~Crumpled Foil Mind~

“A duel, you and I—“ leveled the student.

The Master said nothing, standing as still as a crane does in a moon dappled pond at midnight. Mere shadow and and angles, they were not about to react.

the student bit back their anger and breathed deeply, just as the Master had thought them. They slipped into stance and leveled their spear at the Master. Attacking singularly, swipes of the elements, but all were evaded with barely a flicker of movement.

Then the Master made a move. In a single fluid motion, the Master disarmed the student and flung them to the ground with such force that the sound of cracking bones could be heard.

The Master said something. The student could never remember because they were barely hearing. Ringing in their ears. Anger swept away, replaced by something small. Wanting to curl in on themselves. Wanting to disappear.

“Why did you train me?” The student heard themselves saying. “Why couldn’t you love me instead?”

As always, the Master’s face inscrutable. Like a crane in a pond. Like a vision. There one second, gone the next.

But those hadn’t been the most important questions. The student had yearned to say, “what did you see in me?” But they were afraid of the answer. Instead they grew a protective pride. A hollow anger that, ultimately, was just steam. But the Master had seen through it. And the Master had chosen to leave.

The student wandered for years pondering this puzzling event. The student searched for eons for their life’s meaning. They remembered the Master with diluted emotion. Even then it was a confused remembrance.

Until one day the student chanced upon their hometown. Fate deals no such coincidence. Their Master sat at a table under a sun warmed tree that created shadows on the gravel. A game of —- lain out in front of them.

A slow melody plays. I open my eyes, taking in the scene around me. I’m seated at a desk. A window shafts in soft sunlight. Books and paper all around my vicinity, stacked high in the corners of a cluttered room that smells of paper and ink. This was in the days before. I’m wearing a dress. My arms are soft brown and my hair is meticulously arranged to look deliberately messy. Oh, I do remember. When I curated appearances and danced with the world before I learned it hated me.

The end was a sudden storm. I don’t wish to recall it. A whirlwind sweeping, sweeping through with no regard for any. My skin grew golden, my arms wiry and lean. I chose the spear and tore up my dresses because there was always a wound to dress. I learned through trial and fire. When the dunes came, they signalled the quiet. The eternity promised to man was a globe covered in sand.

Blink and there’s blood. I’ve buried so many loved ones away. Until I stood alone. The choices I made not making me a friend. A lone kind of creature. Destined to disappear.

a peaceful calm descends.

the monitor beeps. All goes still.

No. her name is rage and fierce fire, and her motto is to fight to her own despair and detriment, but it’s good, really, that she raises her body from the coffin and levels her eyes at the world, eyes filled with Hate.

Oh, but she was a lover once too. Baked cakes at midnight and painted too. Sang songs at daybreak and always had a dance ready to spring forth. It was the world that hated her, love, not the other way around

Valentine Harcourt. She’s a sullen girl, walks with her shoulders hunched and her face perpetually tipped down. She has a shifty gaze and a thin mouth more prone to sneer than smile. Dressed in that dour black jacket, hands stuffed in her pocket and headphones turning out the world around her, it’s no wonder she’s an outcast here at X University.

No one would make the link between Valentine and Valentina Skye, the boxer at Wayne’s. This one’s got squared shoulders, arms sculpted as if a master sculptor took to his chisel with reverence. She’s got a quick roundhouse and even more lethal right hook, god, when she hits that training bag and the chains rattle, it’s like the bells have chimed and a spell almost descends, descends.

“You don’t look like a boxer,” Wayne cast a quick eye over Valentina who stood in a crop top, exercise bag slung over her shoulder. Her arms were the only thing that gave him pause, but he delivered his judgement with finality. “This is a serious establishment, lady.”

Valentina’s eyes burned with a strange steel that made Wayne bite his lip. “Try me out, Wayne.” She said his name unabashedly. “I can sling a quick one.”

Wayne might have been feeling charitable, the extra doughnut he’d had in the afternoon might have dispelled a certain mild mood which made him utter the words, “alright, stranger. The floor’s yours. Ten minutes to convince me I shouldn’t blacklist you here.”

When Valentina boxed, she was all lethal, angry energy. Resentment and bitterness exuded from her as she jabbed and threw hooks and uppercuts. Though her musculature seemed to have been sculpted by angels, she was a demon on the floor. The punching bag bore her rage with a strained, torturous patience.

“What drives you?” Wayne asked Valentina one day as she stretched into a plank at the end of a session. “Why are you so angry all the time?”

Valentina breathed in a sharp breath. The smell of rubber, of sweat, that petroleum scent of equipment, emboldened her. “Think I could compete next quarter?” she asked in reply.

Wayne smiled a wry grin in spite of himself. A dark horse straight out of his studio. “We’re gonna win that championship,” he said.

Valentine kept her head down. She trudged through life with a load on her back and a wariness in her shoulders. Books in her bag. No purpose. She’d fucked up too many times to clean up her act now. This chance? This chance to get her degree and change her trajectory? Well, it was a shit chance. Bottom barrel major, parents who looked at her with disappointment written all over their faces. Whispers clung to her at all the gatherings so she stopped visiting the family. Waste of space. Days, she lay in bed with the curtains drawn close. She didn’t imagine the darkness, she became it. Still she trudged to class. Still she made it through the snow and through the allergies in spring. And that was the most laughable part of it all. That she held on to a jeering, ultimately fading, kind of hope.

