"At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it."
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
-ooo-
A year passed and then two. They did not pass quickly though they were generally unremarkable. She moved through her life as if through water, only breaking the surface when she absolutely had to come up for air. She divided her life into before them and after them, because the time she'd spent with them had been so small, so fragile and yet so unbelievably important that it was something she hoarded to herself, kept close and hidden within her as if it had always been and always would be. A private world within the depths of her soul which informed everything she had been, everything she was, everything she would be. She'd known them for such a short amount of time, just the briefest of moments in the whole of a lifetime, but they'd somehow become everything she wanted and needed and longed for. So she moved through her life, got a job, moved out of her mother's house, finished school, moved on with her life and never looked back at the things she'd hated and feared and been unable to change before them. She was living for three, after all. She had too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it in. There were things to experience and a life to be lived as fully and completely as she could manage with half the person she could have been dead and buried in a field and alive only in that private space within her, only in dreams, soft and indistinct and never quite right.
She dreamed of him, of them, often. She imagined sometimes in the early morning hours as she woke from one of these dreams, with a heart that ached from missing something she'd only truly had for hours, that she would dream about them the rest of her life, miss them the rest of her life. And she hoped so. She was the only one left alive who knew what Nine's smile had felt like, cool as a chill breeze on a summer's day, what Twelve's laughter had sounded like, sunshine bursting forth from dark clouds. These were things no one else would ever know. No one else would ever miss and she thought the world was a darker place for that. For it never knowing the gift those two had given it or the warmth of Twelve's back as she pressed against him while they raced through the city on a stolen motorbike.
When she was still a teenager, she dreamed of all that might have been if they were still with her. If they were all still together. She dreamed of cold toes and warm mornings and music from cold places and burned food and water, always water. Cool water and warm water everywhere around them, in swimming pools and from garden hoses and what it would be like to have gone with them to the sea. When she woke she did the things she dreamed of. She swam and she ate good food and bad food and went to amusement parks and festivals and traveled and stood at the edge of the sea. Sometimes, most times, she missed them, but the ache was familiar, an old friend, and not one she'd ever feared.
She dreamed most often of standing with them as the cool water swept over their toes at the end of the world where no one could find them and nothing could hurt them.
On those mornings, she woke up longing to stand in a place she'd never been, that had never existed except in her mind, and sometimes she went to visit them so that she could remind herself that that place was not real, no matter how it seemed in her dreams.
When she was older, in university, after she had sex for the first time and it had been vaguely unpleasant and awkward and nothing like what she wanted though she hadn't had the least idea she'd wanted anything in particular at the time, she'd dreamed of them more often in a completely different way than before. Completely different, but also strangely the same. She dreamed of Twelve most of all, of awkward tentative kisses and teasing and laughter and tumbling in and out of bed with him. Of being wanted in that simple way that Twelve had wanted things, things that were normal and ordinary and something he'd never had. Less often she dreamed of Nine's pale hands and serious expression, his drive and purpose and rhythm of the music he lived his life to in the quiet moments in-between. As she grew older and graduated from her university and moved on with her life, she dreamed of them both. Of laughter and cool water and the three of them together in ways she'd never have thought of when she was young, but seemed as natural as breathing in her dreams. Sometimes she woke with tears on her cheeks and a dampness between her thighs that spoke of the intimacy she wanted, but would never truly find.
Time was fleeting and eventually it stole all things away, both good and bad.
She still had her dreams, but they were formless and indistinct and she still ached with missing them as she went through the motions of her daily life, but as the days turned into years she could remember them less and less. She still went and did things, had new experiences so she would have things to share if they ever met again. Even if she didn't remember them as well as she once did, she could still live for them. Even with the images gone, the feelings remained, fresh and wild in her chest as they'd been in those days and hours she'd been with them.
In her thirties, she still remembered expressions and the soft tones of that cold land music that Nine had loved. She still had the tiny music player and some nights, after she had put her husband and her children to bed, she sat up listening to it through an earbud, always the one he had used, leaving her own to dangle unused in her lap.
Sometimes her daughter would wake up and find her crying as she stared out the window in the dark room and she would clamor up in the armchair beside her and listen quietly to that music through the spare earbud. It was difficult sometimes to reconcile the life she had with the life she would have wanted for herself. Still she wasn't unhappy. She had her children and her husband and a life full of places to go and food to eat and things to do.
When she was in her forties, she couldn't remember their faces anymore, but she remembered warmth and the thrill in her chest when Twelve had come back to pick her up and she remembered the grit under her fingernails as she helped bury them where she hoped no one would ever bother them. Where they would be safe. She visited that forlorn, abandoned place every month without fail and her husband would sometimes jokingly call it 'visiting the ghosts' and she supposed she was. Once he'd called it 'visiting her boyfriends' and she'd thrown an orange at his head. She'd never told him about them, never told anyone about them, but people remembered the things they had done. The Athena Project had been big news for a long, long time and all the things Sphinx had done made them memorable, made their messages memorable. When she was younger and wilder and the ache of missing them was fresher, she'd had their word for hope tattoo'd across the rise of her hip, a physical token to carry alongside the memories. She had the tattoo refreshed every few years so the blue was always rich and dark and she could see it in the mirror every morning, brush her fingers across it as she went to sleep each night. To reflect as she slipped into unconsciousness about how much she had needed them, how much she needed them still.
