I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

Sony stops chewing altogether, bright eyes dull behind a veil of
something that brings her pain. They draw to her lap much like her
hand draws to her stomach, as if observing a memory.
“Yeah,” she says, but it’s a lie. “Have you ever been hiking?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s amazing, Sam. You have to try it.” She pokes me for
emphasis. “I was so close to the top of a mountain, you know. I could
see the ocean from up there and everything.” Her voice gains a
breathy quality, wondrous, like rather than a drearily lit hall and a trio
of steel elevator doors, the sea folds out before us.
“I wish I had wings,” she says, like a kind devil that used to have
them on her back. “I could’ve flown free over the water forever.”
I find this intimate. Listening to someone get lost like that. It’s akin to
reading Neo’s words that he lets too few people see.
Sony grins, chocolate staining her teeth. “You should come hiking
with me one day.”
Sony and I talk most of the night. I discover hiking and chocolate for
the first time. Chocolate, as Sony and my tastebuds teach me, is one
of the greatest things in the world, right up there with Wuthering
Heights. Sony says she doesn’t read much. I tell her about Neo. At
first, she doesn’t believe that he’s a real person. She tells me about
her mother, a temperate woman who raised a beastly thing. Sony
laughs at herself some more. When she grows restless, I show her
around the hospital. By the time dawn stretches through the
windows, Sony returns to her room and presses endless kisses to
her mother’s face.
After that night, Sony is discharged. I don’t see her for some time.
That vending machine misses our nightly conversation. I let myself
trail the scuff marks in her memory. I even show Neo chocolate. He