Here it is. Finally.
My heart broke a bit, writing this. Just a little warning.
Thank you all for reading, especially those who have stuck around since the beginning. It's been a long, tumultuous journey, and I'm glad for the support and encouragement to continue.
I hope it was worth your time.
Chapter 25: Gokigenyou
"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'it might have been.'"
-John Greenleaf Whittier
There are some things that cannot be changed. Like the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That night follows day and trees need light to grow. These things are absolute, unchangeable: laws of the universe that are not meant to be broken- unable, really, to be broken.
In this same way death is unavoidable. It has no master of any kind and all are eventually welcomed into its dark embrace.
Fukuzawa Yumi was no exception.
She died in her hospital bed sometime that night, quietly slipping from this earthly realm with one last whisper of a breath, the tiniest of gasps. Her small chest, at the same time, ceased its weak rise and fell still, her closed eyelids relaxed, and the muscles of her face smoothed tranquilly as though in the midst of a deep, heavy sleep. Only this sleep was not temporary. It was not one Yumi would ever wake from. Her doe eyes had seen the last thing they were going to see the week before as she stared lovingly into her onee sama's sapphire gaze for that one, final time, uttering those simple, loving words:
"Gokigenyou, onee sama."
Sachiko, looking back on it months later- it took her that long to even begin to think sanely of the event –would only remark that it was a very Yumi-like thing to be said. Only an absent minded girl like her would think to say goodbye with a greeting.
Only her Yumi.
Though Yumi's friends and family had been given weeks to get used to the idea of Yumi's death, none of them were prepared when it finally came. How could they be? No one bore it well- no one was calm and dignified and as together as one would think, as girls of Lillian, they would be.
Yumi's demise, to put it simply, broke them.
Mercilessly.
Mere days after her onee sama had been buried, Touko quit acting. It was her passion, her life, the source of her energy, and she thrived on it. It served as the platform in which her stubbornness and occasional haughty manner could be taken, transformed into something beautiful- something others longed to touch and hold and claim as their own.
Or, it had been. Not anymore. Not without her onee sama.
Not without Yumi.
She could not bear to perform, could not stand being caught in the accusatory, blinding glare of spotlight, on a stage that had once acted as her haven, dressed in all of her finery, desperately searching the crowd for a girl she knew would not be there. The onee sama she no longer had.
It simply hurt too much.
No one blamed her for it. It would be hypocritical, when they had their own methods of escape as well.
Each, it seemed, equally futile.
Sei began to drink. She'd done so before, strictly for fun- alcohol being an excuse for her to become even more of a flirt –but after Yumi died she fell into the habit of drinking long and hard. She did so alone, stuck with her heavy thoughts in the dark solitude of her university room and could not, for the longest time, get out of the practice. She welcomed the haze that came with drinking cheap wine and drinking it by the bottle. She welcomed not having to think, the dullness that came with a tongue thick on poison. It prevented her from having to dwell on the pain that beat mercilessly at her heart, the pain of losing that girl- that sweet, innocent girl! –so senselessly, to the world of the dead. A realm none of them could see or touch.
Now, though, Sei would give anything to see her Yumi chan again; anything and everything. But what she had to give would not be taken. Yumi was dead and there was no bringing her back.
No amount of wine the former rosa gigantea consumed would change this horrible fact.
Yoshino turned to Rei as she had done countless times in the past, both by force of nature and habit. The older girl had always been her form of support and she clung to her now with desperation, her sorrow unintentionally dragging on the tall girl as well so that their grief was a mutual, shared thing; Yoshino hurting at the loss of Yumi and Rei, along with this pain, hurting for the loss Yumi's death had caused in Yoshino.
The younger, quite simply, lost the spunk that made her who she was; Yoshino, the girl with a dry wit and clever, amusing tongue, who always had a pithy reply for everything- a little joke to lighten the atmosphere and get people laughing.
But things just didn't seem funny anymore. Not in a world that had become so bleak.
A world now deprived of her best friend.
Rei, who was, and always had been, soft at heart (too soft, she woefully agonized in the face of this tragedy) did her best to become the strong one. It was hard, even downright impossible at times. Her gentle nature was not used to taking charge, to being firm and unyielding so that she could get Yoshino out of bed when the younger girl hardly had the will to open her red, tear marked eyes. She was not used to burying her emotions and simply gritting her teeth as she forcefully dragged her cousin from her room when the latter had spent a restless night sobbing and wailing her regrets, her heartfelt pleas- "Why Rei, why?" -neither understanding and both equally helpless to come up with an answer. She was not used to shaking Yoshino from stupors and bringing the younger girl food after she had stared, hour upon hour, at pictures of a certain smiling pigtailed girl, the urge to eat forgotten and near nonexistent. Yet even though she was not used to these many agonizing tasks Rei did what she could. She knew that otherwise they would both become lost, and that was something she simply was not willing to let happen.
