Chapter Text
Tuesday, 23 May 2023, 8:50 a.m.
Day 123
122 days ever since the first petal fell
Maybe it would have been easier, a little less painful, if it were just imagination that pervaded all of my senses.
An imagination of you.
Even when my eyes close and push away the warm tears that are trying to fall just for a semblance of relief, I see you and how you refuse to see me or look into my eyes, like you never wanted me to be here. When I hold my breath not wanting my nose to inhale the redolent scents from the flower shop, gardens and meadows, I take in the aroma of the delicate flowers that I will never be able to wrap into an elegant bouquet, cradle in my arms and to my chest, and give you conveying with flower language how much you mean to me. The scent of hot cocoa and coffee that I will never be able to relish whilst walking alongside you ever again. When my ears try to focus on everything else from the rhapsodies of the bustling city or the turning of papers and books, I hear your voice even when there is an absence of words, or kindness, or even any vague trace that I had even once mattered to you. When I am walking farther and further away from you who keeps pushing me away and hurting me and wanting me to leave like I never belonged, I still feel the way our shoulders casually bumped when we walked together, our hands brushed, touched, and even intertwined, the way you felt with our arms around each other, warm and reassuring in those times that were most harrowing yet beautiful. Even when I am thinking about how my heart is simply not meant to be held by the one I love the most instead of being broken like it is the most worthless thing in this world, the little broken corner of my mind that I do not give a voice to or usually give into... It thinks about what it might feel like, taste like, to have your lips touch mine. Even if I know a vulnerable fantasy is all it will ever be, even though I know that you do not want me or want me to want you.
You are still my imagination. My heartbeat. My breath.
Sight. Scent. Sound. Touch. Taste.
You took and are still taking every inch of me.
Even when we both know you never wanted me.
Not in a romantic way. Nor in any other way.
And you don't have to tell me again "I didn't ask you to", just so you know that you can spare my heart from shattering upon those words again, for I know. Even if it does not matter that it does not stop me from doing it anyway. From protecting you, remembering you, and wanting to. You can step on the pieces of my broken heart lying on the floor as many times as you want, and that won't change. You can even hate me for loving you, and that's okay, because at least you would be hating me for something I actually did as opposed to what I did not do. Maybe it really would be easier if I could fool myself into thinking you were imagination, that every hurt and sadness were merely an illusion, but we both know that I never lie, even to console those I love the most, so we know better than to expect me to lie to myself just to ease my own pain a little. I will not ask for you to care about me or what happens to me.
Neither will I ever ask or want a whisper of an "I love you" that you do not mean. Or for you to keep a fragile promise that you broke long before the first petal fell. A suicidal steak as I may have, I will not ask for the impossible, let alone for something you do not want to give. All that I ask is for you to please...
Let me take my last breath in peace, even if just a little peace...
And let me go.
Now those eyes could not flutter or blink, lips could not breathe out a single hushed syllable, as Rafael, who had loved brokenly and beautifully, lied seemingly in deep sleep on the white hospital bed, his slow, even heartbeat reflected by the machine by his bed as his face was overlaid by an oxygen mask. Unable to take in the scent of her even as she stood by his hospital bed, unable to hear her whisper his name with a gentleness that she had wrongfully kept away from him, unable to feel the warmth of her fingertips that trembled as they touched his hand that was so cold and still.
Unable to feel his own broken heart that could never stop loving her even when that same love was taking every breath away.
The doctor had informed her, and everyone else, that Rafael would be waking up very shortly, that his condition was now stable and his head had already regained the oxygen that it had lost during that harrowing, near fatal moment of asphyxia and bleeding, but Olivia did not even want to imagine the look in his honest, transparent gaze if he were to wake up to her. Her, who had pervaded all of his senses and his heart only to thoroughly destroy every corner of him just when he had chosen to open his heart to her once more. When he still chose to love her without ever uttering the words "I love you". To the outside world, aside from a few mundane furniture, the room was quiet and hollow; lifeless except for the two people in this room. Yet,
Consuming every inch of space raw and whole were the blinding flashbacks and colour-drenched memories of the past months that she had spent not loving, cherishing and looking out for him like he had always done for her, but hurting, breaking and killing him over and over again even when her heart knew he did not ever do anything to deserve it, even when she knew he would never hurt her back no matter what she did to him.
