Goodbyes

But she wasn’t there.

A lifetime later, he’d reached their apartment complex. Sunset had arrived, covering the world in heavy blue and banishing shadows into unrefined feathering. The tops of the buildings were all just smudges to him now. Nails moved along chalkboards as his vision reverberated on itself.

Up the stairs he’d gone, and from afar he’d seen her door ajar.

She wouldn’t have done that. Not if she’d planned on coming back.

‘Oh gods no,’ he’d thought to himself.

The door creaked on its tired hinge as he entered her home for the second time. That was when he saw the Kamakura card on the floor.

“Oh gods, please no,” he wept.

“If it is too late for you, it is BEYOND too fucking late for me, Masaru.”

Her voice finally replayed in his mind with clarity, and that was all he could hear.

“If it is too late for you, it is BEYOND too fucking late for me, Masaru.”

Agony struck him with the force of a battering ram. She’d left. She’d given up. That was all his thoughts could articulate as he looked at the small card that lay alone on the faux wood flooring.

The Eyes flickered in front of his face.

“What?!! What do you want?!!! Is she gone?!!! Is Sayane GONE?!!!!” he cried out.

He could finally say her name.

But it was too late.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

“One day, they leave their homes for the last time, probably not knowing it. They lock their doors, but they never come home. Because our owners decide at some point we’re worth more being sold overseas or dead and ripped apart as organ donors for the black market.”

Her words haunted him.

The Eyes ignited from their center. Fire danced within their glowing containment vessels. Masaru’s fingers flicked against themselves.

His phone buzzed again.

Sayane’s phone told her she’d arrived just before the PA system did.

“If it is too late for you, it is BEYOND too fucking late for me, Masaru.”

He wanted to cry.

Sayane’s train finally reached the station.

He wanted to fade.

Sayane rushed out into the rain as quickly as she could.

She’d left.

But he was left.

“Oh, Sayane. I’m so sorry.”

He wanted to cry.

Sayane reached the spot where the hotel was supposed to be, but only found destruction.

“I’m sorry.”

He wanted to weep.

Sayane felt something beyond hate radiating from the site. She did not feel him.

“I’m so very sorry.”

He wanted to scream.

“Oh, Masaru. Oh, no…” she whimpered.

His phone continued to buzz.

The Eyes glowed brighter and moved to his face as the fire wreathed their circular bodies. They stopped just before him, and he felt a flicker of fear, but he didn’t care anymore.

“Do whatever you want, it doesn’t matter anymore,” he muttered.

The Eyes bobbed backwards slightly, then moved forward, into his own. The pain was different. It wasn’t agony like what he was already feeling. It was simply an erasing of whatever bits of him were still clinging to hope. Like tattoos being removed from skin with sandpaper.

Masaru twisted over himself as his hands raised to his face, but The Eyes continued their invasion until they’d consumed his own. Tears of white-hot malice ran down his face as his completed grief fell without abandon.

All of the world turned black and white as color burned away.

She was gone. That’s what he thought. That’s what he knew.

He hadn’t done enough. He’d been too much of a shell.

His phone buzzed, and he finally removed it to look at the number.

It was his Andrakin; his office. He had a half dozen missed calls from them.

He’d allowed that place to take too much of him. Too much abuse and hatred had been thrown into him for too many years.

It wasn’t the hotel that had caused him to fade. It was Andrakin. It was his manager.

Slowly, his body began to reform. Only, it wasn’t clean or refined. Instead, he was simply an ashen, smoking shadow. Darkness covered him as hate spread and remade him into something nearly whole.

The phone rang again. Masaru’s thumb raised and pressed the deny button.

That place. That man. It had been so very cruel to him and so many others. So much of this was their fault. So much was his manager’s fault. Masaru looked out at Sayane’s empty apartment and mourned, realizing he would never see her again.

So much pain and suffering had occurred because of Andrakin and his manager, and now Masaru was going to make him pay. Years of dreaming and imagining revenge against the abuser who was now calling him would finally turn to reality.

Masaru still didn’t know how much longer he had, but it would be enough for a final culmination of malice.

He left Sayane’s apartment with only a single glance back.

“I’m so sorry,” he said to the empty room.