She had always liked tulips. She said that they reminded her of me. Especially the blue ones she claimed, cause they were the ones that always seemed to attract bees.
I stand, shoulder to shoulder, with her brother, Kisuke, as Ichigo makes his speech and I try to choke back the tears. We all wear a tulip, and I made sure I got a blue one. Ichigo steps down from the podium and takes his place on the other side of Ayame, my daughter, as Kisuke goes up to make his speech. I barely pay attention as I stare at the blown up picture of her, smiling and laughing. I divert my eyes as the pain swells to an almost unbearable level as I remember taking the picture. I'm called up next. My shoulder is squeezed by Kisuke as he goes to stand by his neice and he whispers to me,
"If you can't get through your speech, just let me know Soi-Fon. I'll say it for you, if I have to." I nod as I take my place, next to the picture that I can't look at.
"I know I'm supposed to be talking about…" I choke and can't say her name. Instead I motion to her picture.
"But… I can't think of anything that has already been said. So, instead, I'm gonna talk about the woman I married. You see the person that everyone has been describing was the woman my wife became. The woman I initially fell in love with was different. She was strong, and smart, and sexy, however she was also insecure and unstable and just generally hurting. But she didn't let that stop her. She went after what she wanted, and I can't think of one single thing that stopped her. One single thing, except, just maybe, her legs.
My wife loved to run. Adored it. It made her feel at peace. So when she was attacked and left paralysed from the waist down, that, for her, was the end. She couldn't do anything, in her minds eye. She couldn't care for Ayame properly, despite the fact that she was the one to have carried her. She could no longer teach P.E. Heck she couldn't even go down the shops alone anymore. But through all that time, no matter how bad she felt, she struggled on with a smile on her face. She learnt how to make her wheelchair go incredibly fast and then used to race Ayame down the river. She did everything she could to make sure that she lived a normal life. That was the woman I married. Not the frail broken little thing that everyone has been describing today, the woman who died with a smile on her face. I don't want to remember her.
I want to remember the woman who laughed as she raced round and round the living room in her wheelchair, making herself and her daughter dizzy. I want to remember the woman who carried on teaching sports at a high school and still took part in teacher versus pupil football matches with special sticks that looked like feet. I want to remember…I want to remember the woman that I loved and married, who, even on our wedding day, didn't wear shoes or a suit or a dress. I want to remember the individual who could charm the birds out of the trees then catch them as they tried to fly away.
I want to remember the woman I initially met in college. The woman who obsessed over Tulips and refused to let me leave the house if I wasn't wearing one…" I placed my hand on her coffin before grabbing the bunch of blue tulips from my purse and placing them where her chest would be.
"I want to remember Yoruichi Shihion. The goddess she truly was."
SBHNH: Yet another thing that was floating around my documents that I found recently.
There's hundreds of these things I swear.
Hope you enjoyed it, I wrote it aaaaages ago, like over a year... man I need to check my stuff more often...
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