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constellations
(civil wars)
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He spends the day in her wake cleaning her presence from this life, but it is an impossible task.
In the month and a half that they'd stayed in Lightning, the small apartment they'd leased had become imbued with her.
A frivolous floral tea set is restrained to a cabinet he'd never open again, the pile of blankets on the couch where she liked to curl up and read are set aside in a box underneath their—no, his—bed.
Her hat is whisked away, the coffee table moved back to its original position, too far to prop feet upon. The box of homemade sweets the neighbor had given her as a housewarming gift are dumped in the trash.
He stares at the painting of him in the waning light, fingers hesitant against the texture of hardened oil paint—the whorls in the curves of his shoulders, the long sweeping lines in the mussed sheets. He stares at the attention given to his relaxed face, the dark lines of his eyelashes, and after a long moment, he quietly picks up the painting and places it at the back of the closet.
She is a specter he can't shake.
Her smell is in the sheets, and in the weeks to follow, he wakes every morning in the dull light believing the pink of the sunrise to be her. Her rose petal hair, her mischievous smile. He doesn't notice her toothbrush is still there until he knocks over the cup, and his fingers wrap around the offending green thing, snapping it in half.
He goes in the morning to the old shrine he and Sakura had visited in the fog, and as his knees reunite with the cool stone, his hands clasping together in the way his mother had always taught him, he tries to erase her from his memory.
It is better this way, he tells himself. It has to be.
The walk back down the mountainside is slow and tempestuous. The leaves play tricks on him, and the overhanging trees are a reminder of a time when she'd pressed her face into the space between his shoulder blades, weeping for him.
He squeezes his eyes shut, and for a few days, he throws himself back into work. He builds a school, repaves a road, trains until his knuckles bleed.
But still, he returns to their space, and for all the distance placed, he cannot escape her.
He steps on a bobby pin hidden in the carpet, bright red and assuredly hers. His lips tremble, teeth clench, and the heat he'd been holding back for so long burns his eyes, angry tears prickling.
With a shout, he punches a hole through the wall.
He sinks to the ground, hands fisting in the worn carpet, and he succumbs to the truth: there will be no forgetting Haruno Sakura.
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notes: *flees from the previous hiding spot*