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Dear Yuki,
Let’s preface, I am not in love with you.
But, you know, you really are winter. You’re the untouchable snowflake: purely for looks and display and never to be touched and held and caressed. Never to be anyone’s, especially not mine. What would have happened if you fell in love with me instead? What if it was me who you wrote songs for, who got to feel how your hand felt in mine, who I could have touched? What if it was me you melted for?
I could never be like you, I could have never caught up to you, or Mafuyu. You always take something and make it better ten, hundred, thousand-fold. It’s the same words, the same chords. Yet you somehow always sang it better, played it better, made me slowly and agonizingly ache for the way you move your fingers, the way your voice lilted at the chorus, the way you said my name like you didn’t have a clue of its effect on me. And then sometimes, even for a tiny moment, I wished from the bottom of my heart that song wasn’t written for Mafuyu.
Now I play your song- the same words, the same chords… the same feelings.
I don’t feel contempt for Mafuyu… After all, you two were essential to each other and pretty much made for one another. Like you were carved in a way that could fit perfectly against Mafuyu. I could see the way your eyes lit up when you saw him, you know? He brought warmth to you. You didn’t have to be winter with him. I just can’t be that for you. I’ll always just be the substitute. The piece that’s just ‘good enough’. The runner-up. The childhood friend. And never more.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not in love with you. But once in a while, I remember how you would give me the biggest grin after a show, alongside a subtly snarky comment, and I wish I was. I’m not in love with you.
I wish it wasn’t you. It would be so easy, to forget about you, to forget how I would yearn over your laughter and your smile and the way your hair was always a little too long and how I always had to lend you a pencil and you, you, you. Of course, winter comes every year, and I have to try to pull myself out of not-love again and again.
When will I get to see you again? When will I hear your song again? It doesn’t have to be sung for me. It’s okay if it’s not for me. I just want to be able to see you, hear you, admire you for one more time.
I’ll always be tugged between being in a state of wanting to be your everything and wishing you were nothing to me. It’s a complex feeling, not-loving you. It’ll always be like this. I’ll always never be enough to ask you to stay and I'll always never be enough to go with you. It’s excruciatingly stagnant, and that’s how it’ll always be. This depth of a never-ending winter.
It’s almost laughable. Why did it have to come out like this? What did I do wrong? Why did it have to be me? I’ll ask myself over and over, turning out, looking under, and checking again and again to find an answer.
As someone we both know has said,
“Winter is coming soon.” And when it does, will I have to do this all over again?
I’m not in love with you, and it’s the one thing I wish I could’ve changed.
Yours,
Hiiragi