Hope Blooms in Spring

CW: death / 1935 words
Side note: italics are in the past (except thoughts)


-


My heart pounds; a thick beat forming.

The auditorium is dark, and the windows bare no light from the Sun. The ground shakes slightly, under pressure from the underground workers, hustling in the dim corridors to clean up every scrap of anxiety, left behind by the performers.

I close my eyes, feeling the lucid light spill onto my face. I grip my violin gently, enough to feel the strings stiffen and dig into my skin, enough to feel her gentle hands intertwined into mine, slowly slipping, slipping, slipping—

Remember who taught you how to play the violin.

Start.

—

It smells of burnt alcohol and tears. Lots of tears.

I slowly approach her room. Workers draped in thin, blue robes scuttle around her body, each one calling to another, asking for another tool with a bright, silver facade, one meant to extricate the sickness that fills her lungs. Their hands, covered in plastic blue gloves, work carefully, as if she is a flower without sun, without rain.

I can’t approach her, so I watch from afar.

—

The song starts off as a gentle tune, a melody weighted with pain, and wanting. It is too sad for the world, and as I softly press down on the stiffened strings, I feel the burden they hold. Every single string fights to not feel the sadness in the notes. I remember her teaching me this piece, Spring Song by Mendelssohn, her favorite, my least favorite. When she taught me, her hand grabbed my arm, slowly leading the violin bow in the right direction, guiding me through every bit of music the sheet held.

I can still feel her fading away—

Continue.

一

The wind gently rattles the room, and the curtains sway from side to side. The window, slightly ajar, sheds bone-chilling cold through the glass, a weather so raw it would’ve frosted the whitest petal on the firmest stem. Remnants of dawn hang loosely in the sky, golden hues are cast upon shaded trees, and Winter’s hands caress the atmosphere with shattered bits of ice that fall silently from the clouds. Winter; the one that sheathes the sun, its presence visible through the thickest foliage and brushes, prepares for its final days, until Spring sets free scattered bits of beauty on untrimmed bushes.

My mother sits still on the windowsill, face earnest, eying the park full of kids scrambling and playing with pure snow, running with their frail limbs through skinny pine trees, small breaths of air escaping their mouths. She picks up her old, worn violin, and starts playing 一 Spring Song.

I can hear Winter ending slowly, a steady tumble of snow coming to a halt, and once that all stops, rain pours its tears onto the park, and the children start to run home.

一

I can feel a tear slip down my cheek. My heart is an empty cup; anger, regret, remorse sewn heavily through my veins. The needles pierce through my skin, injecting plastic happiness. Surgeons crowd around me, and strangle my body down to the thin bed, remodeling me into something happy, repainting me into a wallpaper of living flowers; daisies, sunflowers, all these pretty little things I’ll never be.

I feel like I can’t breathe, their blue gloves choke me. I can’t feel air, I can’t feel … anything.

More and more tears fall. One by one, they coat the wooden boards on the top of the stage, each and every one of them a depiction of beauty, now lost.

I feel the bow slip and fall to the ground.

一

She lets go of her bow, and lets it thud on the hospital floor; halfway through the song. Her palms are parched by age, her heart decays in the cold.

None of us have the voice to speak, but the silence is enough to let me know that she loves me. Love is stitched tightly into her veins; love is fastened into our copper hearts. It leaves a deep cut; love hurts.

She drags herself over to the bed, so I shut the window tightly. The wind, seeking entrance in the smallest crevices of the panes, rumbles the hospital’s edifice in its fury: there was no entrance. The room shakes violently, each roar a breath of burning cold wind swirling around the room, causing winterbourne rivulets of water to freeze on the window panes.

She knows her final hours are being crushed by time; her skin starts to fade to gray, her eyes melt into the earth, and she is just another dead carcass, another dead tree. From a living flower, to broken down dirt once more, she is just another figure printed onto the earth, now burnt into bits of charcoal near the fire.

Death falls upon her slowly; forlorn angels whisper in angst of the passing, fear grows on their spines like uncut weeds, slowly climbing一up, up, up一until they can no longer bear it. Lightly, they press their nimble fingers against her mouth and withdraw Life in simple swells of relief一gracefully tugging onto the last shredded bits of existence and sending them into the wind’s hardening currents.

Her body lays still, and with a breath of fresh flowers, Spring falls upon me.

一

I pick up my bow, and keep on playing.

Strings start breaking, one by one, as the bow pinches each one with a throb. They’re flying freely through the stiffened air, searching for bursts of light through the shaded windows and the eclipsed sun. They, too, feel swathed in a biting pain.

As I play, a heavy grating is heard throughout the room; hands cover over looped ears and eyes falter, blinking uncontrollably and furiously, like a shivering fly in a brawny breeze.

