Jay leaned back, pulling the blanket higher around her shoulders like an armor again.
She looked at him once more, her expression unreadable.
"We'll talk again," she said quietly.
"I'll wait," he replied.
"And don't follow me around either. Like…"
Like?" he asked
"Like usual!" she said shyly.
"I'll be discreet," he grinned.
Jay rolled her eyes; but she couldn't stop the small smile that betrayed her lips.
....
He stepped out of the hospital room and let the door click shut behind him. It sounded too loud and too final, when it actually was just the beginning, like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence he hadn't finished writing.
He remembered that she had told him to not to get his hopes up. But it was too late.
The hope had already rooted itself deep, stubborn and irrational; like a weed blooming in a war zone. Her mere willingness to listen to him was enough to send a layer of happiness and hope.
His feet carried him down the hallway, but his head was still in that room. In her voice and In her innocent painful eyes.
"You better mean every damn word you utter."
He did. God, he did. And then a smile came on his face, followed by a wave of sadness that said, you are happy too soon aren't you. Then a thought came to his mind.
I mean everything But did she believe me? This was the real agony.
He passed a nurse station without noticing. Someone called his name; maybe. Maybe not. His ears were ringing with her words, with his own silence, with the memory of her face when she asked,
"Do you love me?"
He hadn't expected the question. And yet… hadn't he dreamed of it? Every night, even before this mess, when he first saw her and thought, there you are.
The truth was: he didn't fall in love with her in the hospital. He fell for her long before that.
Maybe when he saw her laughing at something stupid someone said and noticed that she never laughed just halfway. Or maybe when she argued with the teacher not for herself but for the girl sitting two rows behind.
Maybe when she once looked at him and didn't look through him like most people did.
Maybe when she walked away; and left a him-shaped silence in her place. Or maybe that day in the rain when she was crying, as she got off the bus. How dearly he wanted to run over to her and shelter her, but then another girl came after her. He was too late. or maybe when she strained her foot and ask him for water?! well he dont know when it all began...
She thought he was a stranger.
But he'd been walking around with pieces of her in his mind for years.
About Now?
well…Now she was the storm and it was legit; angry, hurt, suspicious; and she had every right to be. He had messed up. No sugar-coating it. No knight-in-shining delusions. He should've told her. Should've been brave. Should've knocked at the door and said, "I know you don't remember me, but I remember you. And I've been waiting for a chance to matter."
Instead, he tried to play fate like a chess game. And well fate, clearly, played dirty. He stopped at the rooftop elevator but didn't press the button.
He looked out the tall hallway window and whispered, "You were crying?"
And he remembered how she'd caught him red-eyed on the roof earlier.
And he lied. "Nooo…"
But he had cried. Quietly. Because for once in his life, he had something real. Something worth bleeding for. And it might still slip through his fingers like a sand. He said to himself, "is this love? Is this obsession?" then he answered himself, "no thi sis not obsession! I can let her go if she want me too, but I cannot allow anyone to hurt that's for sure!"
He exhaled slowly.
"I'll give her time," he murmured to no one.
"I'll give her space."
He paused.
"But I'm not giving up."
The elevator chimed.
He didn't get in.
He just stood there; heart aching, hope fragile, and every breath tethered to a girl who had just begun to look at him not like a stranger…
…but like a question worth answering.
...…..
Before the hospital.
Before the argument.
Before she called him a stalker and before he fell asleep with her voice spinning in his head like a broken lullaby.
....
many year ago …There was this girl on a swing.
And there was a boy on the sand.
He was seven or maybe eight years old. Playing in the sand nearby the school gate when he saw a little girl, who had strained her foot in the park adjacent to the school. There was a blue ribbon in her hair. She was sitting on the swing like it was a sofa, her head resting with the rusting chain of the swing and the chilled wind was her applause. She wasn't crying; not loudly. Just sniffling, like crying would be embarrassing but the pain didn't care.
He saw her from the school gate. His mother was late for pick-up again, and he was killing time like kids do; picking at gravel, playing with the ants, stomping some and saving the others, imagining himself as a superhero with perfect timing.
That day, he saved no one.
But someone saved him.
She got off the swing and limping her way turned to the boy who was just standing there and asked:
"Boy…Do you have any water?"
He blinked. And just stared at her and then nodded.
He opened his bag and took out a super-mario design bottle, handed it to her, his tiny bottle of warm water, his mother had packed that morning and had forcefully asked him to finish it. She took it, drank it without asking if he minded, and smiled like it was nothing. He was smiling, his mind saying, "finally mama won't scold me for not drinking it." He chuckled with his hand on his mouth.
"Why are you laughing, boy!"
"I am not boy!" he snapped back at her, taking his bottle away.
Are you a girl?" little girl asked with a tilted head and surprised expression.
"I am Aeris!" he said angrily.
"I am jay…" little girl said with a smile offering her hand.
Though he turned his face away without shaking her hand back, that smile stuck with him and innocently for the next week, he made sure to stand near the swing set after school, his bottle full to offer it to her any moment. And She came back, Every day, now with a cast on her foot.
Sometimes with candies and sometimes with bruises. Sometimes she sat in silence, and he sat beside her; not saying a word. That was their thing.
One day she wasn't there. Then not the next day either.
Then she came back, but this time she was in a different uniform. From a private school. Not like his. Her father was standing nearby. She didn't look at him. Just ran past him to her father arms like he was a stranger. And though he was a little kid, he felt her close enough to give him a hug or tell him that she was no longer her schoolmate.. he remembered how he was angry for days. And then he forgot.
….
Years passed.
He grew up. Though he had forgotten everything but every girl he ever met got measured against a standard he didn't know he had set unconsciously; a swing and a blue ribbon and a strained foot and a warm bottle of water and well enough none of them passed.
When he saw her again; really saw her; older, stronger, beautiful and bitter… crying in the rain as she ran out of the bus, that day. He just couldn't undo when he saw her and the only word he could utter way was, "JAY!?"
He recognized the blue ribbon on her bag, before he recognized her face.
And his heart well, it didn't just remember. It chose her all over again.
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