Work Text:
When Tobio was young, he thought melancholy was a type of flower.
The way it rolled off the tongue made him imagine an idyllic kind of flower, ones painted in the fairytale meadows of picture books. A flower that blew in the breeze like a dandelion, that you wore in your hair like a daisy, that his sister placed under his chin to glow like a buttercup.
As he grew up practicing in the yard, whether it be passing the volleyball to Ojiisan or to himself, he often admired the family garden, the afternoon sun cradling waxy leaves and saturating petals as it started to kiss the horizon. The garden was tended to with care, manicured with a love and diligence he found himself implementing towards his own maintenance and growth, weeding hangnails as he had the flowerbeds.
Many days he would lie on his back near the hydrangeas, tossing a volleyball up to a sea of cotton clouds, feel the calluses forming on his fingertips, and wish to one day grow his own garden, so that he may lie and watch the cumulus drift by, in the embrace of his melancholies.
Tobio would often be sent out back with Miwa to fetch herb clippings for dinner, bare feet brushed with the evening dew of grass, leaving two sets of prints - one big, one small - as they hopped between stepping stones.
Somewhere, there are photographs of him placing Vabochan on those same stones, or perched next to him on the porch, before he eagerly bounded into the grass, passing the ball back and forth with Miwa and Ojiisan.
As the years went by, however, it had seemed that both he (and the garden) had run out of time (thyme).
There was a week where his waking moments were haunted by monochrome - hydrangeas and buttercups exchanged for vases upon wreaths of lilies, whitecaps along a blustering sea of pitch. At such a young age, a quiet and steady companion had been uprooted from his life - as were the herbs: slow-cooked, fresh dinners evolving into a rarity in favor of hurried premade meals.
The night of the burial, he had lied in the grass in the only proper suit he owned and gazed up at the cemetery of stars, witnessing how brightly they burned, daring to continue to shine from beyond the grave. Tobio took a breath, evening air pooling like antifreeze in his lungs. He was utterly numb to the world.
Not even the man on the moon dared to show its face that night, a tossed volleyball taking its place in the sky. The moon mourned. Tobio merely set the ball again. And again. And again.
He didn’t cry that night.
The stars were his only witness as a seed took root and sprouted in the gaping hole of his chest, the ghost of calloused fingertips, weathered from time and devotion, leaving an imprint on his soul.
Melancholies, Tobio discovered, smelled of dewdrops and soil and salt.
He was naive to think that once his garden had started that his passions would be coming up like roses, believing hours upon hours hitting the pavement on daily runs or serving in the gymnasium late into the night would cultivate and bring his goals to fruition, to bear fruit.
Yet the echo of a denied set upon paneled floors reverberated through his entire being. His hands shook. Ragged hangnails littered his nail beds like weeds.
He was mistaken.
Then again, most children are.
It was much rather another kind of flower which grew within him, known not to grace the fairytale pages of childhood. It didn't bloom just to be picked and asked questions of love - it doesn't know whether she loves you, or if he loves you not. It blooms just to bloom, grows just to grow, and thrives to be alive. For if Tobio had a flower for every tear he refused to shed, their fragrance would reach the stars.
Now, Tobio stood among hydrangeas, this time on an apartment balcony as opposed to the backyard of his youth. He stood there, in that pseudo-slice of Eden, donning a crown of melancholies in the moonlight and the incandescence of a city feigning sleep. He gazed up above at the garden of night, for the stars held life's greatest truths.
In rare moments of stillness such as these, ones without volleyball, where his gaze would shift in and out of focus, he would look up and fixate on a star, before feeling the phantom weight of a hand enveloping his own. Crescent moons decorated his palms as he chased the feeling, grasping only at air.
The night was clear, silken and velvet.
He searched for meaning beyond the wings of glittering Aquila, as if the fabled eagle which bore Zeus' thunderbolts also held the secrets to conquering the qualms of life between its nebulous feathers, lest he be smited where he stood.
The melancholies which adorned his head bloomed in hand with the thyme in a planter along the railing, resting next to his fingertips, both recently manicured. Yet not even the midnight blossoms could tear his gaze from the night sky, from the eagle in perpetual flight, wings flapping in time with the beat of his heart.
The wind chime sang delicately in the breeze.
Twin droplets rolled over and down a heart-shaped curve - one of chlorophyll, the other flushed by the cool night air - before descending to the concrete - one five stories down by the street, the other less than two meters, landing between a pair of worn slippers.
Tobio could not remember the last time he let himself cry, could not recount the months upon months the tears were frozen in an eternal winter within him, before yielding to spring sun. He took a shaky breath.
Dewdrops. Soil. Salt.
Hydrangea. Thyme.
Home.
It mattered not what the real definition of melancholy was to Tobio. After years upon years of cultivating his own garden, it was irrelevant. For it turned out that melancholies were flowers that bloomed inside our hearts.
Planted by our most secret desires - kept under a lock with no key.
Nourished by our fears - of what's to come and what could have been.
And watered by our tears.