do any of you understand how much this cg haunts me. back straight you walk down the stairs with your shoulders tight, poised perfect like the bride you know you’ll never be. careful or you’ll fall. hand on the banister you walk down the stairs and meet his eyes for the first time in almost ten years and you can tell he doesn’t recognize you, and you almost don’t recognize him, but he still has that gap between his two front teeth, that mole under his eye, that scar on his left knee. probably. aoi was the one who took him. he didn’t trust you to do it. said you wouldn’t be able to hurt him and he was probably right. chest hurting you walk down the stairs and you stop, and you wish you didn’t have to leave again, and you wish you could fall down at his feet and say i’m sorry, junpei, i’m sorry i left you, i’m sorry i have to leave you again, i’m sorry and i love you and because i love you sometimes i wish i’d never asked to sit with you that day during lunch, it’s only that you were always alone, too, and i just thought maybe you would be the one who didn’t get scared by my eyebags, the way my skin drew tight around my bones. i’m sorry i was so unsightly, it’s just that my brother quit school by the time he was twelve, worked three jobs by fifteen, you know he can’t even do long division? his fists are his only problem-solver, and i know that’s not my fault, but a lot of the time it feels like it is. that’s true for many things. that day on the boat i cracked my head (just like you) so hard i saw stars and i saw a lot of other things, too, and i know you’ll be scared, junpei. i know you’ll be lonely. i know you’ll love other people and maybe it’s cruel for me to feel jealous over that. i wish i could stay, but it’s hard when i know exactly what will happen if i do. junpei, isn’t it sad? isn’t it tragic, the way infinite histories stretch out ahead of us, but i can’t love you in this one, or the next, or the next. we’ll spend our lives missing each other, junpei, and one day we’ll meet again and you’ll realize i’m not that same little girl by the rabbit hutch anymore, and on that day you’ll stop loving me the way i need you to. but i owe my life to your love, junpei. sometimes i wish that i didn’t have to fight so much harder than everybody else to keep it. sometimes i wish that the world was kinder. sometimes i wish that i hadn’t met you at all.
