A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge at the DFC, B95 – write about despair.
blinders
Once again, he stared at the grave marker. Once again, his mind wandered. Wandered to memories. Wandered to dreams. Wandered to the bitter, biting, wind of reality.
Unfortunately, he wasn't young enough to drown eternally in the dreams. He wasn't young enough to pull blinders over his eyes and stay blind, and there was loneliness and contempt and a whole manner of other negative things around to remind him of what reality appeared to be. There was his family, sometimes. Passing by, never sparing him more than a glance and never speaking. Though, sometimes, he saw the father turn to give him a second glance. But it didn't matter. He didn't stop to talk. He didn't care. They were wrapped in their individual grief as well but they had each other, and they had many other well-wishing companions.
Misery bred company but not for him. His misery was alone to fester, amidst a sea of misery surrounding him. And they were a happier misery. Together, sharing all the parts of his life he couldn't touch, he'd never touched. He sometimes wondered what that little boy would say if he ever stopped him and spoke to him – but no, the father wouldn't allow that, would he? It was part of the reason he'd never touched the child, never spoken to the woman… It was part of the reason he'd ceased to know about his friend…
It was part of the reason he was abandoned, and, if he'd been a child and still had those blinders, he could have believed it was the entire reason.
Except it wasn't. And some of it at least had to have come from the both of them, and them alone. Hiroki had abandoned him, and somewhere, there was blame for both of them. Hiroki's fault was obvious. He was yet to find his own in that matter. Perhaps because he hadn't changed. Perhaps because he hadn't adjusted, hadn't drifted away from the dream and mellowed out, abandoning that other world and adapting to this. But why would he have? It had been their lifetime dream to go to that other world, when dreams like that still existed, when the blinders were still there.
And now Hiroki had abandoned him again. And, really, he should have known this form of abandonment would come as well. What else had been left? He'd lost dreams, friendship, love, possibilities of a family…all while Hiroki had taken those things and gone elsewhere, but some part of him was still wearing blinders, still thinking that things would change, that doors would open and their happy childhood and the future they'd seen back then would come to him again.
But now…there was nothing. Hiroki had taken both possibility and hope, the only things left to take. All that remained were lacklustre memories and the grey, ugly image of reality that wouldn't change. There wasn't even a spark of hatred to dress it up: the one thing perhaps Hiroki deserved to take but hadn't. Because he did not feel it to give. After that abandonment he only still felt an empty hole: sadness and despair.
He wondered if hate would be classed as an ugly or beautiful thing. Because the world as it was now was the ugliest he had ever seen, and the grave marker the pinnacle of it world. And the vague memories he still had of that other world grew more beautiful, more ephemeral, by the day. A paradise, at the end of this poor trodden path in hell. He wondered if death was a way to open that gate, but he discarded that idea after toying only a little with it. Until the human mind to grasp the truth of what lay beyond death, it was too risky an endeavour. There was another way. A way they'd only glimpsed through their childhood and had worked towards understanding – until he'd been abandoned.
But he would continue it. Beyond that lay all he had left: the only beautiful thing, that image beyond the blinders of his childhood, that he kept carefully locked up so the current world couldn't rub it away with dust and grime and soot. And one day, hopefully, he could put those blinders on and see that dream in clarity.