She would not lose Yoshino. Ever.
Not in the way Sachiko had lost Yumi.
Shimako too, at least, had her comfort- though in the beginning, it was hardly enough. Nonetheless she leaned on Noriko—and did so heavily --her love and one means of support. There was many a day when the graceful, dignified girl that was rosa gigantea- admired by the masses for her quiet beauty and charm -would simply break down in hysterics. Many a day where she would simply collapse against her petite souer, slender chest heaving with sobs she could not get a grip on nor stifle.
Not that she didn't try. God know how she tried! But in the end the sorrow was too much for her and she could not bear it.
No one could.
So it was her petite souer, heart heavy and world weary, who did her best to make everything better; kissing the beautiful tears from her onee sama's curved cheeks as they fell (her own mingling with them as she did) almost as though, in the process, she hoped to devour her love's despair.
It didn't cure the older girl of her grief, but it helped.
And then, finally, there was Sachiko.
Beautiful, lovely, broken Sachiko.
How the world wept for the poor former Rosa Chinensis, for she did graduate, even if it was in a daze; even if she only remembered bits and pieces of the ceremony. Even if her broken heart was occupied entirely with something else, someone else, so that she received her papers with lifeless hands and a blank stare and had to be helped back to her seat by a shaken Rei, stumbling forward as though blind without an iota of her former, prideful grace.
How far she had fallen, that stunning, fragment of a girl, with her raven hair and large, haunted sapphire eyes.
Impossibly far.
To the wretched, aching hearts of the yamayurikai, they feared it was a fall she would never recover from. She who had lost her other half- her better half, she had once joked to Youko. That person who made her whole.
Yumi.
There were no words to describe her sorrow. Words did not encompass the grief she felt, the one that chewed her up and spat her out to lie limp and uncaring on the floor of her bedroom, day after day, week after week, barely aware that she existed at all save for the constant ache of complete and utter loss that tore mercilessly at her chest and refused to leave, even in the darkest hours of the night and the brightest hours of the day.
How wretched the others thought, not condescending but sympathetically, their own throats closing up at the mere thought of her.
How sad.
She ate very little and drank even less. She stared out at everyone and everything in the world as though seeing nothing with eyes as dead as the place where her soul had once resided. Now, it was bare, bare of the one person who had made her existence worth living:
Yumi.
She saw her sometimes, when she was alone. Quick, fleeting sightings that made her head whirl and the blood pump in her veins so that she almost felt whole again.
Her Yumi.
She would enter unobtrusively, hovering in the dark, murky corners of her bedroom, when twilight fell and shadows graced their presence. Just a flash of her really, a sliver that disappeared if Sachiko turned to face her, gone before the former rosa chinesis could lift a hand out and touch her, as if to verify that she was, in fact, real. It was then that the young Ogasawara, in her bleary state, would imagine herself to catch other glimpses, flickers of nothingness that haunted her imagination relentlessly and stirred up recollections that were too painful to really be healthy. Sometimes, it made Sachiko's heart pound, these unearthly, nostalgic apparitions.
Other times, it seemed to throb and ache.
Yumi was everywhere. Sometimes, she appeared in shimmering mirages across the street, standing quietly in empty doorways and sitting unobtrusively in vacant seats on the bus, a ghostly specter of what she had once been. Sachiko, in these instances, would find herself almost calling out to her- hope rising in her chest before she could stop it -when suddenly the pigtailed visage would vanish again, as quickly as it had come.
But still, she saw her.
She was there, in the reflections of shop windows and pools of water on the street, gracing the surfaces of mirrors and reflective surfaces- brown eyes, brown hair, twin colored ribbons, bashful grin -there, so close, a mere flicker away!- but at the same time, untouchable. Sometimes, she was smiling that beautiful smile Sachiko remembered so well, kind and honest and enthusiastic.
Other times, it was her small, pale face that haunted her, frozen in the stillness of death.
The young Ogasawara could not get her out of her head, her heart. The image was stuck, mingling with the pain, flowing through her entire body and soul so completely she was drowning in the entirety of it: Yumi.
