Gentian Blue
epilogue
Perhaps I owe myself an explanation.
It's been about three years since then and the only thing that has changed is that the world finally makes sense again. It gave me the chance to move to the city and join the theater just as I wanted, except I didn't get my suburb apartment with the package deal. I live a block away from the theater, have five sets of silverware for whenever my family comes over to see the plays, and have light blue sheets because they were on sale. I can't complain about my living situation. Nothing's perfect but it's good enough for me.
Getting here seemed so terribly easy, but perhaps that's because my mind was fuzzy until I graduated from high school. I remember a blur for several months, then some clarity, and finally everything was back to normal once I grabbed my diploma. Humans are funny in that they don't let go of things easily, and then they forget and move on with no memory trail left behind. Sometimes I wish it were the same for me, but that would not have been a life worth living.
Here's a better explanation. My words are rare and I get everything from a script. You'd think I would be better at this, but the day when Axel didn't come back and the gentians bloomed outside my window, I lost years worth of words. It's amazing that I still know how to open my jaw to recite my lines on the stage, but that comes naturally as an artist. Artists never say what they mean, so it's better for someone to write words for me.
I don't say this very often, but I feel this must be known. That night, Axel was out alone, coming back from the art shop. We know this because there was a bag filled with blue paint tubes scattered on the street. Blue, of course, because apparently he saw my gentians the moment they bloomed and he began painting them behind my back. He went out to purchase more blue, but it was dark and it was a time when the world didn't make sense. He was killed by a car.
Despite my failing mentality at the time, I still demanded to know the details, wrenching them out of poor Demyx when I barged into his house a few days after the funeral. I listened to each nitty-gritty detail that the police and investigators and whoever the hell else was present discovered on the site and in the hospital. He was hit right in the chest; his stomach, intestines, and lungs burst on impact. Apparently, a few rib bones penetrated his insides here and there, causing his whole torso to collapse in a hot, bubbly pile that steamed on the pavement. I didn't bother to ask about how his heart did in all this mess, and I didn't really care. For all I knew, his entire being turned into marble that night.
Now for how I dealt with all this. I had some turbulent weeks of nearly ruining my relationships with my siblings, and all the screaming and violence could have been so easily solved if I had just dropped down to my knees and confessed why the loss of some neighbor was so important. You'd also think that this whole thing would leave me alone since Axel and I weren't together for that long, but I truly believed that he saved my life. I was growing up and I didn't want to because there was nothing left for me out there. All I had was a decent voice that lacked the understanding of how to make it a great voice that wouldn't simply wash away underneath the crowd and rot in the dirt. I truly believed I was blessed, but now? I just had a stroke of luck. I never imagined a life without him, but here I am, living this unimaginable existence, feeding off my own inspiration – originally with the intention of eating myself away, but that never worked.
Perhaps now an explanation on how I made it here. Axel died near summer, just at the end of the school year. It made it all the more difficult to complete that year, but Sora had hammered it into my head that he wouldn't forgive me if I gave up so easily. Kairi got my focus back on my studies and Namine gave me creative words, not quite the same as Axel's, but she was also a rising artist so I could understand her points the best.
That summer, Demyx called me over. We went through Axel's room, picking out what could be forgotten, what could be given away, and what could be kept. His parents wanted most of his remaining art to either keep or sell for display. Maybe Axel would turn into all those other artists who made their names big only when they reached heaven.
We picked lightly at the objects in his room, which were covered in dust. Demyx thought about turning the room into a library – at least something to fill it up so it would seem less hollow.
"How about this," he said, grabbing my attention. I stopped staring at the green sheets. Our voices echoed easily in the room, so we spoke in shallow whispers. "Let's move all his artwork into the hallway and then collect up anything else his parents might want on his bed."
I didn't say anything; just nodded and began moving the stacks of canvases leaning against a wall. Back then, I had a fear of using my voice at all. I thought something would tear my vocal chords out if I spoke, then slide down my throat and harvest something sickly and terrible in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to avoid as much thinking as possible.
