Hands sealed in the thin envelopes of his pockets, he sauntered up the uneven, foot trodden path stamped along the incline of the hill. Eyes blinking fast against the afternoon sun, which painted the cracks within the leaves of the cherry blossom tree a blinding white, he was delivered by his footsteps towards the sleeping figure, lain against the conjunction between sky and earth.
From far away, the crumbling clocktower chimed out an off-kilter melody, where each note seemed an exception to the rhythm – though the song was still familiar, if only for the tradition. As his weighted breaths pounded against the cage of his body, the cool air of spring impressed a sense of freedom on his mind, as trails of wind swept through the air – the only trace of their existence being the scattering of petals left in their wake on the day of departure.
When the ground eventually evened out at the peak, he glanced back at the scene he had left behind, marvelling at the emptiness of the space locked in between where he hesitated now and the pavilion where they had all gathered just an hour before. With a vivid green carpet peeled off halfway to unveil a patchy, yellow base merged with stoic concrete flooring, the world seemed hurriedly stitched together from two disparate halves – one blanketed in silence as thick as the wind, the other overwhelmed by the footfall of those who already knew the destination.
Down below, clusters of people bloomed like flowers blossoming as they were engulfed in widening arrangements of celebration, arms stretching and intertwining to fill in the gaps. Lone observer on the outside, he hesitated, his expression cool. Yet as he turned back slowly, he felt a coolness on his bottom lip, where a fingertip drew out a pinprick of blood – the jagged tip of a tooth bit down too hard the culprit.
Ducking underneath the shadow of the tree, which dampened the vivid colours of the scene in exchange for its liberating coolness, he felt his eyes adjust and his gaze focus, as he stepped around the other’s outline and scattered belongings, circling a quarter of the trunk before he too sunk down. Yet still the body beside him did not stir – brunette head rested peacefully in the palms of two arms crossed behind it, ebony eyes blind but to some fanciful dream.
In colours he imagined it would be, as he stretched out his own legs, gracing a palette more naïve than light could ever paint the world. Or in shifting filters, like from the movies of their youth, when existence spun with fewer cogs in a rasping cage, from a time they both revered but for the wrong reasons. The two of them used to quote the grandest of the scripted lines in jest, breaking into peals of laughter from their own theatrics – pre-constructed words of superficial meaning grating the air between them, while alone they dreamt it all made sense.
His own head drooping, his eyelids fluttered weakly in protest of the growing drowsiness of the afternoon, having gotten little rest the night before. Yet just as he was about to slip wholly off the brink of consciousness, a loud, exaggerated yawn resounded nearby that startled him back awake.
“- over yet?”
Inky eyes briefly glanced at him indifferently, eyelids still heavy with sleep. Thin lips dropped open in another yawn, though this time soundless, as the other slowly pushed himself up onto his elbows.
Shaking off the tiredness, he pulled his knees to his chest and loosely wrapped his arms around them, brushing off a few broken strands of grass clinging to the fabric.
“Yeah, you just missed it.”
A crooked grin cracked the porcelain face, splintering the thin line into one that curved easily into dimpled cheeks.
“Just as intended.”
Shaking his head slightly, his eyes rolled back dramatically, as the other tittered. Setting his gaze back upon the scene below, it was then that he observed the crowds had thinned considerably since before, where the sun had long begun its slow descent back beneath the horizons. When a hand suddenly gripped his arm, fingers tightening around the solid circumference of his sleeve, another curled to point into the dissipating bustle.
He followed the blunt arrow of a fingertip, gaze narrowing on one of the larger masses scattered onto the pavilion, crowding against an edge. Though their faces were indistinguishable, turned in varying angles against the rays of the daunting sun, he knew the figure at the center like how he once could pinpoint the North Star in the Little Dipper – bright enough even on the darkest of nights, a sight that led lost souls back home. Clumsy hands extended, detached from the connected body, to grope handfuls of the draped gown, yet the girl was unbothered, slender fingers scooping up each palm to clasp warmly – head lowering minutely to speak words of parting as if not even the world could listen.
“So do you know where she’s going?”
Dropping his gaze, he absentmindedly picked at loose, stray threads on the side of his leg, where his knee once grazed the ground – wound long healed, though slivers of the fading scar criss-crossed with tears in the worn fabric.
“To the city, she said. Has relatives there to put her up for a bit more schooling before she has a serious go with the family business.”
“She plan to come back?”