Even when the main reason her heart had been in so much pain, no matter how much she had denied and deflected it... was her own self, for choosing to pretend his heart, his emotions, their promises... did not matter.
"I have learnt that breaking a heart does not make that same heart stop loving you. As a matter of fact, whether you interpret it to be ironic, twisted or even cruel, rather than being unable to love, the broken heart loves much more and even deeper than a heart still readily intact. A broken heart is still able to yearn, to love, to hope..."
His voice, so gentle and kind, had cracked as the warm tears that he had not wanted her to see trickled down his cheeks, past his tortured smile, even as he kept his gaze turned away from her who had simply stared as his shattered heart slowly bled across the floor like moonlight from a broken sky upon the shadows waiting to disappear with the night, across the papers that he had dyed in ink and memories so that he could conceal and bear his own heartbreak quietly like in that letter carefully plucked from a notebook that overflowed with his love even as it undulated with his grief.
"To breathe... even when the one it can't stop loving doesn't care whether it lives or dies."
But I care, were the words that her heart wanted to cry out upon seeing just how fractured she had made him, only to crumble into breaths that said absolutely nothing as tearing into her were the shame and guilt that she had denied and deflected even when her decisions - her inability to be honest with herself - were hurting him more than they were hurting her. Words that she knew would not be worth a single shred of feeling especially if she were to say them to him, or the people who loved him and did everything that they could to protect him from her. One of who was standing right outside the closed door, not trusting her to be left alone with a defenceless Rafael in the slightest.
Those people also definitely included Noah, who no longer had any faith in her word or how much he and Rafael meant to her, just as much as he did not believe that she cared that Rafael had been suffering from a heart that broke with each breath he gave away. Who did not trust her to keep her promises or try and piece back together what she had singlehandedly broken. All of which she could not lie and say she did not do when she knew fully well exactly what she had done.
Including treating the promise that she and Rafael had made eight years ago on the winter February of 2015 so carelessly, taking it for granted, to the point that he, who had cradled it within his heart, believed she no longer saw any worth in it.
That she had broken it long before life gave him the death sentence just because he loved her who could not love him back.
"It's okay if you break my heart. You've done it before, too many times for me to count at this point. Breaking it again will not make any difference."
She knew without a whisper needing to be relinquished that there were too many moments and memories within these past months that she neither knew nor fathomed, too much heartbreak and grief that she did not notice even when all she had to do was look carefully and deeply. The slow descent of the piano keys deepening like the pain that made lunacy feel like mercy; sleep to be the only true blessing. The camera that took pictures of moments that could only breathe once before dying into the existence known as 'memory'. Black mascara bleeding down fingertips like ink writing a story with a cruel ending in the lamplight; a calm, perfect mask cracking like white porcelain. Memories made of rippling moonlight and water as reflected in a painting as heartbreaking as it is heartbroken. Countless paper cranes folded to cradle a wish that would never be like the tiny one that was sitting alone on the sill by the window filtering with the daylight where Rafael had learnt to suffocate his own pain... All the pieces he interweaved with light so that he may leave behind warmth for those who wanted more time with him, the ones he wrote in the darkness so that his heart could breathe and he could appear in the open with a calm smile, all the glimpses of broken art and stories and flowers that resembled doves reaching for heaven that she had missed... She might never know every single one of them, let alone their suffering that she had only deepened. But, as she wrapped her fingers around that hand that had stopped reaching out to her lest be pushed back once more, stroked her fingertips over those knuckles that no longer knocked upon her door knowing she would never let him in...
She knew she did not deserve it, but she wanted and needed a chance. A chance to say "I love you", a chance to give him the true answer to his unanswered confession that she had taken for granted, and...
A chance to prove that their promise in February, their promise to squabble at 85, was not broken.
"What are you gonna be doing when you're 85?"
"Squabbling with you?"
"Wouldn't that be nice?"
That when they were 85 and onwards...
She would be loving him.
No matter how long it took for him to believe in a single word she had to say. No matter how long it took for her to prove that she was never letting him go, just like how the night never wanted to let go of the moonlight that was the only reason why the night was beautiful in the first place.
The moonlight that gently kissed the night sky goodnight and goodbye just so that the night could feel bright and beautiful. Even when it was already gone forever.