Most of the room consisted of art, so we had to make some piles in Demyx's room across the hallway. I was rummaging through the closet when I found them and, in a shocked state of mind, I panicked and hurried to collect the pieces before someone found out and forced me to my knees.
Just my dried-up luck when I stumbled into Demyx outside the door. I couldn't hide my guilty face nor the bundle of artwork in my hands.
"Which ones are those?" he asked, and in my head, I dropped down and revealed everything to the blue sky.
In reality, I simply turned the papers around to show him exactly what Axel and I were keeping behind everyone's backs. The spice of a relationship, the kind of secret that had us giggling underneath green sheets whenever we pulled them over our heads so that it was completely dark and hidden inside. And it wasn't really even that surprising or scandalous – just a collection of drawings of me, looking out the window, or wrapped in a sheet like a Greek god, or wrapped in nothing but my own flesh. Demyx raised an eyebrow at them, but said nothing because perhaps all his words went with Axel, too. Instead, he directed me to the hallway and pulled out a canvas from the pile.
Demyx and I made it our own secret to take whatever art pieces we wanted before handing them forever to his parents. I took all the ones of me, selfishly, along with the canvas that featured a trellis of freshly bloomed blue gentians and a window. In the window was an outline of a mouth, a pair of hunched shoulders, and an arm dangling outside with a pitch pipe in hand. On the backside was something smudged in pencil. Those words must have gone with him as well. It would have been nice to know what the pencil smudges originally said, but that would have been too convenient. I decided to stop believing in the idea of destiny, to stop thinking that the smudges were supposed to be a message strong enough to make my blood boil in my heart, but humans are funny in that their habits are hard to break.
I've given my explanation, so back to the present day. I'm building up a decent name here – yet not so big that the unstable pressures of movies and reputations swamp me. I like it like this. People say that I'm better than I know, and I believe them. Axel once told me that artists never find satisfaction in their work, and it can be tiresome, but I can't fathom a life that has a definite goal and stops once that goal is obtained. My work will never be done here, whether or not I like it.
Here's where everyone else is. Sora got what he wanted in soccer and can now be seen playing with the city's team. Kairi and Namine are in a university outside the city limits, testing their math and writing skills. Surely they will land with big-time jobs in an even bigger city. I immediately tried out for the theater once I finished high school and they say my slick, baritone voice won them over. By then, I had learned to form enough words to lead me to where I wanted to be.
Simple as that. There are complications here and there, but Axel was enough complication for a century. Perhaps now an explanation of where he is now.
Last week I visited his marble stone. I do this often, more than a sane person should, but as I said when I first visited the area, the hill is nice, breezy, usually sunny despite how often it rains here now. The description has his name, a saturated saying, and a pair of dates. In the beginning, the marble was innocently white, so white that it angered me, but the stone faded to grey as my rage vanished. In the beginning, I imagined how his body would decompose. They say that the eyes are the first to go, so I always began with the image of green drying out and sinking into the skull. His collapsed torso would bloat and his remaining organs would turn into sludge. His skin would melt and he would rot in his marble cavern. It was all very twisted, but now I am certain that he is nothing more but white bone, so I can no longer picture his gruesome demise.
I cannot say much about what Axel would be doing now. I have very few beliefs, and the ones I had as a child are gone. It would be nice to meet again, to see each other on blue clouds or in a meadow. I don't care which one I get. I don't care about saving up to buy heaven. They say that a singer's voice should be strong enough to echo everywhere. For now, I'll imagine that my singing sends earthquakes in the ground and in the sky.
Not too long before Axel died, he told me a secret between his green sheets when we were side-by-side with our hands aligned. He leaned over slightly to brush his lips on my ear, and said that blue gentians were supposed to mean saddened love. I shook my head to deny it, but out of all the secrets between Axel and I, that is the only one I cannot keep.