A Garden of Regrets - November 4th, 2022

Sometimes I think I should have been a gardener. Something about the feel of soil, green of grass and weight of gloves, crouching among flowers.

It makes me smile in confusion, the petals beneath my fingers, because when would I have had time for something like gardening, knowing that I had to keep my eyes on him at all times? Knowing that more often my finger was against the plastic of a mouse rather than the soil in my backyard, that I’d sooner be skidding back and stepping out the door with purpose than spending idle time with flowers, as if I’d forgotten my responsibility to him.

So why does it feel so familiar?

It could be a mistake. It wouldn’t be the first time. Not with this, all unraveled threads and the threat of death or discovery, and knowing now that everything was really over long, long before it began.

Poppies remind me of him. Red and small, and I gather them in Minecraft and put them in a chest dedicated to him, of things that are red and look like his eyes and a color he wasn’t unfond of. There’s something in me that wants to hold them close, look at their petals flutter and their thin stem bend, and I’ve never truly seen one that reminds me of him. It’s the red; it’s inescapable with thoughts of him, of his piercing red eyes that seemed to slice through everything with ease.

Hydrangeas, too. They were always there, that little bush on the corners that we turned by on our way to school. Glancing over his shoulder as we walked, and there they were; the bright blue and pink and green contrasting with the gray of the sidewalk and the light paint of the house behind it, and I couldn’t stop when there were more important things to keep track of (now, A-ya, don’t look at your phone, you’re going to trip), but I grew fond of them either way. It was just another thing tying us together.

Rabbits, hydrangeas, rain-slicked asphalt and dripping trails down windows, dark dismal places that look like they’ll spark his interest, the red glow of night-lights against glass, poppies, red, and flowers, flowers like they had place and had meaning. Flowers like I’d held their petals without ripping, without despair.

My room itself was fairly impersonal. It was like I’d taken all meaning and decoration and stuffed it into only the space that he occupied within my heart, like all meaning lay in that screen that I would watch for hours, and before that, the press of my ear against the wall and crane of my neck outside towards the backyard, knowing that he was just as close as the house beside ours, and thinking of some kind of excuse to go there and just watch.

It was a room constructed like my image; your average teenager whose life didn’t revolve around their childhood friend.

In thinking of plants, my mind always goes to A-ya, because in a way, I think I thought I was growing him like one. That if I poured my attention and care into him, and supplied him with the fertilizer (attention and support) to grow and bloom brighter (execute his interests and ideas), that he would reach towards the sun (me? Did I want it to be me?) and thrive, in a sense, with the understanding of life held in my hands, and endless tending and care, because I cared, and that meant everything, didn’t it?

(It’s funny, because sometimes you don’t understand. Because the plant manual said that they prefer shade, but the cover you construct for it wasn’t enough to protect it from the strength of the sun where you were, and you didn’t account for the proper adjustment of water levels in response to that, did you? Running fingers softly over yellowed leaves, and trying to understand what it was that you did wrong, for things to have ended so badly, and the swelling desperation to fix things before they led to the death of your charge.)

Maybe I should have associated roses with A-ya, instead, even though he would scoff if I ever said so, and the others would wrinkle their noses and tell me to check my eyes. Dark red, striking but unassuming among full gardens, and thorns that bite at you if you dare come near, try to remove it from its place.

Sometimes I think about what we could have been, if we didn’t find the book (if I didn’t support, blindly, wholeheartedly, everything A-ya wanted to do, without question), if I didn’t go along with Kokkuri-san, if my paranoia didn’t overtake me.

If I had really put my all into really tending the garden I inhabited, instead of dumping what I thought was fertilizer and what really may have been poison onto my favorite flower.

(Are the vivid feelings and thoughts of gardening merely a metaphor for everything I feel, how my life could be so easily likened to the misinformed tending of plants, or is there something I’m forgetting?)

I feel like A-ya would have enjoyed being something like a cultural anthropologist. It’s fun to imagine him as something of an occultist or ghost hunter, but for him to go on journeys and learn about others’ legends, mingling among others as a detached face and trying to understand the intricacies of their communication... It just feels right, doesn’t it?

As much as I wanted to keep him in a greenhouse, dug into the ground and preventing his roots from having any taste of a world that didn’t involve me, now, with the gift of a shred of objectivity and a different life, I understand that he would have thrived outside.

But even then, I don’t think I would have been able to let go of him. It’s just out-of-character, isn’t it, to think that I would have let him set off into the world alone, even if I had realized back then that it would’ve been better for him to wander like a legend, gathering information, spreading it, and crafting it into whatever he wished?

In the imaginary landscape I’ve painted of possible futures we never had, I think I would have become a photographer, perhaps a journalist. It isn’t like I was unfamiliar with pictures; excuses to draw A-ya close, documenting him over the years, precious and fleeting and not enough, in the end. But they travel, and if A-ya had done so, I wouldn’t have been far behind.

I can’t imagine the hands that ended him to gently worm holes in dirt and place seeds, diligently watering and monitoring their condition. And not just the hands, but also the head, so focused on maintaining my fragile grasp on my desired reality that others’ actions and natures fell into unimportant, unobserved territory.

For someone who felt like they had the world at their fingertips as long as A-ya was in my sight, it didn’t take long for all that to crumble down and burn the second anyone pointed it out.

The fact that I could barely touch him says a lot to me.

A-ya was my world—or, I was his.

A-ya needed me—or, I needed him.

I had to stay detached and confident in order to protect A-ya—or, he didn’t care either way what I did, even if he tolerated my presence as a discussion partner to infodump to. (And I would have been content sitting there for hours, just listening to the glee creeping into his voice, the way his eyes would gleam when he touched on a particular tidbit he was particularly pleased with—)

But in the end, what does it say that I don’t remember a time I actually hugged him close?

Does it matter? Would he care? Probably not. But of many regrets, of withered vines before a destination and leaves that never reached the sun, I think; if I had actually expressed myself, in words or warmth or a hand lightly wrapped around a wrist, instead of with knives for tongues and fingers and a sense of self so thin it could be shattered with a tap, would things have ended differently?

And even if they didn’t, if everything played out the same way, if I was possessed again, or if I took my own actions again, would I have been able to properly stand by his side?

In the end, I can only imagine the sights of red and blue flowers and a whisper in my heart that they were for him. The small red among the grass and the vivid blue that stretched tall, and little stones placed along the edges, and a light finger against dirt that was just barely damp, and A-ya standing among flowers, wind toying with his messy hair.

If I was a stronger, better man, I might have reached out to him; told him that the flowers (my heart) were his, that he could come and go from my garden knowing that he always had somewhere safe to hide (that I would always be by his side, not because he was too weak to live without me, but because it was only natural for me to be there, that I had known him longer than almost anyone else), and wished him well (as he followed his path).

Instead, there’s a bitter numbness there, like an apple seed, but this toxin curls in your throat and sits in your stomach and chest and doesn’t leave, and it’s only the grazing of fingers over stems and feeling a desire to snap them into pieces and destroy everything you’ve ever worked for that remains there, like it’s the only path, like you’ve never been able to do anything else.

Like there was never another way it could have ended for you, and never a way you could have made it better, and never a time that he saw your outstretched hand and held it dear.