She told me that he was always so careful, that the first time he had her on his bed he cried into her breasts. He exhaled her name slowly each time, then chanted it like a song; their bodies in a raindance, clouds frantically responding and covering her mind and irises. She paused, sometimes, in her retelling to me. She would stare at the ground as though it were his eyes, silent as though his ‘I love you’ was whispering in her ears.
She said it was her fault. He had a brilliant mind. He knew Napikov and Shakespeare like the veins in her wrists. He knew Masaoka Shiki and City of Trees as well as her body. Or maybe better than her body. She said that he called her mature for a child, but that she must not be growing anymore. She was still ten years old inside, but now it was just that she had breasts.
And she admitted that she was no poet, that she was merely an observer scribbling sentence fragments and wording her rapid pulse on paper with torn and jagged edges. She was a child who blushed, and she did not like classical music, and Yoshino in the Moonlight was pretty but hard to follow. She stared at her wrists, blood vessels and branched blue lines her roadmap. Then she shook her head and murmured that she couldn’t find his love anymore.
Slowly, she talked less. To me. To everyone. She gained weight, then lost it tenfold. Her soft hair paled and thinned and then became a lumpy ponytail; effortless.
He waved at me once in passing, unknowing, and all at once I understood her silence. There was a strip of gold on his left finger. And her hands were bare.
I wanted to tell her that she was just sixteen years old, I wanted to tell her that love was not reciting the English or knowing all there was of literary spring in Japan. I wanted to tell her that she had a pretty face and that her body was still as soft, her eyes—with a little hope—could still brighten again. I wanted to tell her that somebody would mirror all of the love she had to give, if not today, then someday. I wanted to tell her, but she wasn’t in school.
She didn’t leave a note. Whoever found her, I hope they were gentle, I hope they did not damage her name and label her insane. It would be hard to see otherwise, I suppose, to open the bathroom door and find the definition of loveliness and chances and time lying cold and still. Her wrists were red, rolled carpets bleeding around her like bloodwings.
They call it suicide, but I’m sure she was looking. She sat on the tiles with a razor, slashing at every word of love he’d ever spoken to her. She seared the skin that his hands used to brush. And she searched for the literature he’d memorized in sync with her anatomy.
Growing exhausted in her search, she found nothing and lost the will to try. Unable to understand the poetry, she watched herself open and did not realize that she had become it. Wide and unlimited, like the cherry trees bursting into bloom. She closed her eyes, and gave herself to the unyielding spring.
-excerpt from somnambulating's CCS fan fic, City of Trees
somnambulating. City of Trees. 2004. 23 Oct 2006. <http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1734371/1/>
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