I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

“You’re not Hamlet,” I bite. “You’re my Hamlet.”
She looks me up and down and thinks I’m kidding.
“I mean it.” My voice echoes. “He’s not like you. He wouldn’t get up
early just so Sony would have someone to wake up to. He wouldn’t
make Neo laugh.
He wouldn’t listen to C’s monologues about music. He wouldn’t
believe in artists, draw endless universes or raise little plants. He’s
not like you.”
Under my voice, Hikari’s face blanks. The shape of her hand
beneath that blanket engrains itself into my wanting. I want to touch
her again. For real this time. I want to draw to the surface of the
water and breathe again if it means I can breathe her. Reality be
damned.
“I never feel anything,” I whisper. “But every time I remember how
little you think of yourself, I feel angry. I feel like banishing anyone
and everyone who ever made you believe you deserve to be alone.
Because that kind of pain, it– it can ruin people, it can make them
lose faith in everything, just like Hamlet did, but you? You look at me
more than anyone ever has, and no one ever looks twice at me. I’m
a skull in a graveyard. I’m empty.”
Hikari’s breath shakes in her mouth as she leans forward. “You’re not
empty, Sam.”
“I am.” That is an undeniable truth, not a stale one, “yet somehow
you find a way to see something in me in a way no one ever has.”
“Sam.”
“Yes?”
I lean to meet her on the very edge of this verging distance we are
but a moment away from obliterating. And then she asks, “Can I kiss