Work Text:
Maybe, or someday, with a pretty view
The snowflakes would catch between
And melt to form a spring’s dew.
A sight that I wish to have dreamed.
And—
Perhaps,
Then we might come to understand
Why some ends would only lap
Around, and around;
Forever intertwining, unwinding;
Much like being chain-bound.
It left me wondering:
What are you, to me?
Was I, to you, at least somebody?
Cruel. Is how she came to understand it, at first.
But after, when another letter came, she wanted to know how?
Why?
Life is stranger than fiction, sometimes—Kyoko has experienced that much. But this—
It was too much.
But she doesn’t have the heart to crumple the letter in her hands. The words sit on the paper in heavy, blue ink—almost floating. With a gold shimmer that told her that it could have only been written this morning. A fragrance of rose laid loft in the envelope—with a smatter of dried petals within.
Different from the others before it. This letter was too new. Not old—covered in spiderwebs, underneath the floorboard of a classroom, drenched in ash and smoke, wetly sticking to her gloves as if it were pulled out of a pile of snow. Words, ever so slightly faded. Written in pencil—pen—stamps—
Or in blood. Fresh blood—staining her hands as she took it out of her school locker in her 2nd year of middle school. Those words—her first words since winter—
She’s forgotten them.
But this letter was different. The scheme sticks to her mind, said in her voice. Like an echo of a dream; a wish that fell between the space between bookshelves. Thumping, racking her brain with a singular question.
What does she want?
It peaks her curiosity—souring her tongue as she looks it over once more.
Her thumb wipes the last word of the poem, and it smears; somebody, becomes nobody—as the ink spreads in the crevices of her gloved thumb. The wash of blue ink lost in the light.
Kyoko doesn’t believe in ghosts.
“...I didn’t mean it, Yui-onēsama.” She finds herself saying, whispering to the poem that she ruined—
No, that’s wrong.
She didn’t ruin anyone’s poem.
Because ghosts don’t exist.
The letter in her hands…it can be explained through another means. It had to come from somebody else. Someone not lost between the limbo of winter and spring. Buried in a cemetery covered in bouquets of roses—
“...”
Ghosts don’t exist. But she finds herself looking for a pen and paper anyway.
The waning moon; waxed,
Spun in helix, Earth’s duet,
a dream, unending.
The words sit crooked on the lines of her paper, off center in the middle of the page.
She’s not a poet. But, faintly, she remembers the way Yui had written words down on a page. Between notes of interest, behind the words of conversations—in her school notebooks. Over Kyoko’s notebooks. Strips of paper tucked between old journals, taped over dorm walls.
Maybe, eventually, Kyoko’s dorm would look a lot like hers.
Maybe; or someday.