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  Lancali

  I Fell in Love with Hope

  First published by Lancali LLC 2022

  Copyright © 2022 by Lancali

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Lancali asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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  First edition

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  To my Sam,

  And to everyone in the world who needs to feel a little less alone

  foreword

  This is a story that takes pieces of my heart and spreads them thin on paper. Told from the perspective of an all-knowing narrator, it is an exploration of friendship, sin, illness, love, and all things that make us human.

  These pages are full of real memories given the shape of different characters, similar places, and the same ideas. No characters depicted in this novel are referencing real individuals.

  It’s important I mention that many of the technicalities of disease are portrayed fictitiously in this novel and should not be analyzed as medically reviewed cases. Unnamed physical disorders are unnamed purposefully. I took some symbolic liberties in that department.

  As a writer, I also believe it is my responsibility to clearly showcase sensitive material that is portrayed, described, and otherwise mentioned. This story contains domestic abuse, eating disorders, intense physical bullying, self-harm, suicide, rape, depression, anxiety, and gory descriptions of disease.

  Autoimmune disorders are a strange thing from an outsider’s perspective and even more so from an insider’s experience. It’s a broad spectrum, a pendulum that swings from chronic to terminal. A large majority of people with autoimmune diseases can expect to live normal lives. A small minority can’t.

  This story is for both. It is for all who know loneliness and for all who search for themselves.

  I hope you find a piece of you in Sam, Hikari, Neo, Sony, and Coeur as I did.

  before

  The love of my life wants to die.

  That’s a tragic thing to say out loud. No. Maybe not tragic. Maybe just unfair. But as you begin this story, I think you’ll find that tragedies and injustices usually fall under the same umbrella.

  Because before the love of my life decided he didn’t want to live anymore, he told me the stars belonged to us. We spent every night together, our bodies softly intertwined on harsh roof tiles, memorizing the patterns in the sky. So even as he withered, as his body became less body and more corpse, I believed our stars would give him faith. I believed they would keep him alive so long as he could look up and see they hadn’t fallen.

  Tonight, he and I stand on a bridge as the river rushes black and street lamps cast a golden halo on our winter-numbed fingers.

  “Are you angry at me?” I ask because tonight, I tell him the truth. I tell him the truth about me, the truth I say to no one, the secret that makes me different from everyone he knows. I throw it like a lasso around his neck, a lifeline, something to keep him from taking that final step into the dark.

  He shakes his head, grasping the railing. “I’m just curious.” The yellow-flared eyes I’ve always fallen into find mine. “What does it feel like? To be you?”

  “It feels like I’ve stolen,” I say. “Like this body isn’t really mine.”

  Confessions are brusk and surrendering, but mine are gentle. The truth of who I am doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to. He knows that. He’s been sick since he was born. Being sick teaches you that reasons are just poor attempts at justifying misfortune. They give you an illusion of why, but why is a loud question and death is quiet.

  “Do you believe me?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Do you still love me?”

  “Of course I still love you,” he sighs, palm cupping my face, thumb trailing my cheek.

  I smile.

  Love is our staple. Love made us pretenders.

  As children, we pretended the hospital was a castle, and we were its knights. We used to play cards on patrol, and he let me win every time. We ate on the ground floor as he made up stories about the commoners in gowns that walked past. We slept in the same bed as he whispered about the adventures waiting for us outside the palace walls. Then, he kissed me because we were alone and each other’s and everything was alright.

  We had to pretend.

  The air was just thin. That’s why his lungs failed to draw breath. He was just sad that day. That’s why his heart couldn’t beat on its own. We were just tired. That’s why his muscles gave out, and he collapsed in my arms.

  We spent our whole lives together pretending, but if you pretend for too long, reality reminds you one way or another that it doesn’t like being insulted.

  Tonight, we argued. We fought like we never have before, and he came to this bridge alone to get away from me, I think. I’m not sure. Now that my secret is free, now that he knows who I am, what I am, the anger we shared dissipates, like it was housed in a sore muscle starting to heal.

  He puts his coat on my shoulders when I shiver. His arms slip beneath mine, and he pulls me against him. I lean into his warmth, our silhouette interrupted by specks of white sinking in the picture.

  “Are the stars falling?” I ask.

  “It’s snow,” he whispers. He runs his touch up my spine, reverberating with chuckles. “It’s only snow.”

  Cool and delicate, snow falls to my lips.

  “Is snow ours too?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, his mouth against my neck. “Everything is ours.”

  “Thank you.” My fingers tangle in his hair. “For the everything.”

  “Thank you.” Hurt etches his throat. He presses himself against me even harder, like he could disappear into me if he tried. “For making me want to chase it.”

