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Defying Gravity: Always

by dementedchris

I found you one last time, hidden in the shelter of the cherry trees you love. I watched you and I realized that it had come to this: ten years and a love that refused to go away.

"I have to talk to you," I began. I did not know where I dug up the courage to speak, as I never had it in all those years that I stood by your side and watched you hurt yourself a thousand times over. Was it yesterday's conversation with Tomoe? Was it the need to have things out in the open, no pretenses, no lies? Or was it simply the harsh realization that you truly loved her and I had to move on? I was no longer aware of what brought me to you.

I was there because I had nowhere else to go.

"Do you want us to walk home now, Kaoru-dono?" you asked in your usual careful tone.

"That's not what I mean and you know it," I replied. We had avoided talking about it -- about us -- when it was what we should have done from the very beginning before things avalanched to this grand scale of emotions that threatened to bury us in its wake.

You stood up. "Don't say it," you said, almost angrily.

And I shook, from rage or fear or love, I did not bother to find out. "If you knew, then why didn't you tell me?"

"The same reason you never told me before."

"I'm telling you now."

You sighed and collapsed back on the ground, your face in your hands. "You shouldn't. Not me. Never me. You deserve someone better."

I sat down beside you, cautious now of the territory I was invading. Was this still my place? After today, would it ever be? "Why do you keep on saying that, Kenshin?" I asked. "Shouldn't that be my choice, who I deserve or who I don't? You never gave me a chance to lo--"

"You deserve good things."

"Then why not you?"

You were silent for so long, I didn't think that you would ever answer. "I remember the first time I ever brought you home. My parents were so pleased, but you looked so shy then that I realized that I was seeing a whole new side to you." You sighed, then looked at me. "When they died, you were the first person who came to me. You cried but I didn't know why you did. You didn't have to. It wasn't your grief. At the funeral you looked so lost when you clung to your grandfather, crying the tears that I could not. I knew then that I could only hurt you, that I could only bring you pain."

"And that's it, I'm some fragile creature you have to protect all the time?" I could not keep the hurt from my voice. "You think I don't know you. You think I can't know you."

"I would have given you the world," I added quietly.

***

I was six when you moved into town, but I had heard of your reputation before I had even seen your shadow. They said you were a bully, fierce and sulking, and I was headstrong enough to resolve to teach you a lesson when we met. But as fate would have had it, we already spent two hours in the playground before I realized that I had been having fun with the boy I was determined to put in his place.

"What's wrong?" you asked, when I stuttered after you introduced yourself.

"N-Nothing," I replied, summoning all the courage a tomboy like me had. Were you really whom the stories claimed you were? You certainly didn't look like any bully I knew, thin and scrawny as you were. Besides, you pushed me on the swing for all of ten minutes and you let me step on your back so I could reach the monkey bars and you even stood up for me when one of the older kids shoved me off the seesaw, and would a bully do all that?

"You've heard, huh?" you continued. There was a guarded quality to your question, almost sad.

It was then I made a decision.

I stuck my chin out boldly. "I don't care that you placed a cat inside a sack and left it in the middle of the road. Or that you let out the air of a fifth-grader's bicycle tires. That's all in the past. But now that you're my friend I'll have to teach you what's right and wrong."

For a moment I thought you were going to hit me. That the stories were right, and you were some kind of deranged juvenile delinquent. But instead, your shoulders shook with laughter. "That's what they say about me?"

"You mean they're not true?" I asked, surprised.

You faced me. "What do you think?"

"No."

You just nodded, then turned to leave.

"Hey, where are you going?" I cried out after you.

You stopped. "Look for another place to play. It was fun being with you, but I don't want your friends to stop liking you just because you played with me."

I shook my head. "I don't care what they say. We're friends now, aren't we?"

In the guileless nature of children, you took my hand in yours and pulled me towards the monkey bars. Your fingers were strong and warm over mine, and in retrospect, it must have been at that point that something in me recognized something in you, and there was no turning back. It was much later when I realized what my innocent self had unconsciously known all along.

It was impossible to defy the laws of gravity, the laws of the heart.

***

"I'm sorry," you said.

You were every thing I wanted.

I was the last thing you needed.

***

And that was it.

Yesterday I had told Tomoe-san that it didn't matter, that telling you would only complicate matters. I knew my confession would not change your mind about her, or about me. But I had to tell you. You had to know why I wanted to say goodbye.

Because it hurt to just be a friend when I wanted to be more. Because it hurt every time I lied to myself and said that your happiness made me happy. Because at some point, the emotions were just too much to bear and I longed for some kind of freedom. I thought I was the one who knew you best, the one who was foremost in your thoughts. Now I wanted to be certain. It was a selfish kind of love, really, but I felt that I owed it to myself somehow.

"I love you," I said, with no more hesitations, with no more doubts. I said it because it needed to be said.

I loved you because you made me love the person I was when I was with you. You met me on so many different levels and taught me to grow. With you, we were alone together, and that was all right.

"Thank you," you replied.

"I never asked for your thanks."

"This changes nothing, you know," you said, but how your voice broke.

I smiled through my tears and cradled your face with my hands. "No. This changes everything."

And how my heart broke.

Your fingers reached for my hands as I kissed you gently, on your left cheek, near your mouth, to scar you there as you had scarred me. "Take care always," I said, turning to leave.

I was a few meters away when your voice followed me. "Pick you up tomorrow morning?" you persisted.

Perhaps the hardest thing to bear was the kindness in your tone, the one that clung to the ideals of friendship over the desires of the heart. It was so nice to believe that we would stay this way for always. But we would drift apart, and we would both know why. You would not want to hurt me again. You would stop telling me about Tomoe, about the things that are important to you, until one day, you would stop telling me anything at all. And yet I still risked all this just for the chance to tell you what I felt.

It was a selfish, selfish love.

I shook my head. I would not be healed by tomorrow. But I knew all I needed was time. And until then, I was going to take what I could get, whatever little thing you could give. Your friendship, your affection -- it was going to have to be enough. But I was going to keep the faith. That someday, you will find your way back to me, and that somehow, I would find the strength to keep on waiting.

The road home was a long one, and for the first time in years, I was going to have to walk it alone.

On that gentle afternoon in mid-October, you let me go.