dreaming in retrograde

 

Hate, he realizes, was too strong a word to describe what he feels. It is more like a blue-noted, tinged sadness, like realizing your favourite sweater is fraying at the ends. Chiaki himself is used to smiling—he does it when he’s happy, he does it when he’s sad and faking it. He smiles even when everything and everyone in the world would tell him, it made no sense to smile now, but still, he smiled. And when his smiles encouraged others to smile around him, his smile only gets brighter and wider, still.

 

Midori does not smile.

 

It is a mouth accustomed to frowning. It is a mouth used to straight lines and trembling and lip-biting, just as his eyes are used to drooping and his eyebrows used to jutting upwards in worry. And being someone who loves seeing others happy and smiling, seeing Midori’s face always under a constant downpour; it hurts, just a bit.

 

It makes him feel like he’s lost. Chiaki wants to be someone who can make people happy. If he can’t even do something like this, then how can he live with himself?

 

But, living with Midori—getting used to his presence, the feeling of closeness Chiaki never had the chance to receive from the other back when they were high schoolers, Midori has taught him a few things. 

 

Chiaki lives in a big, bright world full of sound. Midori lived quiet. What Midori had taught him, slowly, subtlety, was to notice.

 

All the little things, the quiet things, the things gone past like the scurrying of wind until you come across them in your memories, on summer evenings when you couldn’t fall asleep. It’s hard to see the small things through lenses that have only ever seen in full technicolor, his loud world, but slowly,

 

(One. Because Chiaki was deathly afraid of ghosts, Midori had gone ahead and strung Christmas lights all along the hallway leading up to the kitchen.)

 

(Two. Sometimes, Chiaki would wake up from a nightmare, sweat and tears dripping down his face, and would go to quietly, discreetly wipe his face with a sleeve, only to find Midori’s hand curled around his. Despite appearing to be sound asleep, Chiaki knew Midori was a light sleeper.)

 

(Three. The finger-touches during dinner. The gentle shoulder bump or hand squeeze whenever Midori isn’t feeling up to a hug or a kiss. A hint of a half-smile, barely showing, but there, whenever Midori wakes up first, and sees Chiaki’s eyes open.)

 

Chiaki wants to ask, are you happy with me? Being with me?

 

But he knows that even if he did, Midori wouldn’t say anything. His answers all lie in the little things, and some of these, maybe Chiaki just hasn’t found yet.

 

He looks forward, each and every day, to find them.

 

And one by one, finding them gets easier. Even through Midori’s bad days, even through the usual frowns and deep-set eyebrows and tears that Chiaki hated to see so much, there would be that little thing Chiaki would have never noticed before but now does, that one extra marshmallow in his cup of hot cocoa sitting on the kitchen table when Midori had gone to bed first. In a world of sadness, every little thing that shone became so much more precious.

 

So, when Midori bursts out into soft laughter and smiles so hard his cheeks are flushed, Chiaki’s heart melts, a thousand times more.