“I'm sorry I hurt you, but you'll be
better off without me. We had fun, and I'll always cherish the time
we spent together. Be well, Lapse.”
She didn't turn around. He started to
walk away, then he heard a quiet sniffling sound.
“Lapse...” he said, softly. “I'm
sorry. But it's best this way.”
“Everyone's left me. I'm all alone.
Again.”
Then he turned around to see her
standing all alone, surrounded by empty darkness. “Please, no...”
she pleaded, as she she gazed upwards, tears welling up in her big,
mismatched eyes. “Don't take me back there!”
The darkness seemed to swallow up her
up. “Someone! Anyone! Please help me!”
“Lapse!”, he shouted, running
towards her, but he merely stumbled and fell in the dark, unable to
get close to her. He reached out along the ground and tried to pull
himself towards her, but as he got close she faded away, crying out
in horrible agony.
“No! Please! Not again!” he
shouted, but she was gone. “Not again...” he reached out towards
where she had been, futilely.
“You fool”, said a pair of pale
yellow eyes, shining at him from the darkness. “How long will you
lie to yourself? Your heart still cries out for her. Would you have
things end like this? Would that make you happy?”
“It was I who sent her into the
darkness in the first place. She's better off without me.”
A terrible scowl of white teeth flashed
across his field of vision and he felt himself falling, Lapse
screaming out for his help as the water rushed over his face.
---
Lapse looked at the picture of the
little bird flying over the ocean again. “She doesn't need
anyone”, she thought to herself. Then her eyes came across the
tear in the picture, and she felt terribly sad. “Why does this
picture make me feel this way?” she wondered, lifting it by the
edges to take it down. She almost dropped it as she got it off the
wall and discovered there was a hidden compartment behind it.
Setting the picture down, she reached into the little compartment,
which was filled with various sheets of paper. She took one out to
examine it and was so overcome that she had to sit down. Her eyes
started to well up with tears as more painful memories came back to
her. Suddenly, there was a noise from above her, and she just wanted
to disappear...
“Please, go away” she urged, from
some place Sister couldn't see. “I just want to be alone.”
“No you don't”, she replied, trying
to find where the voice had come from. “I know that being alone
doesn't make you happy.”
“No one wants me to be around.
I'll... manage on my own... somehow.” Her voice was a bit muffled,
like she was hiding under something.
“That's not true”, Sister said,
lifting one of the couch cushions. “When you disappeared, we all
tried to find you, and while the rest of us eventually lost hope, he
never did. He never stopped trying to find you. He missed you so
much.” She still couldn't figure out where the voice was coming
from.
“Then why,” Lapse asked, hurt
feelings bleeding through her words, “why wasn't he happy to see me
again?”
“You didn't exactly jump into his
arms, either.”
The voice grew weak. “I... I was
afraid.”
Sister gave up and flopped down on the
couch. She had hidden much better this time. “What exactly
happened on the night you went away?”
There was silence for a moment, then a
rustling sound. A piece of paper dropped into her paws. Drawn upon
it was a picture of two strangers locked in a tight embrace. Lapse
appeared from behind and flopped down on the couch beside her.
“When the sun rises, it takes us
somewhere far away”, she began. “I see and hear lots of
interesting and beautiful things out there, but when the sun goes
down, they're gone forever, and that always made me sad. So I try to
bring some of them back with me in my head, and then I put them down
on these sheets. It's not the same, though. When I look at them, it
just makes me wish I could see the real thing again.”
“So what's the story behind this
one?”
“One day, I was walking through a
gallery and I saw... that. Right away, I knew that... that was us.”
She looked down at her paws, sheepishly. “When I saw that, I
realized that the reason all those pretty things made me feel so sad
was because I wanted to share them with him.”
“Did you tell him about it?”
Lapse gingerly took the picture back
and looked at it. “I wanted to, but I wasn't sure how to bring it
up. We were very close, but also very different. I just tried to be
around him a lot, and we started cuddling each other more... he
seemed to be happy, so I was planning to tell him how I felt soon,
but I kept putting it off. Being with him, I just felt... safe...
and I knew it would happen sooner or later.”
“But it didn't?”
