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The whisper of a goodbye is not always neat and straightforward. They don't always end with a comment of gratitude or a ‘let's keep in touch.’ Parting gifts aren't guaranteed and silent promises aren't always made. On occasion, farewells are met with a scream of terror – the shatter of a glass heart that is unrepairable. Often, they’re met with piercing silences; a goodbye left unheard tearing it’s inhabitant apart slowly – torturously. It’s jagged edges of “please don’t go,” and a hand ripping away from a palm in a rush, “I have to.”
It’s late nights staring at a roof wondering what happened, listening desperately for even a hint of closure. It’s a light switch flicking on and the end of a prolonged mourning for a lost goodbye.
It’s bitten nails and scarred skin left by fallen stars and farewells to a reputation upholding the sky. Ripped letters flooding desks and spilled ink dripping off of a counter, sacrifices staining the carpet below.
When Osamu was eight years old he got a new pair of tennis shoes for the upcoming school year. White with a red stripe in the middle, he vowed not to get them too dirty and ran upstairs – box in hand and a smile sewn deep into the flesh of his cheeks.
Those shoes were the ones he wore to his first official volleyball practice.
They’re imprinted with specs of dirt from the time Atsumu chased him out of the gym, team not bothering to do anything but watch as giggles flooded the air.
They have the scuffs marked from the dread of exhaustion hugging him after a long day. The drag of his feet echoing through the air and Osamu knows it’ll leave marks, but he doesn’t care.
They have a slight stain of fruit punch from the time he and Aran tried to make fruit punch in his backyard. The heat of the cement burning through the bottom of his shoes, encouraging him to dump the packet into the pitcher. A simple task that ended in shattered glass and the neighbor’s dog barking, spooked from the noise.
They have drought-ridden tears engraved into the inside of them, left from clutching the shoes to his chest as he cries. Much too small for him now, Osamu still whispers secrets to them in solitude. Confessions of sins and desires are meticulously mended into them as his only means to confide in something that will listen, something that isn’t as invested in his affairs as Atsumu is.
Mourning is a funny thing when it was your choice to lose your love in the first place. As he lays in his sheets on a too hot summer day near the end of his third year in highschool, he thinks that his fingertips are betraying him by itching to reach out to the one thing he said goodbye to.
There’s an intangible goodbye left hanging by a thread at the end of one of those shoes. It lays at the side of their family door screaming at him every time he visits. It stays humming in the back of his mind until one day, the string is cut and his mother packs them up in a box to store them away. “You’ve outgrown them anyways, love.”
There are scars laid out across Osamu’s body, marking between skin and bone they each murmur different tales of tragedies and fortunes alike.
Flakes of scar tissue are rooted into the skin at the corner of his elbow from the time he fell off a swing when he was four. Soothing whispers of it’s okay and rubs on back as his mother patches him up bleed into the renewed cells.
Splashes of pale whites hug his fingers, a show of growth and skill on display – hours spent repeating the same routine over and over again are rooted in them. There’s a scar left from a popped blister on the side of his knee – as skilled as Osamu is, his balance is terrible and one too many dropped pans will eventually burn.
There are two sets of scars in particular that rest over the meadow that is his chest. Trails from the center to the underside of his pectorals that are man-made and traced over often, usually by his own fingertips covered with a dollop of healing cream. They’re matching to the human eye, yet for Osamu they tell different sides to the same story.
A left wing torn and ripped to shreds. Feathers plucked out in the silence of turned heads and yells of denial. Some torn away neatly, like a page in a book that someone cares for – yet needs to deface for whatever reason. Others are wrenched so quickly they don’t even realize the damage until it’s already happened, and by then the feathers are falling through the air and blood is oozing onto the floor. A masterpiece of destruction is left behind in a single scar on his skin.
A right wing patched up and nursed back to health. Delicate intricacies of warmth surrounding him in crisis are sewn with colorful threads and sharp, skin piercing needles. It’s the sting of acceptance and the burn of old limbs not further needed. It’s the ache between his thumbs that scream terrors of leave, run, before it’s too late, and a foreign thumb entwining with his own – muffling the yells and soothing the hurt.
There are traces of silent farewells laced into the core of his skin, torn and sewn with no well wishes exchanged; only a fear-ridden goodbye hanging in the brush of his fingers before anesthetics kicked in.
When Osamu was nine, he was friends with a girl who looked like a bunny. Her hair was a fluffy brown and her cheeks were chubby enough to pinch and pull, a blush that smelt like bubblegum would often rise at the corners of her face.
She was nice, he remembers, with a pretty smile that had a few teeth missing from her mouth. Imperfection complimenting the dark red of her gums and yellow-tone of her teeth. It’s an ugly pretty, but it still made him look forward to seeing her daily.
The first time Osamu had lost one of his teeth, he cried for hours worrying it would never return. In a way, he was right. It wouldn't. A new tooth would grow in its place but it wouldn’t be the same shape or have the same density as the first. A tooth falls out and is replaced by one that’s familiar, but most definitely not the same.
Rini-chan, in specifics, had lost her two lateral incisors at around the same time. Her left one fell out three days and two nights before the right.
The first day she came in with both of them missing, never gone, he had poked her palm with a pencil and whispered to her during the middle of class.
“Ya look like the bunny on yer notebook, Rini-chan.”
She had only laughed and stuck her tongue out between the two gaps, flooding them with a wave of pink before turning back to her notebook and doodling a bunny in the margins.
Graphite had a tendency to smudge across the side of her hand, an atonement to the transgression of individuality. Left-handedness is a burden that was not yet mastered at her age, only weighing her down with wet paper towels that Osamu often used to help her wipe off the ash yelling at her that she was dirty.
One day, on the edge of his tenth birthday, Osamu had gone out shopping with his mother and saw an eraser shaped like bunny ears. It was small, just big enough to be able to twist around yet tiny enough that it wouldn’t make a pencil totter at the weight of it. He asked his mom to buy it for him, with the intention of giving it to her after the weekend was over.
That night she moved away without a word. He never had the chance to say goodbye.
The eraser lies at the bottom of his old backpack, too small to remember among the other oddities of a simple life, but sometimes he still thinks of her and wonders if she’s okay.
It’s an unheard au revoir that he hopes will be met with a hey, how have you been sometime in the future. Yet a light clicks on and the urn of forced closure fills up three percent.
The building Onigiri Miya resides in was built facing the sunrise. It’s an odd thing, opening up the shop with the sun rising at the same pace as your hands. It’s nice, though, having light flood through the windows of his heart; shining on his wings and adorning them with the glow of a fire.
Osamu likes to watch the sun rise through the delicate glass crammed between bricks. It’s a breath of fresh air allowing him to breathe, breathe, breathe within the confines of his skin; sometimes he thinks his lungs could break the boundaries if he tried hard enough.
Sometimes the sun is an angry red, crying out tears of blood upon his counters with only the vague shape of a building across from the store shadowing them. It’s on those days that he tends to wipe the granite more than normal.
Other times, it’s a golden yellow that resembles the hair of a sibling hours away. It’s the color of the cleaner under his cabinet and the uniform of an estranged friend exerting themself on a volleyball court. It radiates the heat of remembrance and it's warm enough that he has to pull off his shirt to cool himself down.
Miya Osamu likes to watch the sun rise up, up, up while thinking of the moon that’s simultaneously fading away. A goodbye both unseen and unheard yet acknowledged regardless. It’s a farewell hidden between harsh stars and soft clouds and, he thinks, we don’t just forget it after it’s gone.