Hesitating, his eyes unwittingly flickered back to the pavilion, watching the scene continue to unfold. As if synced to his thoughts, in a moment as temporal as the clock hand grazing notches on the rim to mark out a mere second in the ocean of time, pale eyes snapped onto his. Like frames of a video in rewind, he watched her – a few steps away, head thrown back in laughter, then halfway down the slope, hand still in his. When she finally raised her arm, waving wildly with a familiar smile, she was too far away to read the words on her lips, yet he heard her voice as if they were back at the beginning.
“No, don’t think so.”
“Too bad.”
He heard a sudden rustling beside him – the crinkling of plastic wrap being folded back. When the other spoke, it was around a mouthful of sandwich, already half-devoured.
“She was cool.”
Grimacing, he watched as a hand was thrust carelessly into the emptying bag, pulling out another triangle of bread to prod his arm with. Gingerly he accepted it, fingers feeling for the transparent sticker in the middle, from where the wrapping cut off. Nimbly stripping off the seal, he observed the materializing of a water bottle in a previously unoccupied patch of ground and smiled to himself, before he took the first bite.
“Well, this is it, huh.”
“What is?”
The other’s turn to roll his eyes, empty wrapping was reduced to a ball by curled fists and tossed into the pile of bags thrown to the side, as he slid back into position, arms raising once more above his head.
“An era, a journey, a chapter – whatever you want to call it.”
“Taking a page out from the speeches?”
“A few choice words do not make a page. But it’s the last day – the only time when all cliché is forgiven. I thought you’d have more to say about it, having moaned about it since years ago.”
“I don’t know.”
His bites small, the sandwich in his hands diminished in size at an almost negligible pace, as he stared at it stubbornly.
“Somehow, it’s a lot less memorable than I thought it would be.”
“So, no rolling tears, just in time confessions, moving farewells, or newly bestowed hopes for a better future, I see. Just another boring day on the calendar, notable only for having the same people gathered in the same place but for the last time. How unfortunate that it disappointed you so.”
He glared futilely at the other, who didn’t even bother a glance back. Begrudgingly, he picked at the olives in the sandwich, setting them into a pitiful pile on a torn napkin beside him.
“Disappointed, no. At least I had more of an experience than you, sleeping it all away without a care.”
“As one should – and those bags under your eyes agree with me, I think. After all, we already know how it goes – words said for words’ sake, neatly wrapping this whole drama up with some exaggerated bow of a ceremony. Only the actors are substituted in, yet the script is the same. Even after the applause wanes and we all exit stage left, the charade carries on off-stage – reprieve only comes if you admit it.”
After a slight pause, the voice carried on casually, still rising and falling to a familiar cadence.
“So why come find me?”
“What do you mean?”
For a moment, silence overtook the world again, stifling the twittering of passing birds, the murmur of distant voices, and the sound of blustering wind. Though the afternoon sun still simmered relentlessly, the air seemed colder, even without a breeze, and he felt his own breath stutter involuntarily, even if he had expected the question.
“Well, we haven’t exactly been on speaking terms, lately, have we.”
Nodding slightly, he responded slowly, his voice a murmur.
“Suppose not.”
“Suppose so. Then carried away by aforementioned sentimentality, were you? Or couldn’t bear to leave without saying one last farewell to your old friend? I mean, never mind that it’s been months. It’s just –”
Quietly, he waited for the other to speak, watching as the pavilion steadily emptied to a dozen stragglers, hurrying off in diagonals with glazed eyes.
“Well, how did you know I’d be here?”
A face carved out so firmly in memory that he dreamt of it still, turned to mirror his for the first time since they begun speaking, and he stared back wordlessly, having expected the question but still not sure of the answer. Over the years, he had felt the beginnings of it shift and change irrevocably within his heart, just as easily as the lines of a child’s face could sharpen and deepen into that of a stranger – unrecognizable if not for remnants of a life he once knew almost as his own behind the mask, smile still blithe but for traces of bitterness that were only embedded after he was gone. Yet just like a child did he fumble for words to bottle the feeling and pass it with trembling hands from one soul to another, and as such had he not moved in time, like the other.
As such, he was the first then to break away, finishing off the last few crumbs of the sandwich, then grabbing the bottle between them and bringing it to his lips.
“You weren’t there at the ceremony, and the door to the roof was locked.”
“I could have gone back, for all you knew.”
“But you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we tear up at the same scenes in movies and know the lyrics to the same parts of sad songs. You pretend, sure, but you wouldn’t leave until the end.”
“Still, I only brought you here once, and that was years ago, back when even the tree wasn’t fully grown – I honestly doubted you’d even remember this place.”
