Take Me Away

Something you think about day in and day out is that. Well.

You never even apologized. You couldn’t even say sorry, not to his face. He never heard your whispers in his sleep.

You really are that awful, aren’t you?

When you wake up this morning, you know immediately that it’s been two years to the day. It’s not something you have to think about. You just see the date and you know.

Two years that you’ve been wanting to say something and two years that you’ve been unable to do so. Two years of running around the city like some kind of idiot vigilante, using your so-called yakuza powers to make a case for beating the shit out of people you believe are scum of the earth. Two years of not having Jakurai around as a sort of impulse control.

The same old thing.

You’ll never change anyway.

Once you’ve gotten up and washed away the remaining dirt and the slight bit of blood from last night’s fight (only one guy, so you guess you got lucky), you sit back on your bed just long enough to pray to whatever deity wants to waste their time on you. You pray, like you’ve done every day for all this time, that Jakurai is okay. That he’s happy. That even if he doesn’t forgive you, even if he never heard it, that you’re sorry. That he knows you love him. And that you don’t run into him ever again.

You’re plagued with memories that you never thought would hurt you. Memories of being by Jakurai’s side and memories of late night talks that lay the two of you bare and memories of taking him home after stressful shifts, side by side and happy.

You can’t say it’s unfair, though, can you?

With that done, you leave your apartment. It’s a smaller one than the one you shared with Jakurai, but it feels a lot spacier. Probably because you’re alone now. That makes a lot of difference.

The sun is too warm when you step outside, immediately shining a burning light on your skin and the new scars you’ve collected in the last two years. They’re all pretty small, but they’re so glaringly obvious. You see them whenever you look down, whenever you step out, whenever you lie down for the night.

You take a cigarette from your back pocket and, just before you light it, you hope that Jakurai is going to have a better day than you are. You know you covered this in your prayer earlier, but you’re still unsure if it was heard, so you do this, too, just in case. You just want him to have the best he can, since all you can give him now is your goodwill.

You’re too tired to be outside with no reason, though, so you go back inside. And you don’t necessarily hope for a reason, but you do wonder if the only thing you’ll be doing today is wallowing in the mistakes you made.

You don’t really want to spend the whole day wishing you had just...found the strength to say something.

Just as you decide to try cleaning up your room (you knocked over a thing or two when you came in last night, a good dash of adrenaline still pumping through you), you are hit with a terrible, distracting idea.

Though you know you’re too much of a coward to do it, you wonder if Jakurai ever changed his number. If you dialed it. Would he. Maybe?

It would be such a bad idea. You’d be pulling Jakurai backwards. You’d be moving backwards (even if you haven’t really moved forward). But still…if you could just…?

No. You need something else to do.

You try cleaning your room again. It’s incredibly hard.

---

Midnight comes fairly quickly and you’re surprised when it rolls around. You’ve successfully distracted yourself the whole day, seems like, even the final dragging half hour that you spent playing darts on your wall.

But even though the accursed day is over, you don’t feel any freer. You’re still held back by the thought of what you did and the understanding that you probably made it worse by running away. You can’t settle down. The mere notion of sleep won’t come to you.

You miss absolutely everything about him; his warm touch, his low voice, his compassion and his kindness. You never had a night this awful when you were with him; you never tossed and turned like the way you are now, never felt like you would die before you actually got to rest. Your eyes burn and all you want to do is close them but then you’re hit with another thought about how you ruined everything and they shoot open.

This has been your reality ever since you left.

You hope Jakurai’s is nothing like this.

On nights this bad, you look to your memories for comfort. Sure, they hurt, and sure, you wish you had the chance to recreate them, but it’s all you have to help you relax.

You hang onto the memory of your first “date,” where you and Jakurai followed the streetlights after one of his night shifts at the hospital to a random park and talked about anything that came to mind (you expected him to get philosophical or something, but the main thing he talked about was how nice fishing was, which was equally as interesting). You hang onto the the memory of your first night at his place, the moment you found out that he was the worst drinker you ever met and could barely handle a few shots without swiping at you (but he was kind of cute, red-faced and pouty, because you felt he wouldn’t really hurt you). You hang onto the memory of kissing him for the first time, when he picked you up after a stupid fight with another gang and you thought it was nice, seeing him in the sunlight for once where everything about him glowed, but he ruined it all by bending down and kissing you before you leaned up and kissed him (and it’s not like he surprised you, because he’s so tall you saw him coming out of the corner of your eye).

All of the memories are torture and they make your chest ache, but they also help your mind quiet down because just the thought of Jakurai alone is enough to help you breathe. It’s not the same as having him against you or his voice completely enveloping you, but it’s enough. It’s all you have.

You try closing your eyes again, but your heart jumps when the image of the punch flashes behind your eyelids. It’s brief, but it still shakes you.

Your phone is just a short reach away. He probably doesn’t have the same phone anymore, let alone the same number.

At the last second, you decide not to call him.

You’re sleeping facing the window, something you do a lot more now that you’re alone. The moon is high and you can’t see many stars in the city, but you see enough and you wonder if Jakurai ever moved out of the apartment you shared and you wonder if, though he’s probably working, he sees any of the same sky that you do. It’s a dumb thought; it’s all one sky, isn’t it?

But. Even if it is dumb, you still wonder. You hope that he’s seeing what you see, the same scattered stars. You hope he can receive the message you’re trying to send. The apologies. The love.

It’s stupid, though. He probably doesn’t want to, no matter how many messages you attach to the stars. He probably isn’t even expecting them, since you were never that kind of person.

Even so, you don’t sleep much that night. It keeps you busy.