She sighed. “Maybe it would have,
but something else happened first. One day, I found myself in this
enormous garden. I've been in gardens before, but this one was
completely different – there were thousands upon thousands of
flowers of hundreds of different types and colours. Some of them
grew as tall as me, others were tiny little things that you had to
lean in to see, but they were all beautiful. There were long, cozy
paths lined with tall trees on either side, where you could sit and
enjoy the shade. There were long sprawling fields where hundreds of
types of flowers grew together and you could gaze out for miles
across a sea of different colours. There were even beautiful ponds
filled with pretty flowers where huge fountains shot into the air,
creating rainbows as the water fell back to the ground. It was the
most incredible thing I ever saw, and seeing it all I longed for him
with an intensity I had never known. Then, just as I was taking it
all in, I came across a gigantic square, lined by hedges and divided
by hundreds of rose bushes, with a great structure at the end. And
unlike the rest of the garden, here it was flooded with people. At
the very front, a man and a woman dressed in black and white embraced
just like in the picture, and I heard them say that they would stay
together forever, and everyone started clapping and cheering... and I
just couldn't take it anymore. Tonight, I'd find some way to tell
him. Tomorrow, that would be us.”
“That sounds so wonderful,” Sister
said dreamily, imaging herself there with Corsair by her side. “What
happened when you told him?”
“I was waiting for him first thing
that evening, but he always took forever to come out of his cabin...”
---
Lapse tiptoed back and forth across the
railing above his cabin, listening carefully, her heart beating
quickly in anticipation. It was quiet, which meant he either wasn't
back yet or he was still messing with his fur. It was so silly, how
he looked didn't matter to her. He had a very serious exterior but
underneath it he was soft and kind and she adored him. Suddenly,
she heard him moving about below, and she nimbly flipped over the
ledge, holding herself up by her toes. The door opened inward, and
she saw the face of the one who was the most precious to her.
“Boo!”, she said. He merely smiled and looked at her. She
dropped down and landed in front of him, and playfully messed up the
fur he had meticulously arranged. He laughed, which made her so
happy, and she threw her paws around him, embracing him tightly
before leading him away.
She had spent a long time thinking
about how to tell him about what she had come to realize. She
couldn't just tell him directly, she had tried showing him her
pictures before and singing that song for him and he seemed to enjoy
them but he just didn't quite get it. So she tried to think of
something he would understand and realized that the answer lay in the
stars above. Compared to the day, there wasn't much to see at night,
but they always made her happy, and she was never happier when they
would sit and watch them together. He used to tell her that the
stars could tell you where you were if you knew how to look at them,
but to her they told a different story. Before she met him, the
stars were all she had for company, she would talk to them when she
was lonely and wonder what they would look like up close if you could
fly up to them. But she wasn't alone anymore, he was the star in her
sky now, and she knew that where she wanted to be was with him. She
hoped he understood, and for a moment it seemed like he did.
Overjoyed, she leapt into his arms, and he caught her and held her
close to himself.
Her mind and heart raced as the
euphoria of having her feelings returned set in. She could barely
contain her excitement over what he would look like once the sun came
up, she had waited so long to see his other side. She buried her
face in his chest and wrapped her paws around his neck as he held and
caressed her, and all of her fears and loneliness melted away. “I
always knew”, she whispered into his chest, nuzzling the one she
loved.
After what seemed like forever, someone
from his crew came to collect him to do something or other. She
followed along and teased him, still barely able to contain herself,
but then he said something that deflated her mood instantly: “You
have to go back”. At first, she couldn't believe it, but then she
realized he must just not understand that she wanted to take him with
her this morning, after all, they had never done it before.
“Come with me!”
she begged him, urgently. “There's so much I want to show you!”
It would all be okay as soon as he saw it.
She took his paws in hers
to bring him with her, but then he pulled them away and crushed her
heart: “We can't, it's just not right. It's too dangerous to do
strange things like that.”
She couldn't believe it.
All she wanted was to share those things with him, and yet he had
said that. “Is it strange for me to want to be with you?” she
said, tears running down her face. It was all happening again.
He muttered something, but
he kept his distance. It was true. He really was afraid to be with
her. Her wish would never come true.
“I thought you
liked me.” She said, devastated. What had she done? Why did no
one like her? Why? Why?
Then the sun called her
away, not to some happy place, but to be cruelly mocked and abused by
the strangers, proving that things could always get worse. As she
ran from them, she knew there was nothing left for her. The one she
loved was gone. The things she loved and wanted to share with others
were gone. She was a failure whom no one would ever like, and all
she wanted to do was hide away from it all and never, ever come back.
---
“And that's the end of it.” Lapse
said, solemnly. “The next thing I knew I somehow found myself back
here.”
“Oh Lapse, I'm so sorry,” Sister
said, hugging her. She was crying. “After that, how could I ask
you to go back?”
“Just tell me something...” Lapse
returned the hug, then pulled away to look Sister in the eyes. “Do
you know why he didn't come with me that morning?”
“Yes”, she replied, sniffling.
“Then I'll go back,” she said,
standing up. “Because I still care for him.”
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