With a loose gesture that languidly swept over the hill, the other spoke unwaveringly, yet somehow, he felt more than observed the tenseness in the voice, the movements – a myriad of unspoken questions accumulated, then selectively isolated and exposed to the open air.
He leaned back then, loosening his own posture to mirror his companion’s, and folding his hands over his torso as he kept his gaze skyward, trained on the slow parade of clouds passing overhead. A ribbon of white tied haphazardly over the world’s ceiling, he watched it faithfully shift, like a river accommodating rain.
“I guess I kind of dreamt of it.”
“How so?”
He glanced at the other quickly, yet the face was unreadable. Still, when the other did not comment further, he carried on slowly.
“Well, I’m waiting alone on the pavilion, surrounded by people who I feel I recognize but whose faces I can’t see. Yet from the shoulders down, all are dressed in the same gowns, and so do I know the day.”
Closing his eyes, he clumsily narrated the rest as it played out again in his mind, stuttering at intervals though the plot itself was still complete.
Though he does not know why he waits, he remains steadfast at his post in the center, as the crowd rotates around him endlessly – where he inexplicably feels at ease though stationary in a dynamic world, as if knowing that only then could he be found. When he looks down, only his clothes are an anomaly in the uniform sea, yet his presence is merely ignored rather than ostracized, and so he turns, wondering in which direction the dream would change.
It is only when he trips over air, catching his balance only by reversing slightly counter-clockwise, that he sees one face clearly for the first time. Though much the same, the simpler façade – less adorned and more monochromatic – clues him into the realization that she is younger, while she breaks free of pattern to reach him. Wordlessly, she hands him what looks like an envelope – crumpled in unforgiving folds, then smoothed out futilely. Yet while his name is the address, there is no opening, though when he holds it to the sun, he sees faint letters inked onto a piece of paper wedged tightly within. When he looks up again, the girl is gone, and the envelope disintegrates in his hands, from the center to the edges, from the outside inwards – such that the first and last thing he sees of the words within is the message
I wish I knew
Around him, the crowd grows more agitated, spinning faster, and each time he blinks the concentric rings of people seem to back away into pinpoints, until the pavilion empties completely and around him swirls a belt of petals – encasing him in his loneliness. Above him, it starts to rain, though the sky is clear, and as the petals are drenched in the fine drizzle, the ribbon is unfurled and lain to rest as a long carpet over the ground, culminating at a young tree not far from where he stood, its scraggly branches dotted with colourful strips of paper looped and tied around them.
Turning slowly, he sees silhouettes skip over the ground, though he is alone, where the pavilion has expanded into a sheet of untainted white, stretching far into the horizons. With the way clear, his footsteps hesitantly trace the path faithfully, looping unbounded in a myriad of twists – but no matter how long he walks, it seems the tree is just as far away as when he had begun.
Yet it is only when he yields staring at the unreachable benchmark, opting instead to gaze at the inky line beneath his feet, that he slowly realizes that he ambles down enormous letters, like a pen sweeping broad strokes across a blank canvas. However, before he could ascertain the meaning of the words spelt, he glances forward once more and for the first time sees a figure sitting by the tree, legs crossed with head bent back.
It is then he realizes without a doubt that it is they whom he seeks, whose handwriting he recognized – on the envelope first received, then beneath his faltering steps.
“You think it was me?”
He glances at the other, answer on the tip of his tongue, yet the other was quicker.
“You’re not exactly leaving much room for guesswork – are your dreams always this literal?”
“I’m hardly done telling you about it.”
“Yet you’ve answered my question, so there’s no need really. That is, you had a dream where I appeared, then thought you might as well check in with my living and breathing counterpart while you were at it. Makes sense, really. Don’t know how you’d think of me otherwise.”
“But –”
As he struggled to find the words, the other sighed exasperatedly yet fell silent, waiting. Closing his eyes, he breathed out slowly, knowing fully well that he was stalling, but still at a loss at how to overcome the gap in between.
“It’s just – after I woke up, I remembered something you said to me long ago.”
Tucked into the darkness behind his eyelids, only his voice was the vessel carrying him easily into the world beyond, though the passage was turbulent.
“Do you remember? You told me once that what you despise the most is regret, because it’s hardest to resolve when it’s all over. Things left undone, words left unsaid, people left alone until it’s too late and you’re left to rehearse what-ifs to yourself in retrospect, long after that narrow window to mold reality has shut.”
