies and the dark submerges us. I will hold her as she decays to bone and then to ash and I will love her till time takes the world away and my curse is vanquished by its end.
“Please, Hikari.” I kiss her like it’s the last time. “Please, don’t leave me yet.”
