Hey guys, don't mind me. Just messing around with some ideas for a new story. Don't know if I'll continue this or not; thoughts/opinions from readers would be appreciated to help me decide. Thank you!
If only.
If only.
It's strange when you really think about it, I've decided. The future is infinitely undetermined. A hundred million possible outcomes, every second of every day. And yet, out of all those possibilities, somehow they all end up condensed into one: one singular outcome as the future metamorphoses into a brief, elusive present. And then it's over and I'm left staring behind me at a path already tread, thinking over all the other ways that path might have gone.
If only they hadn't canceled school that day. Professional development could have waited, couldn't it? She would have been there, with her students, instead of at home when it happened.
If only I hadn't gone out to the street vendors to buy donburi and miso soup. She wanted miso soup from that vendor, had been craving it for a while. He sold the best in the district. An old family recipe. I wanted some too. It was cold that afternoon, and I offered to walk down to his stall and bring some back for both of us. We were going to cuddle on the futon and eat our steaming meals and watch a movie. A little impromptu celebration, because we never got to spend time together like this on weekdays. Our schedules were so busy back then.
Why didn't I ask her to walk down there with me? I know why. Because it was cold and I didn't want to make her get up from where she was snuggled on the futon, under the blanket, looking half-asleep and content as a cat. That's why I offered to go myself, to bring back some warm food. If only I had made her come with me.
If only the apartment manager hadn't let those men inside the building. He later said there had been nothing suspicious about them. Well-dressed and orderly. They had expressed an interest in renting there, and the manager had obligingly taken them upstairs to show them around some of the vacant apartments. They knocked him unconscious and left him lying in one of the bathtubs.
If only they had eaten him instead! Or (I know how wrong it is to think it, but everything is wrong these days) eaten someone else, anyone else. Any one of the 143 other tenants present in the building at the time of the attack. They managed to tear their way through most of the people on our floor by the time the police and the CCG showed up. They didn't even eat most of them. They just killed them. The people on the floor below heard the screams and sounded the alarm.
If only the police had restored order more quickly while the remaining residents rushed to evacuate. If they had sealed off the area faster, created checkpoints and filtered people through, maybe the ghouls wouldn't have managed to return to the vacant apartment, change into clean clothes, and slip right through the line of wailing sirens and screaming humans. Just walk away as if what they'd done had been nothing to them. Another day, another meal.
If only I had gotten there sooner. The paramedics said she was alive for a few minutes after they found her in our apartment. Alive despite the fact that those men, those ghouls, those monsters had taken her arms and legs and broken them backward at the joints, so she couldn't struggle while they fed on the flesh of her limbs. Her body. The arms she used to drape around me late at night. The legs she always said were chubby, fat. She was embarrassed to wear a skirt around anyone but me. The little curve of flesh between her collarbone and shoulder blade that was the perfect softness for resting my head on while we were dancing. Her body that was hers and that she shared only with me. They ate it up like ravenous dogs. I could smell her blood from the street. The police tried to prevent me from entering the building. The goddamn fools. They were worried about stopping people from going in when they should have been scouring the area to make sure her murderers didn't get out! When I finally forced my way inside, I ran up five flights of stairs and through the broken-down door of our apartment. It was too late. All that was left was her body. I remember how the paramedics were shaking so badly they couldn't get to their feet. They were crawling around on the floor, through the wreckage, looking for a sheet, a jacket, something to cover her with. But it was too late for that as well. I saw everything. I saw everything, and I collapsed in the doorway and screamed and screamed and screamed. I don't remember when I stopped screaming and passed out. I don't remember much about what happened after that, or where I was, or whose hands guided me from room to room and made me food and took it away from me uneaten. Sometimes I think I'm still screaming, like I never stopped. Perhaps I've gotten so used to the sound that I hardly notice anymore.
I do remember some things. I moved out of that apartment building. I moved out of the entire ward, back in with my former foster mother. The woman who had taken care of me since I was ten, who gave me her family name even after I came out to her when I was fourteen. It was her hands that gripped my shoulders during the funeral, her hands that tried numbly to wipe away my tears late at night. It was her voice that coaxed me to eat something, anything, that reassured me over and over that it wasn't my fault. I never would have survived those first few months without her.