I was afraid. I didn’t know I didn’t have to be. I didn’t know the fire wouldn’t burn me. My fear its cold and strong hands rope around my neck anchoring me to the dark.

Now, the vastness grows closer—its yawning maw stretches—as I uncontrollably glide. Me. I, a bird who never knew how to fly. My friends are gone. It’s just me in the cold.

I fly, I pray, my wings find stability perhaps adrift, and I tell myself, here— I must find peace. here—

I randomly remembered seki rei shiroe from terra e and now I've sunk into, I kid not, DEPRESSION.

and I replied “——“

I’m forgetting the shape of —-‘s face. I can no longer bring —-‘s voice to mind. —-‘s eye color, was it brown? Honey brown? Or more dark like the wood that’s soaked in scented oil, that when burned fills the air with a heady perfume? I am flailing, floundering, panicking. Who will be there for me when —- is far out of my recall? So I look for the rolls of memory stored in the caches in my brain. No one will develop them, the art is lost and gone. All’s left is gimmicky little stores that charge a premium to develop film. I- I- I can’t-

I have to let —- go. They said I have to. They said they’ll take me somewhere warm and safe where there are no cockroaches and the bread in the fridge has no mold. They said they’ll make sure my sheets don’t have stains and that my prescriptions are always filled. They said I’ll have people to talk to and hobbies to keep busy at. Crochet and the like. Ha! Me, crochet? I was always more of an adventurer. But they didn’t say —- would be there. They didn’t mention—-‘s name. And then I think, what if —- is alive only in the vestiges of my memory? What if —-‘s existence lies in tea grounds of which boiling water has leached all flavour?

They ask me why I stare at the brick wall opposite my left window instead of the flower patch outside my right. I don’t tell them of the vase of wilted roses in my chest. I just smile and nod and pretend to be what they think I am, an old and senile lady. But in my mind’s eye I am reviving. I am keeping—- alive in my recall.

I haven’t drawn —- into my recall in such a long time. —- was such a constant, such an element of stasis in my life. I don’t remember so much, but I guess I remember now,

That I was happy. That I would laugh. That the place occupied by the hollow held instead tenderness and contentment, joy. I was the moon imbued with —-‘s light. Once gone, I was desolate.

I think of —- now, being awake, and a tendril of that long-lost feeling creeps forth, tentative, wavering, desperately delicate.

Like a pang of hunger, it brings with it an ache. The hollow curve evaporates like dew once the sun comes out. It leaves freshly butchered pain.

My love, would that you were here. I would cherish every laugh, every languid spin around the coffee table pretending we were dancing in a ballroom. I would treasure the quiet moments, the mundane lulls of silence in which we’d eat our eggs and sip our coffee. Every moment of closeness, when your arm was slung around my shoulders or when we squeezed into our compact sedan on a summer day, and the warmth radiating from your skin and mine would mingle. Damn, why’s the AC not working, was our refrain. Would that I hear your voice again.

—-, the world is not the same without you. I don’t know how to heal, and ghosts don’t take apologies the same way live persons do. The frustrating part is that I don’t know if I treated you wrong or if it’s all in my head, like most things are these days.

I get out of bed. The sun is up, the groggy veil between sleep and wakedness lifts. The ache is just a shadow. The hollow curve waits for when it’s time to go back to sleep.

I eat my eggs and sip my coffee. I nearly spit out the first sip for how bitter it is. I chuckle inwardly at my own harebrained-ness in scooping too much of the grounds. Yeah, life is…

I pause.

Life is?

The coffee is neither hot nor cold. I’ve finished breakfast, so it’s time to wash my things. I get up and the chair legs grate on the floor. I hope they don’t leave scratch marks. I go to find my eye drops. I hate how uncomfortable my eyes get when they’re dry.

The fluid spatters into my eyes, raindrops of relief. Life, yeah, there should be an eye-drops solution for all of life’s woes.

My heart skips a beat. —-, a woe? The tendril reaches out in full force and twists around my heart, extending thorns before retracting, and now its burst and I’m bleeding all over again. Thinking of —-. I just choke up a bit, not really a cry. But this too will pass.

I’d rather —-‘s ghost haunts me than I forget. But would that! Would that! Would that…

The refrain starts a clamour in my head, banging of copper pots and pans in unison and not.

But —-, did you know? That I am filled yet with love for you. It’s driving me sick. But I’d rather get sick than forget about you.

“My Lord?” I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears. “W-what is this?”

The Yawning Claymore, in all its glory, jutted out of my chest. A red splotch bloomed, growing in size until blood dripped in slow motion to the floor.

I didn’t notice the pain, though. The sword had been hurtled out at me from across the ballroom, but I could only stare into the eyes of its yielder.

Stare, though the lights above attempted to distract me.

Stare, into his ruby coloured eyes, which I’d always thought looked like the sunset sky after a rainy day.

They still looked that way to me.