Keys for Empty Rooms
This is the story of the ones who loved you
Who love you now and loved you then
Some had crawled their way into your heart
To rend the ventricles apart
This is the story of the ones who loved you
The letter comes in a fat, squat envelope, just like any other. And it is sitting there on the table for Rock Lee, waiting for him when he gets in. He sees it blinking up at him with milky eyes, sees the curl of its sardonic smile where its flapping lip is sealed shut.
Lee has been outside in the fair, yellow day digging in the garden, digging trench holes, wet and crater like. They are large enough to sit in, large enough to put something vital in. A heart or a pair of lungs. But all that is going into them are a handful of watermelon seeds, plucked from the guts of a melon he disemboweled with his teeth, hungrily rendering the flesh apart.
Because Lee doesn't believe in wasting anything. Because even though he devoured the fruit, licking the sweet juices from his fingers, things can still circle on. One life for another. Its all in fairness, even if its only a few measly watermelon shoots.
Sometimes though, admittedly, he does wonder to himself where his heart is. When he walks out into the cold, the wind whips right through him, singing loudly in the vacant chambers of his chest. May'be someone took his heart without him knowing. May'be it really is planted there in the garden.
Perhaps if Lee dug deep enough he could find it. Red, fat flesh in the ground. Host of veins and arteries jabbing their hungry, leeching mouths in the soil to suck from Mother Earth the comfort his fragile body could not supply. Sometimes at night when he lies alone in bed, stirred awake by the sounds of shadows creeping out from closets to creak the floorboards, he dares to touch his chest. Lightly he brushes his fingertips across the browned flesh, right over the skin and bone that hides the emptiness beneath like a trapdoor. He wonders why he feels no pain, but then again that would explain everything.
Lee goes in to the sink. He fills the silver bowl up with warm soapy water and carefully scrubs up both his arms; being certain to slip each slippery finger between another, and flush out the dirt hiding in the crevices, just as Guy-sama taught him to do. Just as if he were preparing himself to handle a tattered organ, to tame a loose infection. Lee dries his hands and gets himself a cup of water.
He sits down at the kitchen table, tucking his feet beneath him and prepares slowly, and methodically to sip it. That is when he sees it. There it is. The letter.
Curdled up in its envelope, unmarked and unopened. Neji or TenTen must have found it collecting dust in his mailbox and slipped it in through his window. Because Lee has a delicate understanding when it comes to the concepts of time and the physical boundaries of his body.
Because he would rather crisp away out in the wheat fields, pounding wooden figurines with his fists. Until the sweat rolling down in torrents would glue his eyelids into embracing with strips of brine. Until his knuckles popped like little red atom bombs fixed to his hands. He'd rather do that than to trudge back home to sleep in an empty house.
Lee never checks his mailbox or his backdoor. Because usually the yearning in his fists and feet, mingled with the soreness in his joints and sinew takes precedence. He often awakes, barely able to pivot his body in bed on Saturday mornings to find one of his teammates coming into his room, with handfuls of envelopes he has yet to open, or boxes of equipment he has ordered that were left to rot beside the mail slot at his door, getting covered with piles of leaf, and sewage drainage, and the plumes of the neighborhood birds.
Lee takes the envelope in his grip, smoothes a hand over the bone-white surface. With unnecessary force he slides his finger under the flap and can hear the satisfied pop of the weak glue, give way like prying apart the rib cage to expose the softly pulsing meat. He shakes the letter loose and his eyes crawl down the page.
Its from them. Signed by them. After all these years.
After all of this knowing, and not knowing. Wanting to accept, but not wanting to surrender. After all this pain.
He can remember the letters in the night. He can recall being the little boy who huddled on a dirty floor, his writing hand trembling across a scrap of paper in the moon light. He can remember the smell of his own anxiety in the air, a thick heady musk, and the butterfly knots in his stomach wound tightly again and again and again by restlessness.
Then, he used to sit up until the sky cracked wide open, and bled a vibrant red. Until the sun took it's first infantile breaths, sticking its upturned face above the surface of the Earth. The messenger hawks would come swooping down their great gold beaks open to receive the strips of paper he faithfully fed them, with a tiny, shaking hand. "Find them, please."
