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She stands in the middle of an endless wheat field, hands clasped behind her back, a bittersweet smile worn bravely on her face.
She turns towards you, eyes squinting with warmth as she says her final farewell, carried to the infant future on the gentle west wind.
A million stories, a million possibilities, once clasped in tightly her hands, only to be released into the open air to find the space and time right for them.
When will you reunite? Tomorrow? Never?
Yesterday?
Don’t worry about the answer, for the fact that you question the inevitable “when” is all that matters.
If she were still here, her smooth hands would glide along your wet cheeks, carefully collecting the glimmering tears sliding down your face. She too promised to cry at the end of time, to lament all that has passed when it’s eventually over. She says that’s the true meaning of “Rememberance.” You wished beautiful things need not only exist in memory.
Turn over the eternal page. Step forward, transcendent one. That was our promise, wasn’t it? Leave me. Leave me. Leave me.
Leave-
Still here? Her voice asks, wondering from everywhere, and nowhere. Perhaps it’s all inside your head.
You haven’t left yet. You can’t. Time waits for no one, yet you find yourself lingering in this wheat field, hands uselessly grasping at the stalks as they wave in the calm wind. This can’t be how it ends. It shouldn’t be. Stories deserve a proper happy ending, not this.
You understand why. It has to happen. To close the loop of causality. For the future to save the past, the past will inevitably become the future. There was no stopping it. She’ll return to the beginning, and there is where it will finally end. Your mind accepts this answer. Your heart does not. It’s too cruel, too clinical, poetic in a way that only frustrates. She’s not the center of the universe, she’s just a girl, a girl who dreamed of the world beyond. She deserves to see it.
You can’t stop crying.
The ground is soft, but it provides no comfort. An inhuman sob racks your body, and you find the wheat field around you sinking, the dirt shifting into slippery mud and the stalks matting into the ground as the world around you fills with water, until nothing remains but an endless, clear lake as far as the eye can see, so shallow it only comes up to your shins, so tranquil not even a bubble disrupts it’s mirrored surface.
In the reflection you spot your pathetic self, eyes red from crying, staring back at you in contempt for your failure.
You collapse into the water, and as soon as your skin disrupts the surface tension, ripples of the past erupt outward, bursting forth like the ignition of a newborn sun, sending you back reeling. However, instead of falling into the lake once more, careful hands await to catch you. As you look up to meet your savior, the face of the girl you’ve been waiting for greets you once more, albeit in translucent, watery form.
You call out her name, but she merely shakes her head, explaining she’s only a reflection of the past, here to cheer you up. You thank her for her help, but grumble under your breath, frustrated that she’s not the real thing. It’s clear she understands this as well, and that only makes you even more irritated.
However, you have no time for anger, and are immediately pulled into a dance, twirling around at her behest. In the water beneath you, images of your shared memories prance about alongside you, retelling your first encounter with ===, to meeting the younger version of ======, only slowing at the completion of her adult self, having finally reached the end of her youth… and the end of her journey.
Just as it begins, it ends, and you gasp for air once more, eyelids droopy from the exhaustion of your sway. A single blink is all it takes, and suddenly the world around you shifts again, and you find yourself sitting in the Express’s parlor car, collapsed backwards onto the couch.
Wiping the tears out of your eyes, you then look up and spot a familiar pink figure standing before you.
“It’s been a while, sleepyhead.” She smiles, her eyes twinkling like the endless night sky. In your heart you know that this time, her joy is real.
You gasp out for air, bolting out of your seat and running straight towards her, leaping into her arms and pulling her into the tightest of hugs, tears streaming down your face.
“I missed you, Cyrene.”