He'd seen enough and connected enough dots to figure out both something and nothing about what she felt for Sphinx and the boys that had created it. Enough to hurt both himself and her, but never enough to understand. She knew that was her own fault for keeping that truth secret and safe inside her, for being unwilling to share it. To share them. The only person who really knew that she'd loved them, even if not all of the why, was Shibazaki and he'd been gone for years. She visited his grave too, though not nearly as often or with the same degree of constancy. He had been friendly, but never a friend. More a partner who shared a secret, a presence to stand beside her in that lonely place, kindness and the lingering smell of smoke. There was an irony to going to stand in another lonely place in order to visit him. She'd met his daughter once or twice, coming and going with flowers or cigarettes, they'd smiled at each other, but there had never seemed to be much to say.`
So it was her fault and perhaps his a little as well as she'd never pretended to be anyone but who she was from day one and he'd known she'd had things she kept from him and parts of herself she could never, would never, give to him. How could she really be to blame that he'd thought that might change with time? That she'd become someone different if he just loved her enough? It wasn't that she didn't care for him. She loved him in her own way, but no one liked to be second best especially to something they wouldn't ever truly know and couldn't begin to understand, to ghosts that lacked even names and faces to hate. Just numbers and masks. They'd had a huge row about it and she'd left the house and spent all day out there in that place with them and the wind had blown warm across her back as she laid above and between them and watched the clouds roll by. That night she'd gone and climbed the big Ferris wheel from that day and remembered how quiet it had been sitting there by herself before he came. How much she hadn't wanted him to come, how much she had. She wasn't sure which car it had been, though she was sure if she'd been able to check them all, she would have been able to find it easily enough. Be able to tell even after all this time. She'd found a railing to sit on instead, halfway up, and stayed there until the police came to yell at her for trespassing. They'd have taken her to jail, probably, but she'd dropped his Shibazaki's name as he'd told her to if she ever ran into trouble and they let her go home with a warning. Admonishing her that she was too old for these sorts of shenanigans and she'd smiled and told them she agreed and then she'd gone back home, dry-eyed, but breathtakingly lonely.
She wondered what life would have been like if they'd lived. If she'd lived and she wished she were still with them, that she would see them again. It seemed strange to wish for so much from virtual strangers after all this time, but she still did. Every day.
She wished for more time with them when she was fifty-three and watching the last of her children graduate from high school. When she was fifty-seven and divorcing a man whose only real fault is that he couldn't compete with boys long dead. She wished for more time even when she was sixty-four and her first grandchild was being born and all she truly remembered of them was the feel of cool water and the sound of boys' laughter and the way her screams as they were taken from each other and from her had left her throat raw for days afterwards. Which had always seemed like too long and not long enough.
When she was eighty-one, she didn't make it out to visit them so much anymore. Her hip was bad and the field was a long way from her little apartment near Cape Erimo. On very bad days, she cried herself to sleep missing something she sometimes feared she'd never truly had at all. But the bad days were rare so most days she tended her garden when the weather was fair and sat inside and read and drank tea when the weather was poor. And often she visited the edges of the island where she could stand and look out at the ocean and it felt like standing at the edge of the world while she waited for them through all her tomorrows until there were no more to be had.
Then one morning, when she was ninety-two, she woke up to the sound of a kettle whistling and realized she'd fallen asleep on her worn, tatty couch and the book she'd been reading lay open against his chest. When she opened her eyes and shifted a little, her back ached and she realized she could hear music, soft and indistinct and familiar. A mug was plunked down on the poor excuse for a coffee table in front of her, steam rising from the liquid within. She glanced up at the man, no, the boy that had put it there. He grimaced a little, as if he hadn't expected her to be awake and was a little annoyed that she was. Like he hadn't wanted to be caught out being kind to her and he lowered his head a little so that his dark hair obscured his eyes, made it more difficult to read his expression.
"It's just tea," he commented, as if to explain why he had no use for her misplaced gratitude. He stood back up and his expression was as cool and remote as it had ever been in those hours she'd spent in their apartment. She wondered how she'd ever thought she'd forgotten the sound of his voice. The soft disdain and awkward kindness. The black of his hair. The shine of his glasses.
She leapt from the couch and threw herself at him, no longer an old woman dying slowly in a lonely apartment at the edge of the sea, but a girl who would spend her life loving the memories of boys she'd barely known. Her hands caught at the back of his dark, well-worn sweater and gripped it hard. She'd never hugged him before, never really touched him at all except in passing and he didn't seem to know what to do with the sudden display of affection. He stood stiff and uncertain, but he let her cling to him, sob against his sweater and hold him so hard that it had to be uncomfortable.
"Wow, I think I'm missing out on all the fun," a cheerful voice called from behind her and her breath stopped in her lungs. She heard him bound over the top of the couch, the worn springs screaming in protest and he laughed and that at least was something she remembered, something she'd never forgotten at all, and he leapt at them both, his arms around them, his warmth pressed to her back. Exuberant and joyful and how could she have thought she'd forgotten what it was to be on the receiving end of all that manic enthusiasm. "You're so late! I should really find a way to punish you." He commented, his breath stirring her hair, short and brown again as it had been when she was a girl, when she was a girl who was more than a little in love with them.
"As long as I can stay, you can punish me all you like," she whispered, her voice muffled before she turned her head a little so she could see his light brown hair and the crinkle his smile caused at the corner of his eye just visible over her sweater-clad shoulder.
"You can't stay," he replied, lifting his head enough that she could see the full brightness of his smile before he leaned in and brushed his lips over her cheek. "But you can come along with us, if you want."
She nodded quickly, definitively and without hesitation, "Okay."