then, now, and forever.

“You’re stifling.”

She says that without a shred of malice, carefully stringing together the words I want to hear the most even when she doesn’t mean them. Against the low hum of the dehumidifier, the noises from the television set sound like muffled static. I’m not really watching the TV though, just like how she’s not really looking at me.

Instead, she’s leaning against the half-open window, facing the wall on the other side of the room as if she’s trying to be considerate. Still, there’s no need for that. My gaze finds her anyway, like a routine.

Because she does it on purpose, taking on the form of the woman I promised my life to a lifetime ago. And she looks the same as I remember, even if the warmth of her smile is achingly empty. If time had stopped a long time ago, maybe I could’ve tried to bring myself to love her again.

But after all these years, it’s just a routine now.

“Turn up the volume for me, will you?” I say, tilting my head in the direction of the television screen.

She throws me a fleeting, pitying glance.

“To drown out my voice?”

“I like this show,” I insist. The figures on the screen are blurred, and I can’t make out half of what they’re saying. She knows this and she smiles, before vanishing at the edge of my peripheral vision in a smear of blotting, fuchsia ink. But never completely out of sight.

I don’t hear the sound of approaching footsteps, but now I know someone else is here.

“—time, sir. Sir!”

It’s the young lad with the close-cropped hair whose name may or may not be Sawamura. He’s stifling as he is earnest, and maybe that’s why she can’t bear to look at him. For her, looking at him must be like looking directly at the sun, I decide, as Sawamura helps me to my feet. His strong arms guide me carefully out of the armchair, and the faint, pink stain fades deeper into the shadows.

“Shall we go get some fresh air?” Sawamura says brightly, and it’s a question I can’t really say no to. It’s a routine, after all.

—

Real sunlight is hot against my cheeks and the sweat beading on my forehead, burning through the sticky, uneven sunscreen that Sawamura slathered on my skin. He’s hovering half a pace behind me because I insist on it. Each step I take is heavy and uneven as I drag my feet across the sidewalk, scuffed shoes and aching knees and each gasping breath is thick and musty in my lungs.

Blink the sweat from my eyelashes and I see her again, standing next to the blurry street sign where the road bends. She’s waiting, as she always is. Waiting for me to stumble. To crack my skull on the pavement. To meet her halfway.

She’s there, her arms outstretched to catch me, her smiling lips painted in a deep pink and dribbling past her chin like the last day I saw her.

“Whoa there, that was a close one!” Sawamura exclaims in my ear, bracing my fall even before my knees give out. “Watch your step, sir.”

I do. I always do. The ink spills past the corners of my vision when he grabs my arm, and I wonder briefly if this is what it’s like to have a dutiful grandson.

“Shall we head back inside?”

“No,” I say, tilting my head toward the street sign up ahead. She’s not standing there anymore. “We keep going.”

—

Where the sunlight doesn’t reach, she glides across the street like the ephemeral flutter of a butterfly’s wings. Blink and you miss it, and yet she lingers—a faint bloodstain on a shirt that’s been washed many times but it still won’t come off.

She’s dancing with an invisible partner, waiting for someone in the crowd to take her hand. She hides in Sawamura’s shadow, offering a smile to a smartly-dressed businessman we pass by with a crisp tie and gaunt, sunken cheeks. When I blink, she’s a college girl with a floppy beret and her lips are as pink as the bags under the businessman’s eyes.

See, that’s the curse she placed on me all those years ago. I see it in the hundreds of grotesque butterflies lining the veins along her wrists. But butterflies aren’t pink in nature—it’s ink, and paint, and blood that coats her lips and spills into the shadows.

“...that someone you know?”

I think that’s the third time Sawamura’s asking me that, enunciating the words in my good ear. I blink, and the businessman is gone. She remains.

“Yeah,” I say. “Looks like someone I know.”

She looks like her again, and I take an involuntary step toward the curb. I feel the rush of hot air before I hear the muffled sound of a car honking, and Sawamura yanks on my shoulder with enough force to dislocate my knees.

“That was close, sir.”

Our routine is like clockwork, but he’s paid enough to never say that aloud. He only steers me back the way we came from more forcibly than before, past the stifling crowd and the humid air.

“—lunch in an hour,” Sawamura is saying, and I’m straining to hear him but I’m not really listening. “Shall I sign you up for board game night?”

I nod wordlessly. On the other side of the road, I see her morphing from woman to child to man in a languid dance, scars marred by butterflies dipped in fuschia ink. I see the girl with the beret holding hands with the man we passed by earlier. I close my eyes, and I see her.

—

“I miss my wife,” my neighbour says, flashing me a toothless grin and a glimpse of the cards clenched in his fists. “Go fish.”

“You have a four,” his caregiver says patiently over his shoulder.

He brings the cards near his face, squinting. “Drats. Here, your four.”

“That’s an eight.”

“Darn it, my vision’s going too, just like her,” he groans. “Don’t ever get married, son. You’ll miss her when she’s gone, but she won’t miss you ‘cause she’s already gone.”

Her form flickers in the corner of my eye, like a swarm of butterflies converging at the door. I glance over briefly, just as she melts into the shadows again.

They’re whispering urgently to themselves, that guy’s caregiver and Sawamura. They know my hearing is as poor as my neighbour’s failing eyesight. It’s consideration. It’s a routine.

“How about we wrap this up for tonight?” Sawamura says loudly, and the other caregiver is already gathering the pile of playing cards on the table. My neighbour protests, yelling something unintelligible.

The pink smudge on the wall is barely visible. She can’t stand any of these people—I know she’s never liked Sawamura, but it seems she doesn’t like my neighbour either. When he spoke of his late wife, for a moment, she took form for him.

But he didn’t spare a glance at her. He’s not looking for her.

Then what is he looking at?

“He’s strong,” I whisper softly to myself, and I feel a hand clamp down on my shoulder. Somewhere in the static buzzing in my ears, I must’ve said that louder than intended.

“I think he’s just fortunate,” Sawamura tells me. He matches my pace, lending me just enough support so I can walk back to my room on my own.

“Like you?” I ask, before I can help myself.

“I’d call myself fortunate too.”

Is it that they’re so blinded by the sunlight that they don’t see her? Sometimes their light drowns out her voice, covers up the pink stains, and chases her deep into the shadows. Still, in the middle of the night she crawls into my room and whispers sweet nothings in my ear.

It’s stifling.

—

“I miss my wife.”

“You’re a hypocrite.”

“I know.”

She looks like her, down to the way her lashes flutter like a butterfly’s wings, and the way her clammy fingers ghost over the wrinkles around my mouth. She looks like her, on the last day she was alive, and that was over half a century ago.

“Then you should join me, no? You should’ve come to see me years ago.”

She savours the silence on her tongue, pressing her stone-cold lips to my cheek.

“Hypocrite.”

Her smile is the same, but there’s no warmth. She looks like she hasn’t aged a day. This goddess, this creature—is not my wife.

“Hypocrite,” she says again, and the laughter that escapes her pink lips is a beautiful sound. “I miss you too.”

“Not you,” I say regretfully, wondering if these are the words she wants to hear the most, even though I don’t quite mean them. “I’ll see her soon.”

This is our routine, after all. And one day, it might be true.