Above, the forlorn cry of seagulls resounded as accompaniment to the faint pulsing of the far-off ocean, beyond the fringes of the dome that encapsulated the world as they could see it, from atop the hill. Yet the scene was as still as a painting, where only the petals scattered like flicked paint across the unmarked sky.
“Such thoughts have been troubling me deeply lately – and even my dreams attempt to re-construct the crossroads I’ve faltered at, endlessly. My decisions commit, then undo themselves in reverse, and I flounder in that void of the abstract unknown – all those vague possibilities in which my life could have been bettered, never worsened, if only I had taken the other hand of fate.”
The hour was becoming late, yet still the sun hung languidly in the sky, reluctant to depart.
“A futile grappling with useless thoughts, I know. But how does one stave off emotion? I felt I couldn’t forgive myself for all the mistakes I would never amend.”
His gaze wandered, settling loosely on the figure beside him, whose own eyes were set into the distance.
“But then – “
The other shifted minutely, lowering his head slightly to the growing breeze.
“Then it occurred to me that even if I had overcome those few crossings differently, blindly wading through the dark to some better outcome, the circumstances of my actuality would merely shift and re-align to present infinite other crossroads – none at which I’d ever be satisfied.”
“What do you mean?”
“That is, what lies behind me now is a linear route, fixed by all the choices I made once. There is none of the uncertainty I’ve imagined so fervently to shroud that path – I can only really cast the rest of my life in the unknown that lies ahead of me now, at all those other intersections at which I’ll find myself, for better or for worse.”
He thought back to the envelope in his hands, to the letters beneath his feet – intangible to the clock’s witness, yet more real to him than he would ever admit to the world’s jury.
“So, how do I put this – I think, somehow, I’m merely placing greater faith in myself and my fate. One does tend to overestimate their control over circumstance, but how their circumstances change depends on whether one will live facing forwards or looking back.”
As he spoke, the other lifted their face to meet his eyes, blinking slowed despite the setting of the sun behind them, suspending the rest of existence in its gradual departure.
“That is how I’ve determined I will live with my regret.”
An obsidian gaze stared at him owlishly, the expression still unreadable, though the voice finally seemed to falter – monotony disturbed by a break in the originally streamlined words.
“That’s all well and good, but I still don’t see how I fit into your revelation.”
“Don’t you?”
Unblinking, narrowed eyes gazed at him stubbornly.
“After all, it’s an issue for both of us, isn’t it? How neither of us are good at letting go.”
The other paled suddenly, though the angles of the face were still enough that it seemed a trick of light. Apart it was easy to forget, yet only in being alone together were they once more made aware of the question that corrupted the air between them, which had grated their bond for years into a thin thread always on the verge of snapping loose.
“Your letter – how did it end?”
Jagged line scrawled hatefully across a tense blankness, broken only by an ugly tear in the paper, where only one half was delivered ruefully to his hands, months ago – unfinished words, followed by an implicit space that could be filled with anything. To an outsider, eyes skimming blindly, the possibilities were infinite, bounded only by language. However, he knew from the first moment that there could only be one ending, though he did not know what it meant.
Yet even though his words stopped time atop the hill, still all of existence shifted like clockwork into the next moment, indifferent to the wound it tore in fragile hearts that were left behind.
Looking away, for a while the other did not speak, leaning back against the trunk of the tree and staring out pensively at the world below. Even when he did protest the silence, his voice was only a murmur.
“It doesn’t matter.”
As the wind picked up once more, rifling shamelessly through the fabric of their loose gowns and the assortment of bags cluttering the ground, the words on his tongue faltered when the other cut in first, his tone rigid.
“You think it does, I know – but just listen.”
Pulling forward, he wrapped his arms around his knees, absentmindedly tapping slender fingers in a muted pattern on the cusp of his sleeves. Resting his chin on the makeshift bridge, he stared unseeing down at the pavilion beneath, as the other continued evenly, after a brief pause.
“When I was younger, I wondered sometimes if the lens through which I saw the world was broken irreparably. Whether blurred or turned on a novel angle, there were blatant cracks in everything I perceived, rendering existence in all the ways as I knew it, to be imperfect. Yet the worst of it was not that I couldn’t ignore the flaws nor forgive them, but that there was no prescription anyone could provide for a flawed worldview, especially one so horribly described. My unhappiness – ultimately, it was my own.”
Monotonous, the flow of words grew increasingly even, as more tumbled out unbidden.