  He tries to laugh again, but it’s not the same laugh I’ve always cherished. The laughs I cherish echo. I roused them from his chest when he lay with needles in his veins. When he squeezed my hand, desperate to hold on to something real. Now, his laughter falls flat. It ends abruptly rather than fades.

  “My love,” I say, my voice half lost. “Why did you come to this bridge?”

  The street lamp flickers. The stars start to fall with urgency. The dark creeps into our picture, gripping the edges of the halo.

  He bites down. His eyes squint shut as snow beckons his tears.

  “I’m sorry, my sweet Sam,” he says, his breath catching, his fingers wrinkling the coat like sheets on my back. “I wish I could keep pretending with you.”

  Our castle stands behi
nd us, listening. As he cries into my shoulder, I only feel every moment he ever opened his eyes when I thought he wouldn’t. I feel the smiles we shared when death decided to give him back to me, over and over again.

  So, I can only whisper, “I don’t understand.”

  He presses his forehead to mine, streams burning trails down the frosted edges of his cheekbones, and a fear I used to know too well takes the place of his embrace.

  “I’m happy you told me your secret,” he says, tears catching on the curve of his smile. “I’m happy that you’ll keep living even when I’m gone.”

  He kisses me, snow and salt between our lips.

  He kisses me like it’s the last time he’ll ever have the chance.

  “Remember me,” he says. “Remember that just because the stars fell doesn’t mean they weren’t worth wishing on.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, but the kiss is over.

  His touch has already fallen from my face. He’s already turned around and walked away. I reach for him again, to interlace our fingers, to pull him back as I always have, but death takes his hand instead.

  “Wait.” His footprints fade beneath the white, erased. “Wait!”

  He doesn’t hear me. He only hears the night calling from the other side of the bridge with the promise of peace.

  “Wait–Please–” My tears find fruition because no matter how hard I try, I can’t follow him.

  The shape of our memories thin, disappearing from the street lamp’s gaze and off into the shadows.

  “No, you can’t–you haven’t–” I shake my head “–you can’t go yet- you can’t leave–you–”

  You.

  My light, my love, my reason.

  “You’ll die.”

  The fear digs between my ribs. It breaks my body, my lungs, and my heart.

  When the dark swallows the last of him, reality comes to reap, and pain lays heavy in its hand like a scythe.

  The snow turns into a storm. I try to gather the dancing flickers in my hands and somehow send them back to their sky. My knees fall to the earth, burning from the cold. My castle watches me with pity. My tears rain into the river, my whimpers turn to sobs, and my memories turn to nothing.

  My stars are falling.

  And I can’t save them.

  yellow flared eyes

  Imagine a bomb chained to your wrist.

  It’s been there most of your life, a noise akin to a heart monitor sounding day and night. A countdown. A countdown, by the way, that you can’t see. Look at your bomb, hold it up like a watch. All that’ll stare back at you is a blinking red light and that barking beep to accompany it. They are reminders that this bomb will go off. You just don’t know when.

  That’s what waiting to die is like.

  A bomb sifts through your veins by the name of illness.

  You cannot unhinge it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot run from it.

  Time, Disease, and Death are rueful mechanics that way. They enjoy crafting nooses out of fear, and they love playing games. Shadows their dresses, they curve over your shoulders with eerie fingers coaxing you into the dark, taking your body, your mind, and anything they please with it.

  Time, Disease, and Death are the greatest thieves in the world.

  Or they were.

  Then we came along.

  “Now,” Sony says, wearing sunglasses with a price tag still dangling from her temple.

  “Now?” Neo looks up from his book. He raises a lip in disgust, the mere thought of action off-putting.

  “Now,” Sony repeats, chin up, chest high, like the captain of a ship heading to war. “I’m going in.”

  “Won’t we get caught?” I ask, looking around the gas station empty of all but three idiots and the register attendant flipping through magazines.

  “We’re definitely getting caught,” Neo says. He shuts the book only for Sony to smirk down at him through the peripheral of her soon-to-be-stolen sunglasses.

  “Why would we get caught?” she teases.

  Neo snorts. “We always get caught.”

  “Today is different. Today is on our side,” Sony proclaims, taking a breath, deep and dramatic. “Can’t you taste it, Neo? How sweet the air is?”

  “We’re in a candy aisle, you idiot!” Neo’s wheelchair creaks when he throws his head back to look at me. “Sam. Tell her she’s an idiot.”

  I would, but I value my life.

  “Um, no–”

  “Sony, you’re an idiot,” Neo says, grabbing his pen and slamming it onto the notebook page in his lap, scribbling 4:05 pm: Sony is an idiot.

  Neo is our scribe- the one who records our great deeds. Granted, he didn’t exactly agree to the title. He didn’t even agree to come along on this mission. But when your spine is hook-shaped, you can’t escape the shackles of friendship. The wheelchair groans when I pull it just out of Sony’s reach.

