Chapter 1: Chapter 1: I hate you

Here I was, standing at the entrance. My foot refuses to step through the threshold. It knew better than to disturb the tranquil hum of peace that wrapped itself around my grandma's house. Gray hues and haunted shadows replaced the light that filtered through. The gospel music she'd play with her resolute soprano sprouting praise of gratitude for the gift of another day. Now a crushed star refuses to burn in the night.

I found it in me. Courage was more unreliable than concealed lies as I stepped through. I looked back and forth at the home I used to live in. After getting expelled, my parents sent me here. My grandma's talk about running with the right crowd on my first night struck me like a freight train. I didn't have the decency to appreciate her advice back then. Didn't have the decency to appreciate it very much. 

As I walked through the house, nothing had changed from when I was seventeen. The smell of white diamond perfume still dawdled around the house. There was a pot of coffee on the table when you entered the kitchen. 

I got restless flashes of nostalgia; I ventured upstairs. Every door in the house shut, only my grandmother's remains wide open. Wandering over to her bedroom, I stood in the doorway, peering in. Even though she was gone, her essence still hung in the room. Her spirit was like the smell of a blown-out candle and her room was cleaned with crisp precision. I drew the curtains open so the sunlight and bluebird chirps filtered through. Since I'd been coming to terms with coming back after her passing, I promised myself I wouldn't spend too long in here. The more I stood here replaying conversations on a cassette tape of memories, I closed the door to her room, going across the hall to mine. 

Opening the door, I flip on the light switch. There were boxes stacked up. The polaroids I took as a teenager hung on the discolored walls. I went over to admire them looking at my once youthful and joyous self. There was one other person in the picture. Yamato Tanaka, a boy I gave my heart to during my time here.

It was almost sardonic how the love you feel one day ends in sorrow. It is willing goodbyes while you're young or forced departures when their bodies greet the ground. The final fuck you regardless of the grief that follows. You can't look in the mirror and tell yourself it wasn't worth it.

I remember talking to myself in the mirror. Hating myself for every crafted word meant to add insult to injury. I had been debating for weeks about the perfect time to tell him. I knew leaving after graduation would have been a harsh blow. The fight afterward was being cut with a rusty razor blade a billion times. The adherence sprouted from his mouth, burgeoning into something I didn't think we'd recover from.

I waited for him to say goodbye to me at the airport. Heavy heart and unsaid words boarding the flight with me. His absence is still present; a desolation that left my soul in a state of stunted longing.

I made my way back to the door after leaving my wall of tarnished memories. Turning off the light switch and closing off my past.

My parents were staying at a hotel because my mom didn't want to stay in her mother's house, saying it was too much for her right now. So they left it to me to pack up my grandma's house and donate her things. 

 

---

 

I locked the door to my grandma's house and jogged down the steps. As I was going to unlock my car door, I heard someone yell, "Hey!"

I looked in their direction and almost dropped my keys on the ground when I saw who it was.

"Braxton." A smile stretched across his face. Illuminating his already bright eyes.

"Yamato," I said in a single breath. 

"Um, sorry for your loss. How is your mother holding up?" He asked when he was standing in front of me.

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His height had sprouted up since the last time I'd seen him. The veneer was still just as crushed and hidden. His disposition was still soft, but his height surprised me. I was the one that used to tower over him, and now he was taller than me, almost peering down.

"She's holding up," I said. 

We stare at one another. I drink every ounce of evolution in him. He didn't have black hair anymore, replacing the virgin strands with an auburn color. His face was clear of the acne he had as a teenager.

"If you all need anything, just drop by. We're more than glad to help in any way we can."

There was a part of me that wanted to lash out at him, for not saying goodbye to me when his voice was the last thing I wanted to hear. Now, as an adult, he stands in front of me like we're on good terms. As though we didn't form long nights of vulnerable truth to forced niceties.

"I hate you." The words slipped out like kerosene.

"What?" He asked confused as though he hadn't heard the words the first time around that his mind was incapable of believing it.

I turned away from him, unlocking my car door.

"You heard me."

He lets out a chuckle that comes deep from his stomach.

"I have done nothing for you to hate me."

I glanced at him.

"The fight, you not telling me goodbye?"

His eyes drop to the ground, and he rubs the side of his neck. "Yeah, about that..." he paused. "That night I was... nothing. Forget it. I need to go." He turns on his heels, walking down the driveway. He stops, looking back over his shoulder at me for a moment before he leaves.

I didn't know whether the ache of emptiness was hatred or longing. Was it a mix of two brewed together in complexity? I knew from the way my mind romanticized the pause between his sentences and the way his words jumbled hatred wasn't a word I could apply to him.

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