The Wish From Heaven | ✓

epilogue

"I used to think the days would go
by in order, that you get older one
day at a time. But it's not like that.
It happens overnight."

— Haruki Murakami,
Dance Dance Dance

---------------------

5 years ago; 2014
Sixth Grade

"Cedar, it's been ten minutes already," Dawn said, putting a hand on my back. "Don't cry anymore."

"But Mom will . . . " I trailed away, my voice muffled against the wet pillow. I was hugging the Pikachu cushion tightly as I cried.

"Auntie will get mad, yes, but what's the worse she can do? And I'll be there with you. You don't have to worry!"

I shook my head. "No, that doesn't matter. She is gonna think I'm a failure. I don't want her to think that." I could hear her voice in my head, venomous and disappointed, saying, 'What a failure you are. Why did I even bother raising a son like you?' The thought made me shrink more into the pillow. There was no way I could go home and show her my report card.

"You're not a failure, Cedar," Dawn softly replied. "But even if you are, I will always be by your side. Forever and evermore!"

The twelve years old me back then could not imagine that what Dawn said might not turn out to be true. I knew Death; I knew the heaviness of the word; I knew how this one term could shatter someone's world into broken pieces of lost hopes and memories. But not like Death could ever touch Dawn and come between our friendship, right? Of course it won't. Death is for everyone except me and Dawn, and it exists in the world outside ours — that was what I believed from the core of my heart.

And so I raised my head and turned to him. He wiped my tears with his sleeve, and gave me his beautiful smile. The pitch black darkness of fear and regret and guilt and worry — all of it was washed away with the radiant glow of that smile. Nothing else mattered. He was beside me, and he forever and evermore would be. What could ever take him away from me?

But death took him away from me.

Not like the sixth grader me who got unnecessarily nervous during the Maths exam and got so many calculations wrong and had a breakdown in the middle of it knew that. That me only knew the warmth of his fingers wiping my tears. So I looked up at him and smiled as well. Back then, my smiles came much more frequently and easily.

"Thank you, Dawn," I said. "What will I ever do without you?"

He chuckled. "Nobody told you to do anything without me."

But within the next four years, the answer to that question would change significantly. It would become something like, 'Without me, it will be hard at first, but don't worry, you will get used to it. Especially if someone new comes along.'

Ah, the way our thoughts turn more and more heartbreaking as we are slowly exposed to the cruel shadow of reality, often veiled by the sunlight of hopes that will never come true. Ah, the way my Dawn grew. When did that happen?

"Right." I chuckled too. There was no need to think of a world without him, after all.

After a moment's silence, he asked, "How long are you gonna keep going on like this, Ced?"

I shifted in my position. "What do you mean?"

He looked away as he replied. "Wasting away your childhood like this. You're not getting this back, you know? We're supposed to have fun during this time. We're supposed to do school pranks and bunk classes to go out and eat fried wheat crackers. We're supposed to take part in plays and dramas and help decorate the school for Halloween. We're supposed to hang out together and go to the arcade or watch movies. All of these . . . Dad says we won't get any time for these when we become adults, Ced. And even if we don't want to become adults, someday we'll have to.

"But you – you're spending hours and hours staring at books and doing homeworks and practicing equations. You don't go anywhere outside home and school. You're like a caged bird, stuck in a place you don't want to. You know, Dad says that the most important time for studying is the last few years of high school, and we should enjoy the time before that. So Ced, don't you think you're wasting it all away behind something you don't even like?"

Childhood? What the hell is childhood?

I rolled on my back and faced the ceiling of Dawn's room. "Even if I am wasting it all away, Dawn, at the end of the day, if I can make Mom happy, nothing else matters. You know, Dad told me how much of a hard time Mom had back when they were young. She was in the hospital for a long time after falling sick all of a sudden. She only wants us to do the best so that we don't have to feel inferior to anyone. If she never found happiness back then, doesn't she deserve some now?" I turned my gaze to him again. "Doesn't my mother matter more than my childhood?"

Those innocent words had come out of my mouth back then. It is hard to believe now. And once again, the more time passed, the more I came face to face with how this world works, and the more the way I view it changed. Whether my childhood mattered more or my mother did was never the real question. The real question was why my mother was ruining my childhood despite of knowing how it feels like to live without one.

"But I wonder if a mother can be happy seeing their child in pain."

But Alison Lockwood has never been happy. The happiness I wanted to give her never reached her. That happiness dissolved somewhere on the way, because they felt like she didn't deserve it. She doesn't know the taste of happiness. All she knows is pain, remorse, hurt and anger. And what she knows, are the only things she can give.

But the young me replied, "I'm not in pain at all! I'm just a little scared." I sat up. "I will get through a little scolding and start working extra hard." Little did I know how my heart would fall apart into tiny breadcrumbs seeing the look on her face a few minutes later.

Dawn smiled again. "That's good. But Ced, don't you want to start doing something you love?"

"Something I love?" I frowned at the question that will continue to haunt me up to years later.

"Yeah! Like I love music and want to become a composer in the future, isn't there something you love, and want to follow? Surely there is! But it has to be something you love, not something someone else tells you to love."

I remember thinking how such words of wisdom might have crossed the mind of my best friend. I simply explained it to myself saying it was because he was almost nine months older than me. But now I know, Dawn had grown up on the inside much earlier than I did. Being afraid of a mere streetlamp wasn't his childishness; it was because he saw it as a metaphor of life. People come and leave. The lamp turns on and off. Endlessly. In the vast flow of time, our lives are only milliseconds. Illuminating and diminishing. Endlessly. 

The flickering streetlamp reminded Dawn of the death that was waiting for both of us.

Back then, when I thought about what he said, my mind faced a block. There was nothing I loved other than reading books, but there was no way that could lead me to a career. What would I do, be a librarian?

"I'll think about it," I only replied. But I never really got to. The only place where I was allowed to dream was in Dawn's room, where he stopped letting me enter in his last year of owning a beating heart.

"Good!" He smiled widely. Who wouldn't become immediately happy seeing that? "Whatever you decide, I will be there for you!"

I felt so happy. "Promise?"

"Promise!"

So that careless promise was broken carefully. The iron bars of my cage thickened. Days passed, then months, then years. Dreams turned into a comfort I didn't dare to take shelter under. Happiness turned into a mere word, not an emotion. The pain he would always see in my face remained splattered in permanent ink on my existence. 

Because before I grieved for his death, I grieved for my own.

== THE END ==