I Fell in Love with Hope

by Lancali

We spent our whole lives together pretending, but if you pretend for too long, reality reminds you one way or another that it doesn’t like being insulted.

“Remember me,” he says. “Remember that just because the stars fell doesn’t mean they weren’t worth wishing on.”

“Does it sound like music?” he asks, his voice nearly gone. “No,” Neo says. “It sounds like thunder.” “Thunder’s nice.” “Not when there’s a storm between your ribs.” Neo taps the scars of blood vessels climbing C’s collarbones. “Your veins brew lightning. It’s trying to escape.” C smiles. “You really are a writer.”

Narrators are a natural part of the picture until you take a second glance at them.

Eric’s pen is a mighty weapon.

This is a pen. THIS IS A PEN.

Humans have a knack for self-destruction. Only those of us who love broken things will ever know why.

Destruction is addictive, he writes. The more I am, the less I want to be. The less I am, the lesser I want to become.

Paper is my heart. Pens are my veins. They return words I stole, blood to paint a scene.

“But sometimes parents love the idea of their child more than the person they are.”

“No.” I shake my head, not taking my eyes off her. “I chose this. My depression is consensual.”

“You like the numbness?” she asks. “It’s better than the pain.”

“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.

The last page doesn’t define the book.

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.

I’ve always been able to watch, to see, but I’ve never lived. I don’t have a life, as people do. I am a narrator. Narrators watch.

“The moment despair fell in love with hope.”

My friends laugh, filling page after page, not a dull moment between them. They smile, hug, kiss, run, speak, sing, shout, swim, play, create, and love without constraint.

This place—this exact spot where land and sea meet—is where the world was born. It is where time ceases, disease festers, and death dies.

Love isn’t a thing that’s ever finished,

“The sea’s on fire.”

“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.”