I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

I had a chance to know them, I was blessed with meeting a lot of
people I wouldn’t have had the chance to know.”
Hikari presses her hand to her mouth, in disbelief, in shock, in
sadness, in all things I mirror now.
“Hikari” I try to coax her back to me. “If I wasn’t cursed, I never
would’ve met you.”
She shakes her head, trembling. “You aren’t real.”
“I am.”
I am as real as any person you can see and touch and hear. I am
simply different, younger yet older at the same time, stronger and
weaker, an illusion, an unnatural entity who transcended its purposes
and chose to crawl into the pages of the story.
I shed the same single tear Hikari cries. “I’m just not real in the way
you need me to be.”
“But–but you can leave this place,” she says, clinging to my
existence as she knows it, not because it breaks some kind of
narrative, but because she is slowly creeping towards the same
realization I did when I put her life ahead of my own. “You escaped
with us, you–”
“I can stretch as far as the hospital’s influence goes,” I tell her. “but I
can only stretch so far until I must come home.”
“Sam.” Her voice thins, pinched to a whimper.
What I give her tonight isn’t just the truth of who I am. It is the truth of
our relative impossibility. I clung to it with Sam as I clung to it with
her. This dream of becoming one being together forever.
I knew that there would come a day of no tomorrows.
I knew, and I cry anyway.