What the hawks could never see was the key to all of the rooms, pressed smoothly into his tightly closed hand. He'd had so many vacant suites in his chest, that needed desperately to be filled. So much room in his heart.
But as time went on he stopped clutching the key so tightly, he started sleeping with it under his pillow instead. Then he began to notice the tarnish, so he started hiding it in someplace where it could grow cobwebs comfortably, without him being held responsible. So that soon he couldn't be sure which happened first, if the messenger hawks stopped coming or if he just stopped writing.
He could not forget the sensations, the fog hovering in the back of his head that was his youth. Being led through parks by dark haired strangers, the features of their faces scratched over by time. Their hands as loose and thin as slips of paper laid over his own. So, being light enough to be carried off by any idle wind, perhaps they always knew they'd leave him there, wistfully holding the key. Perhaps he should have put it in a better hiding place. One easier for them to find. He should have been prepared.
A key turns in the lock of the front door. Then the door is bullied open wide, wildly swung back on its hinges to make room for Neji's back, followed then by Neji's frowning front and his arms, stacked with obese brown bags of produce. Lettuce heads and carrot sticks topple from the tower, rolling out across the scratched linoleum floor.
Neji squints his eyes, his frown deepening at Lee over the top of the tallest bag. His hair swings behind him from side to side like a thick, brown pendulum as he crosses the threshold, side stepping the lettuce and letting the bags slip down onto the nearest counter.
Apples, and the thin, curving smiles of bananas roll out. Neji stretches his arms wide this way and that to keep everything from plummeting off of the counter to its demise.
"Don't just stand there mouth agape, Lee. Help me, for the love of God!" he snaps, strands of his hair sticking angrily to his pinking cheeks.
Wide eyed, he obediently scrambles up out of his seat, pushing his chair back.
"No, no, no!" says Neji as Lee bends down to grab a wayward apple. "You're just going to make a bigger mess of things. Can't you keep it together for one second without me?" He scoops all of the convict fruit back into the bag in one fluid motion.
"I..I am doing quite nicely, Neji-senpai." Lee sputters. He bows his head with the weight of the words he's about to say, thinking it better to stare into the shiny, linoleum eyes of the floor rather than the flustered face of the angry boy.
"H-how did you get in here anyway, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Only a blind man would not notice where you keep your key, you buffoon. It's a wonder you haven't been robbed blind yourself by now!" Neji snaps.
Lee rubs his chest absentmindedly. He moves to step over to the fruit and sort everything in its place, but Neji raises his hand roughly his palm inches from Lee's nose. "Don't strain yourself." he barks and starts throwing things around, loafs of bread, and tin cans of meat all coming out of the brown bags.
The dark eyed boy watches him, disquieted. And something sullen sours in his stomach. If he weren't so polite he might voice it. Instead his says "This is all so much, Neji….I didn't ask you to…"
"You have no food in this house, what have you been planning to do, filter feed?! You're not a sponge, Lee! Or are you on some kind of crazed meathead diet?!"
"I just went grocery shopping Monday, Neji-senpai." says Lee in a quiet voice.
Neji stomps over to the refrigerator and throws the door open wide. They both can see the stark, bare boned frame beyond the door, all ribbed shelves and whiteness.
"That was last Monday."
"Oh."
Lee swallows hard, Neji's frown darkens. His eyebrows forming a tight knit little V, kissing in the middle. They stare at each other for a while like that, until Neji finally sighs exaggeratedly.
"Here, before I forget!" he says, digging ferociously into the pockets of his garments. His fist resurfaces tightly clenching the spare key to Lee's front door. The one he usually hides under a layer of silt in the potted plant hanging from the beams of his front porch. Ingeniously so, he'd thought.
Neji stuffs the key, rather pointedly into Lee's hand and closes his fingers around it. "You can't just let anybody in." he says, and Lee nods. Then with nothing further to add, Neji leaves the house, the door swinging heavily behind him as is his brusque way.
They key feels strangely weighted in Lee's hand. He can feel every groove and line. His chest feels incredibly tight. Without having to think too hard, he takes the letter from the table, folds it back into the envelope and slides it into a kitchen drawer. This time he will forget, so they will not have to. Almost as an afterthought he throws the key away, too. Tossing it in the waste basket on his way out into the yard.