this absolution is always incomplete / it's always bittersweet

in memory of

Leaf believes in living more than once. Somewhere, in the back of her mind she can remember things that she knows aren't her memories. She recalls battlefields and red eyes and the ocean wind whipping through her hair. And it doesn't fit into place—because (this) Leaf has never seen the sea and she's never owned a pokemon and she's never left Saffron City to go anywhere.

She dreams of crimson letters and bureaus and she always sees the same face in the mirror—her face. Leaf wonders whether it's possibly to be live twice in the same body.

Sometimes there's a boy—one she's never known—that sneaks into her mind, with raven hair and ruby eyes and a sewn-closed mouth, standing on a icy mountaintop without flinching. She remembers loving him. Somewhere in her, something tugs at her heart and she thinks maybe she still does.


She asks the gym leader (a ghost type trainerit's suitable, Leaf thinks) whether the same people can fall in love in different lives. The woman blinks at her with red eyes and she feels a painful pang of deja vu when Sabrina says nothing.

A month passes by and Leaf returns to the gym. "You remind me of someone," she blurts out and tugs on a strand of hair. "Someone I knew in a different life." Sabrina smiles in a strange, knowing way.

Still there's no reply.


She wishes she could remember the boy's name.

He has started to haunt her dreams every night. It's always in the same, cold cave and he always remains silent. His name hides from her, blurred when she speaks it, quietly haunting her.

She wants to know it desperately.


Leaf paints his picture on white canvas and hangs it on her wall.

The next day she takes it down and paints in a spiky haired boy and herself. It seems right and she thinks that maybe the other boy (she remembers he has green eyes and is powerful, but not powerful enough—) loved her memory man, too.

At some point Leaf realizes that he loved neither of them. After a while the boy with the red eyes became incapable of loving.

Maybe once upon a time he could and did, though.


She sits in her tiny apartment and paints the walls different scenes—the ocean and the snow and a tiny island and even Saffron. She remembers Saffron, too, just differently—dark and ominous and not her Saffron.

She paints one wall black because Leaf remembers dying.

It wasn't painful.


When Leaf sleeps, she whispers a name, over and over and over again—a quiet mantra.

"Red."


red remembers standing at her funeral and loving her and loving him and regretting, regretting, regretting.