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Chuuya digs finger size holes in the soil to plant the solidary flowers he ripped from elsewhere into your grave. Out of your bones grow color, and it is summer. I am drinking lemonade. There are ice cubes in it and Chuuya put them in the glass for me.
I do not imagine this is the future you constructed for me in your mind before. I would like to think you would be glad of it, but you are dead and as I am sitting beside your cold gravestone, I almost think it might be worthwhile to live.
I won’t pick up flowers from their roots and give them to you as tokens of beauty as if their sacrifice is a prize. I won’t lie to you. It has been hard in many ways and for a long while, I cursed you. I cursed you because of your indifference. I cursed you because you deemed it impossible for me to die, as much as you deemed it impossible that I might someday be not so empty.
Curse you for your claims and how true they are.
There’s a shiver in my bones, and it is June. Chuuya puts dying flowers on your grave. He says they will regrow, but he ripped them far above their roots and they are therefore pronounced dead forever. I say nothing to his claims of survival. I have learned that people like to think their destruction will have a worthwhile contribution, and when they learn that it does not, they spiral. Chuuya is keen on spiraling down bottles of wine. He will plant the currently beautiful, however dying flowers, and he will not come back to look at them again. It is okay.
I drink lemonade.
I sit under the shadow of a tree, my back to your gravestone and there’s a lemonade with ice cubes in it that Chuuya brought. It is not so bad to live.
One day, quite soon, the ice cubes will melt and the lemonade will get sticky, unpleasant. It almost already is. But not entirely, and I drink it, and a sense of serenity slides down my throat. There’s sugar on my tongue instead of curses. Would you be proud? Or surprised?
I am exhausted, Odasaku. There’s a certain effort to make your entire existence shrink into not wanting to exist. I am tired of blades on my skin and ropes on my throat. It will never pass, I am quite sure, as you have told me. But god, is there more. It is June, and Chuuya puts flowers on your grave. They are beautiful and in a day or so they will die. How wonderful it is that a thing already dying can be so mesmerizing and full of color.
If I was never thrown into this thing called life, thrown amateurly by a god who did not know how to play the game or write it, perhaps the world would lose nothing. Perhaps it would even gain some things. Who is to say? God is a funny looking man with a very bad humor and he is cruel when he is drunk. I sense I know a man just like this, a man you know, so does Chuuya. I suspect their utter cruelty is why they are worshiped.
Chuuya pours wine into a cup. I refuse to drink. I am drinking lemonade and the ice cubes have started to melt.