“It hurt me greatly, I think. Intensely wary of all I could not control and fearful of all outcomes that were not ideal, I began to deal more in fiction than reality, where all the cracks were merely patched with words. I grew to seek easy solace in other perspectives, manufactured and halcyon, while my own story stumbled and faltered, as I lived with one eye open to the mundane and the other to the fantastical.”
As he spoke, the other absentmindedly ran his palms over the fabric of his pants, mechanically smoothing out the folds as if locked into the motion.
“Yet when does one wake up? It is impossible, after all, to live forever in dream. And so, one day I saw in my broken perspective, for the first time, something beautiful – best described, at the risk of sounding too romantic, I suppose, as a gaze looking back.”
As if coming up for breath, he hesitated.
“For one to describe such a feeling anew is presumptuous, when all the songs do it so well, and I refuse to wax poetic about something so overdone when, in the end, it doesn’t matter.”
Hands suddenly stilling, they rose back behind the turned head, and when he looked once more, the other’s face was unreadable, though the pose was nonchalant.
“In the end, eventually those same eyes flicker elsewhere – while still there you are, unable to look away, desperately chasing one moment in an ocean of many. So, what matters then, do you think? In facing an ending to something that had no beginning.”
Half-lidded eyes suddenly pinpointed his, and he felt suddenly that something else was being said in accompaniment to the words spoken, though he was at a loss as to what.
“I could give you the words, tell you what has plagued me so, but nothing awaits us on the other side. Some things are merely impossible, and I can no longer afford that costly illusion of otherwise. A superficial sort of love offered me a brief reprieve, but then the glass shifted back, and I recalled myself.”
Slowly, he spoke the thought as it occurred to him.
“But nothing has changed.”
“Nothing at all – but I’ve learned since that I would rather lose myself to dream than to memory. The world itself remains broken, sure – but at least I keep all my pieces, knowing that still, one day, I could become whole.”
The other made to stand up, an arm pushing his weight forwards, and he watched the rising back quietly, as the hazy memory of one that once stood straighter turned, gazing back at him. Wind whipped through brunette strands, tousling them unflatteringly, and around them the world was bolder – its sounds being loud interjections to any conversation, its colours warmer even in the sun’s absence. Yet the smile that met his, though just as wide, faltered in a way he had been blind to before.
“So, you’ve become something of a coward.”
The other shrugged, laughing quietly.
“Cowardly or realistic – two sides of the same coin, perhaps, and that we call different halves is not unexpected. But what I have become is just a little older, and with age I find comes the realization that very few things truly matter as much as they first seem. But you asked me about regret.”
Hands delving entirely into unseen pockets, though the voice remained constant, the eyes flashed quickly with defiance, that melded just as easily back into the obsidian pools.
“And now I’ve also told you how I live with mine.”
Bending, the other languidly cleared up the space and collected his belongings. Though from a glance, the pile seemed substantial, when the handles of the smaller bags were looped over his wrists and a hand slipped into the handle of a single suitcase no taller than his waist, it occurred to him that the other did not really have much, as if he had always meant to leave.
“So, this is the last, is it? The world is just too big for us to find one another again, given where we’re both going, where the grandest of reunions only happen in fiction.”
“And you think I’m the dramatic one.”
While the sun finally dipped into the horizon, dragging the warmth of the sky down with it in a cascade of vivid orange and purple, they continued to talk casually until a dip in the temperature triggered an involuntary shiver, and they finally bid each other goodbye.
As the other sauntered down the hill, strides well-paced yet cautious and bags swinging haphazardly from his arms, he watched the retreating figure numbly through half-lidded eyes.
The steps traced an uneven path over the ground, and his thoughts flitted back to the rest of his dream.
In it, as his gaze sweeps blindly over the letters and he realizes he will only be able to deduce the letters through feel, not sight, he begins to walk faster. Eventually he breaks into a steady run, though still the tree and the figure beneath it remain out of his reach – no matter the speed of his chase or the loudness of his voice. It is as if an insurmountable wall towers in the space between them, unbreachable, yet still he runs, unsure of why, but certain that he is running out of time.
Endlessly, the words under his feet loop in an unclosed path, yet as he blindly watches on, the figure makes to leave – legs uncrossing, arms propelling the body upwards. From so far away, the lonely silhouette stretches down the slope of the hill, becoming smaller as it descends slowly.
Soundlessly, his lips wrap futilely around meaningless letters, but it is only when he makes one last turn on the path that he finally realizes how it ends, and the yielded words fall easily into the space between them.
how to quit you.
It is when the figure reaches the bottom of the hill and crosses into the pavilion, that they hesitate.
A single step forwards was taken but then, slowly, the other looks back.