She wanted to touch her and hold her and kiss her- she wanted to whisper sweet nothings into her ear and brush her hair with her fingertips, to recall the silky feeling of it against her skin. She wanted to simply walk down the street with her, side by side, happy and content as their hands intertwined and secretive, shared smiles danced across their lips. But she couldn't because she was gone- dead. She would never feel her skin again, she would never touch her lips again, she would never stare into those bigger than life eyes and hear that innocent laugh and oh god it hurt so much she wanted to die, again and again, to be dead, because then at least she would be with Yumi and she would not have to feel this terrible ache that was being alive and being alone!
It hurt more than she'd ever thought was humanly possible.
And she could not bare it.
It was Yumi she was thinking of when she slipped the pills into her palm and stared at them with more intensity than she had stared at anything in the few weeks beforehand. It was that phrase she imagined hearing in her ears- "Gokigenyou, onee sama" when she put them on her tongue, a ghost of a smile on her lips as she swallowed, thinking of those pigtails and the prospect of tugging gently on one of them, serenity filling her as she imagined Yumi's exclamation of "onee sama!" accompanied by her tell tale blush.
She imagined, then, that her hands were the ones shaking her- such small hands, Yumi, so delicate -as she slipped into the blissful darkness, her warmth as she was curled against someone's heaving chest, shrill, distant cries spiraling through her ears and away, disappearing like stones cast into deep, endless waters.
And it was her name she whispered brokenly "Yumi," when she woke in the blinding white of the hospital room sometime afterward, a sob tearing its way from her chest at the realization that she had failed, that the distance between them- such a great, lonely distance -was still in place, her eyes closing against the sight of her disheveled, heart broken onee sama, because hers was not the face she wanted to see.
The pain washed over her and it was as if she had lost her all over again.
Yumi.
Her name was the one she mumbled with weary lips as she drifted into exhausted slumber, uncaring of the gentle, trembling hand that stroked her hair, the soft, thick exclamation of "Oh Sachiko," so sad it would have been impossibly painful to the younger girl had she heard it. Yet her mind was preoccupied with thoughts of her, memories of her, love for her, and so Youko's words were not the ones that she wrestled with in the throes of unconsciousness. There was Yumi, only Yumi.
Now and always.
It remained that way for some time. Her thoughts dark, her disposition dark, her entire world dark as the light that had once guided her had been snuffed out, leaving her groping for something to show her the way as she stumbled blindly about, grief her only companion. She thought it would never get better, that things would never get easier, and more than once she found herself in her bathroom, several weeks after she had been released from the hospital, a razor pressed against her wrist.
It did not break her skin but she thought about letting it. She imagined, again, how much easier it would be to succumb to the darkness, to say a silent goodbye to the world as she slipped from it like she imagined the blood would slip from her veins, quietly and without fuss. The pain would be gone, the terrible ache, and her lips almost quirked into a smile at the idea of the relief it would provide. But it was Youko's words that came to her then, words that had been spoken in her hospital bed as the former rosa chinensis dully grieved the loss of her failed attempt.
"We can't lose you Sachiko," the older girl sobbed, the sound harsh in the otherwise still room. A wailing that reached into the numbness surrounding Sachiko's heart. She looked up reluctantly and against her will felt her emotions stir at the sight of the blotchy face that greeted her, shocked despite herself at the disheveled appearance of her onee sama.
She had never seen Youko so undone and it was honestly frightening.
The older girl attempted to swallow her cries but they escaped anyway as she bowed her head, her body shaking with emotion. "We can't lose you too," she whispered. "Not you."
The 'not like we lost Yumi' was not spoken, not out loud, but in the heavy air it was implied, sitting somewhere amidst Youko's tears.
To say that Sachiko was shocked would be an understatement. Never could she recall having seen Youko cry before and certainly not in the way she was then, hunched morosely over the hospital bed as though she no longer had the strength to sit up straight, her pale fingers gripping Sachiko's painfully tight, as though afraid to let go, delicate shoulders heaving with the force of her sobs. It did something to Sachiko, cracked the uncaring exterior she had allowed herself to slip into, as one slender hand reached over to cup her stunned face, effectively getting her attention. Dark eyes had met her own in that moment, tears spilling from them and falling on to the younger girl's skin.
"Yumi loved you Sachiko, loved you with everything she had." Her voice cracked as she said this and she had to pause for a moment, thoughts of the young girl flashing through her head so that she had to take a breath and steady herself before she could hope to continue. The bedridden girl beside her closed her eyes at the mention of that name- her name -unable to help the pain that stabbed through her heart at its utterance (so much pain!) but Youko forced herself to finish what she had begun, her voice shaky but determined in its desperation. "She loved you so much, with every ounce of that big heart inside her tiny body. She loved you in a way I can only dream of being loved by somebody, and you loved her too. That's why this is so hard."