Now it's been seven months. Seven months almost to the day since I left her napping on the futon to go buy fucking miso soup from the street vendor. I haven't touched miso since that day. Even thinking about it makes me sick. But it's been seven months now, and my Tokyo friends and mother's friends from the old neighborhood have started talking to me about healing. Finding peace. Moving on. It's not that I don't want to heal. I'd do almost anything to be rid of this vicious, gaping hole in my chest. Walking around every day like a war casualty. I've tried doing the things they say will help. Counseling. Keeping a journal. Meditation. Even dabbling in religion. None of it lets me sleep at night. Nothing takes away the image of her lying there, her limbs all bent the wrong way like a broken doll, gushing blood from every inch of ripped-off skin. Her eyes still open, her face untouched. She wore such a sad expression, lying there, as if in her final moments she thought about all the things she'd wanted to do with her life and realized they would never happen.
Move on? Be happy again? Not likely. For someone like me to find happiness even once in my life was all but impossible, and yet, it happened. What are the chances it could ever happen again? And how could I let it? Permit someone else to love me when my heart is full of her and my brain is full of her and my closet is still filled with her old clothes and my bookshelf with her books? I've kept almost everything. I can't give it away, and when I moved out of my foster mother's home two months ago, I took it with me. It surrounds me every day.
Perhaps that's why I had to come here. Away from it all, to the river where we used to spend our summer evenings. We were in high school then, dating secretly under the guise of being 'friends.' This spot was far enough away from our old neighborhood than we could risk being affectionate in public. We read books together and ate flavored ice shavings, the same pink color as the late-blooming petals in the trees above us. After we graduated high school, we kept coming here in the summer. We had staked out this place as our own. It was here, two summers ago, that we decided to move in together. Last summer we came here on her birthday with a picnic basket and some water balloons. We played like children in the park till evening fell, then we walked home dripping wet and smiled at everyone who stared at us. That memory feels more real than anything going on around me right now as I stand beneath the tree where we once spread our picnic basket. Now it's summer again, and I am here alone.
I think the thing that really breaks me is how pointlessly cruel they were to her. They didn't have to shatter her limbs. Hell, she didn't have to be conscious at all for the horrific devouring of her body. If they had to do it, if there was absolutely no way to alter the universe and change the story up to that point, at least they could have knocked her unconscious so she didn't feel it. They could have had that much mercy. And they didn't have to leave her lying on the floor, gasping for breath through tattered lungs. Hopelessly mutilated like a stripped apple core. They didn't have to do any of that, but they did, because they liked it. They enjoyed her suffering. I know, because the few fifth-floor residents who survived would later tell the press how the ghouls laughed hysterically as they butchered people with their kagune, how they ran them down and crowed to each other about their kill counts over the tortured screams of their victims. It was fun for them. It was sport. I lost my lover and my best friend because they wanted to amuse themselves and she was there.
Maybe that's why I can't even begin to think of moving on. If she had died of a disease or an accident, there would be no one to be angry at. Nothing to blame but our capricious world. In that scenario, I could give myself fully to grief and let it run its course until it left me spent. When I had no more energy to hold on, I would finally have to let go of the pain of what was unalterable. But she didn't die like that, and if it hadn't been for them, she wouldn't have died. She wouldn't have suffered. And the rage I feel because of that is getting in the way of everything else I try to do. Mourning, healing, looking ahead. Living like a normal human being. I can't do any of that when I know they're out there somewhere. That knowledge scalds my heart like boiling water. It messes with my head. Sometimes I look around crowds and wonder if I'd be able to sense them it they were near. After all this time, perhaps they still smell of her blood.
I've been thinking, lately, that maybe I'm going about this process in the wrong order. I've been trying to ignore my anger and focus on mourning, but I'm beginning to suspect that won't work. Maybe I need to give myself to the anger and use it up before I can move on to other things. I need to channel it, harness it, do something with it. I can feel that, deep inside me, it's started to take on a life of its own. And there's only one thing it wants to do with that life. Make sure they can't make anyone else feel this way ever again. The way I feel. The way they made her feel as she lay dying. If I can turn that tide of misery back onto them, I think I'll finally be able to feel something else. Not happiness, certainly, but perhaps the proper tone of grief. And then, some measure of acceptance.
It seems insane, I know. She would panic if she knew what I was thinking. But I can't stop thinking it, even here, in this place where I was happiest with her. The trees are sparser than I remember from last summer; the sky is drab and flat. Even the river water seems polluted, a sickly pale color. I feel like I'm corrupting these gentle memories of our time here with my dark thoughts. I need to do something with them. I need to use them up, and when they're gone, I can finally stop being so angry all the time. She wouldn't have recognized me like this. The person I am now would have been strange to her. But she would have loved me anyway, loved me all the way back to being myself. Of that I am sure.
How to make something out of all the rage that's built up inside me? I'll start by finding the ghouls who ripped her apart. It might take a while, but that's fine with me. It's good to have a purpose in life again. And however long it takes, I know that I will find them. Because, in the end, I am more like them than I could ever let myself believe.