  “It’s a wonder you need back surgery at all, baby.” Sony doesn’t have a title per se. She’s the giver of titles, our leader, doubling as the devil on my shoulder. With hair the color of fire, she wears nothing but toothy, shameless grins. “That stick up your ass could surely serve as a spine, no?”

  “You talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t go up a flight of stairs,” Neo growls. I pull his wheelchair a little further back.

  “It’s a gift,” Sony sighs, her one lung filled with ambition. “Now watch me work, and don’t break my concentration.”

  Neo and I watch as Sony marches to the front counter, her dirty white sneakers squeaking against the tiles. The devil doesn’t forget to sneak a lollipop into her back pocket on the way.

  Neo grumbles, “Klepto.”

  “Excuse me!” Sony puts her arm straight up over her head, waving her hand around in front of the cashier. He gives her a sidelong glance that becomes a double-take.

  Sony’s pretty. The kind of pretty that’s brutal, bright-eyed, and heavy-handed. But I’m guessing his stares have more to do with the breathing tubes trailing the space under her nose and around her cheeks.

  The cigarette box she points to behind the counter just digs her grave.

  “Just this, please,” Sony says.

  “Miss, I–” the gas station attendant interrupts himself, looking at the cigarettes and then back at her. “Are you sure? I don’t think I could give these to you in good conscience.”

  “He’s staring at her chest in good conscience,” Neo bites like he’s about to chew on the fist holding his head up.

  “Oh, no, sir, they’re not for me- um,” Sony recoils, dipping her head. “My friends and I, we–” The devil is quick to tears. She presses a hand to her lips. “We don’t know how much time we have left. Neo, the boy there. He has to get surgery tomorrow. Cancer.”

  She points over her shoulder to Neo and me, the attendant making eye contact with us. Neo and I instantly look away. Neo goes so far as to pretend he’s browsing for chewing gum by looking at the ingredients on the back.

  Sony sniffles dry air and wipes at tears that haven’t fallen. “We just wanted to go to the roof like old times, rebel a little,” she says, shrugging her shoulders, laughing at herself. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t make it. He’s such a good soul. He lost his parents in a fire you know, and his puppy! I–”

  “Okay, okay!” The cashier grabs the cigarettes from the back and shoves them forward. “Just take them. Go on.”

  “Why, thank you,” Sony chirps, taking them without a second thought and prancing out the door.

  In shock that even worked, Neo and I chase after her. He manages to swipe a bag of gummy bears, tucking it between his leg and the armrest. Once we’re out and the door shuts behind us, we both exhale our jitters onto the sidewalk while Sony takes giddy steps.

  Neo does as he’s bid, writing in the notebook, 4:07 pm: The idiot has successfully conned a boob looker into giving her free cigarettes.

  Sony flips the pack in the air and catches it in her palm. “What a sucker.”
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  “I don’t have cancer,” Neo says.

  “No, you don’t. But cancer just saved us twenty bucks, which is the only good thing it’ll be doing anytime soon.”

  “Sony,” I whine.

  “What? The cancer kids love me. They always laugh when I run after them and keel over from lack of air. Quid pro quo, yeah?”

  “You sure they weren’t crying?” Neo says.

  “Quid- pro- quo?” I ask, syllables broken.

  You’ll come to learn I’m not well versed in commonalities, things everybody knows. Sarcasm, irony, idioms, sports. Such complex things elude me till Neo explains.

  “It means something for something in Latin,” he says. Neo knows everything.

  “Yeah!” Sony chimes in, making all sorts of motions with her arms. “Like when you kill somebody, so they kill you. Like karma! That’s how quid pro quo works.”

  I look at Neo. “Is it?”

  “It isn’t. Is there a reason I had to be here for this?” he asks, his wheelchair suddenly creaking, the weight disturbed by something slipped into the cubby beneath it. Neo’s brows crinkle. He turns as much as his back will allow, looking down to see a case of beer bottles hidden beneath his seat.

  Behind Neo’s wheelchair, our mission’s brawn has arrived. He looks more man than boy, tall and beautiful, dark skin and hair, a skyscraper really. With his hands tucked in his pockets, he gently shoves the six-pack further into its hiding place with his foot.

  C. Coeur. His mother is French, his father Haitian, both pretentious namers. Coeur means heart, which isn’t fitting. C’s heart is broken. Literally. He’s also the worst thief in our bunch. C is kind. Kind to the point of paying for things we’ve stolen. He used his brother’s ID to get the beer, but the lack of guilt in his eyes means he most definitely paid for it.

  “How’d it go?” he asks, stationed at Neo’s handles.

  Sony’s quick to show off her spoils.

  “I saved twenty bucks with cancer!”