I can’t hear what I’m playing anymore. Emotions collide and mix and stab the violin she had given me in her will, the wood aching to feel the grace of my mother’s pale-white hands, controlling the sound in streams of rose-gold beauty, waves of aurora borealis green. Those hands are gone now, but I can still feel the coarse skin stroking my arm: comforting me, breathing in the pain: unbridling it leisurely, untying the knots, and pulling out the string that suffocated me, slowly unfurling the cotton strand, and binding it around herself.

I can’t lose her一

一

There is not enough air in the room.

The world rotates and rotates and rotates around the Sun, an eternal cycle of pivoting. I’ve never felt it before, the constant rumbling and swiveling, the unfathomable control of where your mind goes as it tumbles down unremitting directions. My mind is murky; so many light thoughts floating aimlessly through my mind, trembling as the world turns, turns, turns… I can’t breathe, air is out of reach, and it slithers through my fingers and streams through the door.

But somehow, her voice rings inside of me 一 a falling petal from the branches of a cherry blossom tree. A whimsical sound, gnawing at the stains of pain in my heart; a poem, she had always recited to me in her tenuous voice:

“A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
The science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade has suddenly encroached,
Upon a sacrament.”

The white-laced curtains near the window teetered from side to side, as if her hands were moving them for me, so I could see the Sun that peeked its innocence through the idle clouds. Trees shake off dead leaves from their boughs, and unfurl their branches up to the sky as the heat of Spring brings them a reassuring warmth, after a Winter that bruised them and charred their autumn-colored leaves, now browning in the deep folds of snow. Slender grass starts growing through sheets of melting ice, shooting through the ground underneath, each one echoing through the ether: a light exists in spring.

I open the window, and finally breathe in the smell of flowers, nudging themselves through the thickened dirt. I pray for them; that they survive the cold-blooded tempests that are reaching out to them.

Yet, I feel a new sentiment … hope.

一

The violin gets lighter, with each step comes a pocketful of euphoria, thrown at me all at once. I play the gentle tune that molded the song: the strings that cast the music into the auditorium remove the grinding sound from before and weave it into a subtle melody. Even the Moon turned its whitewashed face towards the Earth to listen.

Remember who taught you how to play. Remember.

I can feel her fingers twined into mine, guiding them above the correct strand, following every step of the inscribed floating black notes, each of them with a stand to hang on to.

As I make voice to my last chord, the tears that were broken into bits gather together, and slip onto the wood of my violin, creating a reflection of my face, in a blue flood of water.

And in that moment, I can feel the boiling audience come to a soft simmer. I can hear the shredded music sheets, burnt to ashes near the fire; the pain, the sorrow, the grief, thrown amidst the orange embers, tinted with a beautiful gold.

The song is done; and as the audience becomes quiet, I look up at the sky:

In quiet words, I say, “Forever yours, Nozomi.”

The song had always been for her.

一

ONE WEEK LATER


The graveyard is empty, bereft of any sign of life; not a bird chirrups on a moth-eaten branch, not a spider writhes on top of its wispy threads, and not a flower is posed onto the chilled stone rocks, that radiate under the glare of the Sun. I feel alone amidst the barren field. With each step I take, I know there are shriveled bones beneath me. With a puff of air, I walk over to her tombstone, each daffodil in the watered field being crunched under my rushing feet.

“Mother! Mother!” I run like a child, expecting her to be at the end of the wasteland, still imagining her alive, where the grass grows thinly and wistfully, but when I reach her resting spot, she isn’t there. Small prisms of water stolen from the lakes fall from my eyes.

I place the flowers at the edge of her stone, its petals cast a lifted shadow onto the mossy field. Normally in this moment, where the tears would slip down my cheek, she would untangle the ribbon constricting my throat, and somehow create a bow … but she wasn’t here.

Tears cloak my skin, and kaleidoscopic butterflies pass on, carefully avoiding the spider’s webs, made of gossamer. A bird trills, a flower blooms, and an ant crawls around, hunting for meager crumbs of food. As vicious hurricanes whirl in my heart, I look up at the sky:

Past the folds of paper-thin blue;
Past the yellow moon that shines whitewashed midnights;
Past the white sun that blows seas of overwhelming quantities of stars into your hands;
And past the untouchable:

Though the light erased the stars today, I know it didn’t erase you.

I love you;

The sky is beautiful today, and I hope you know that.


-

Author's Note:

I started this piece a while back (maybe a few months ago) and have been working on to perfect it for a few weeks now. It's lightly inspired by Your Lie in April, and I used the poem “A Light Exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson. Otherwise, special thanks to the people who helped me with this story, your advice helped me a lot :> Hope you enjoyed <3