I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

“Sony.” My voice shakes. “Why?”
Sony’s escapades, the ones where she fled from Eric’s watchful eye,
they never seemed purposeful, but they were. She never stole for
herself. She stole for her kids. She spent her time with them. Not
because they were sick, but because that’s who Sony is. Like a
child, she is curious and fiery, and brutally beautiful. She lives for the
races, the thrills, and the games. She rescued a broken cat and gave
it to a place where broken people come to heal simply because it is
her nature.
“Did you see the toll it took on my mom?” she asks. “Having to see
me gradually become half of who I used to be?”
“Your mother adored you.” I shake my head. “Every part of you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Sony says. The materials keeping her alive
strapped to her chest blur in her periphery. “I couldn’t take the risk
knowing the child might end up like me. It wouldn’t be fair to it.”
Sony cherishes children. It isn’t till now that I understand just how
much she cherished the child she never had.
Every fantasy I ever had of Sony as a woman starts to fade, an old
photograph I never got to take withering. I saw her, somewhere in a
distant future that doesn’t exist. I saw her with a lover and a child in
her arms. She blew endless kisses, nuzzling a baby with its mother’s
wild red hair and little freckles that danced when it laughed.
Tears stream down Sony’s jaw as she catches that picture in me.
Then, they stream down mine.
“It’d only be a chance,” I whisper.
Sony smiles. A smile of acceptance marred by sadness.
She knows it’d only be a chance.
But a chance is enough.