Again Sachiko flinched, her hands gripping the sheets of her hospital bed as though in the hopes of tearing them. Why was she bringing this up? She knew this. She knew it in the very depths of her bones, in the core of her being. The love was there, the ache was there, and neither was ever going to disappear. Didn't Youko understand that? Didn't she realize that she just wanted the pain to go away?
It hurt so much.
It must have been in her eyes, her desolation, because Youko's fingers were suddenly digging into her shoulder blades as her gaze bore into her, relentless in its command for attention. And though Sachiko wanted to look away, to fade away, to dissolve into the ground or air or just something, to not be here, she looked back at her and listened as the older girl continued.
"I know it hurts. It hurts us too Sachiko, and we did not love her the way you loved her. We get it, we really do. It's cruel and its unfair and I can't stand what its doing to you, what its done to us!"
Again she stopped, her features tightening as sorrow rushed over her in a wave but again she found the strength to push forward, her eyes never leaving Sachiko's as she took another deep breath.
"She's gone Sachiko. We loved her, you loved her, and she died anyway." Another sob tore from her throat and Sachiko felt her insides burning, her gaze too as hot tears slipped down her cheeks, this time her own. Youko's words seemed to strike her very soul as she spoke them, ringing with such truthfulness that they could not be ignored. "She died before she should have with so many things she didn't get to do. It's horrible but it's true. She's gone."
Before Sachiko should shout at her to stop, to say that she couldn't take it anymore, she whispered something that made her freeze in her tracks. Something that shook her aching being.
"But not completely. As completely asinine as it sounds-" a bark of laughter that sounded more like a sob escaped her then as she finished "-a part of her lives on in us. In you."
Angrily she wiped at her tears, the look she sent Sachiko almost challenging, as though daring the younger girl to protest. When she didn't, more words spilled forth. "She's in your memories. Nothing could make you forget her. And she can be in your future too."
At Sachiko's broken look she smiled sadly, her hand drifting back to her petite souer's to grip it with all of the comfort she could offer. "Maybe not in the way you want, maybe not physically, but she lives on here." She pressed her hand softly against Sachiko's now heaving chest, her expression remaining fierce. "If you can't live for us, live for her. If your family and your friends aren't enough for you, let her be. Let everything you do be for her. When you open your eyes, let her see the world from them. Do the things she will never get to do, live in her memory. Just... live. It's what she would have wanted."
"It's all any of us want."
She succumbed to her despair then, sobs over taking her once more as she fell upon her petite souer and Sachiko, effectively stunned and emotionally drained, clung to her as she sobbed, revealing for the first time the entirety of her emotions. They were dark and heavy and begging for help and though it pained Youko to listen to her she was glad to hear it, to know that maybe, just maybe, they stood a chance after all.
Youko's words stuck with Sachiko, even as her depression remained. They were not enough for her to revert back to the girl she had once been. Her eyes were still missing that spark and often her moods remained bleak, shrouded in the sorrow of what she had lost and what seemed to be a permanent anguish for it. But even when it was bad enough for her to stand in front of the mirror in her dimly lit bathroom, gaze blank and her razor blade pressed ominously against her flesh, she never made the cut. And as time passed, days turning into weeks and weeks into months, she began to smile slightly at jokes people made. Occasionally she would even laugh, the sound genuine, and appreciate a good thing when it came to pass. One day she even woke up and her first thought was not of Yumi, a minor accomplishment even if the day following it and the one after it were.
She still had her bad days where everything seemed to go wrong. Like the morning she had gotten ready to head to her English seminar at the university only to break down at the sight of a girl with green ribbons holding back a pair of soft pigtails.
She had spent the whole night crying, her nightmares laced with images of blood stained fingers and lips, the words "I love you onee sama" haunting her sleep. Her heart would still stop in her chest whenever she happened to pass the statue of Maria sama, recollections of crooked ties and smiles overwhelming her weary mind.
Still, she lived.
She got up in the morning and went to class. She made new friends even if she remained closed off and somewhat mysterious to them and she managed to keep in touch with most of the yamayurikai, those she was closest too, and went on outings with them. She tried new restaurants, went out to the movies, even took a road trip with Sei and Youko to kyoto, hoping to see all that she could see because she knew her onee sama was right.
She had to live, not only for herself but for Yumi too.
She could feel her love in her chest even now, and the pain, though still present, had managed to die down so that it wasn't foremost on her mind. Gradually, infinitesimally, she healed. She did not try to forget her love but immersed herself in it so that she could, in turn, love more fully.
So when she greeted new people she did it with a polite "gokigenyou," hoping that wherever Yumi was she knew that she was missed and loved and remembered.
What more can any of us ask for in life?