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You start out your first year of high school utterly in love.
His name is Suguru, and his smile is billions of stars glimmering on an inky black sky.
He is not sunshine. To you, Suguru is the whole galaxy.
Then there is his laugh. It makes you wish to have a recorder on you at all times just so you can sleep with that laugh echoing in your dreams. Of course it’s not the same, nothing can ever capture the beauty of his breathless little chuckles or cheeky giggles.
Nothing compares to the real thing.
Especially his voice. Oh, his voice. All the words formed from his mouth are proverb. When you close your eyes you can hear the gentle caress of it. It brushes over your ears and your senses like the warm sheets hung out on a line on the sunniest of days.
Yet to contrast those sunny days are his eyes. Stormy, thunder, lightning, winds, and the rain. Especially the rain. Even just the sight of damp bark from forest trees triggers the memory of his dark brown eyes. They hold an intensity to them you can’t name, yet you have memorised the way they crinkle at the edges, subtly showing his mirth.
If only they would turn to you, maybe you’d have a good chance of glimpsing what there are secrets that lie behind them.
Suguru is not just his appearance. He is also manner and character. Not only those features carry a beauty like no other, but you are sure that if you were to lay him down and cut a line straight through his chest, soft beams of light will seep out through the wound. When you push him open with the care of a fawn you will find soft feathers have gathered in a bundle in his body. And when you scoop out the heart nestled between his lungs and his ribs you will carry God and all his army of angels in your hands.
You love Suguru. The outside as much as the inside. To you he is the Earth and all its living babes. The curling ferns that carry the dew of the dawn and the babbling of a creek. He is an oasis in the desert when a man has collapsed from the heat.
He is Suguru.
With these feelings come the urge to know him. He’s taken up so much more in your life than you’d expected and still you find that space he fills is not quite enough yet.
You seek him out and watch him from afar. You cannot approach him because—well, he is Suguru. You cannot even fathom his presence from a safe distance, what then when he would be so close to your reach? You control yourself.
He’s beauty and he’s grace. In just a week you’ve learned all there is you can about him. His habits, his likes, his dislikes. Every detail is jot into your mind. Whispers catch in the wind. What makes him tick, what makes him smile.
Gojo is what makes him smile.
You have watched Suguru for a week and in every second of every day he is always with Gojo.
The two share a bond. You are not above admitting that you are jealous. Horribly, utterly jealous. It burns on your tounge the moment you see a flash of white come close to him. There are his eyes that are blue, bright, and too wide. He smiles too big, and his voice is too loud.
Gojo is the complete opposite of Suguru in every way imaginable that it makes you sick.
That is why Suguru is so enamoured.
It’s Gojo who approaches him first and Gojo who talks and smiles and worms his way into the gaps between Suguru’s walls. Not cracks because Suguru had let these walls fall himself, opened these gaps for Gojo and Gojo only.
But Suguru smiles more in his presence. If Suguru is the universe then Gojo is the giant ball of gas he cradles in the space inside him.
Compared to him, you are a meteorite floating suspended in the void. Or is it a speck of dust? Either way, you hold no significance in Suguru’s ever expanding.
There are instances where you feel your body jolt, watching him. It begs to be near him, in his presence. Propelled and pulled in by his gravity. Too many times do you have to will your feet to stay rooted at its place, because approaching him now...seems too late.
You know too much. The amount you have gathered of him will be too specific for you to ghost into his life in the instance of a slight interest.
He will know, because you know that your Suguru is smart. He will see right through you, know whatever you have done. He will take one glance into your eyes and suddenly your whole heart, you soul, will be laid before him.
Suguru, you fear, will pick you apart, and he will see you and be disgusted. For your thoughts and all of your sins. He will condemn.
But rather that thought seems too appealing. He is the only one who will see you, truly you, in all the years you have lived on this planet. Of all the people you’ve met, you are certain that Suguru is special. He is The One. He will know you and that alone will set you free.
Would you risk it?
Before you can he is already drifting away. Satoru, Shoko, Kento, Yuu, Utahime, Mei.
Years and years and he is surrounded by people who can look and talk and touch and bask in his presence, clueless to the divinity standing so close. Years and years you are left alone in that shadow where you watch like a moth that bats its wings in fruitless pursuit of the light of the sun.
Unlike a moth you would not stop until you are in his orbit. You’d rather be burned by his brightness or his flames, so long as Suguru accepts you whole or in pieces when you are charred.
You are in your senior year now. You still love Suguru.
Envy burns your veins but it has been stuck to your blood since that first time Suguru had smiled at Satoru way back then.
He’s grown and he’d grown with Satoru and Shoko. For once in your life you have considered things you have not considered before, like wearing glasses wherever you go, or smoking whenever and wherever you want. Would he glance to you, thinking you were Satoru, if you'd dye your hair the fairest snow white?
Suguru...he loves them. You can see it in his eyes. There is a part of you that holds hatred for the fact that Satoru and Shoko are the reasons why he smiles and laughs and jokes these days. You hate that they are a major part of his life, and you hate that all you see when they are not around is Suguru’s empty gaze.
He is hurting and you wish he wouldn’t be.
Oh, Suguru. Your lovely honey. The reason you walk, the reason you rise in the morning, the reason you go to sleep in the night, hoping that you dream of him, for at least a moment more.
His hair is on your pillow and his scent all over your sheets. In your imagination, at least. There is all he’ll ever be with you, in the nothingness that welcomes you when you close your eyes.
Your mind is the only place he will hold your hand, or walk with you side by side. But even in your dreams you can’t imagine him looking at you. It’s always to the side, always somewhere else. Suguru has never looked at you, so it’s not much of a bother when you’ve spent so long getting used to the feeling.
But even then, when the promises in your dreams tempt you numb, you always open your eyes to your empty room come morning. The real Suguru, as distant as he is, is at least real.
When he defects, you don’t know what you did wrong. But really there is nothing you did. You are not even a thought in his mind, never been.
Still it aches to see him go. Satoru shares the same sentiment. The Gojo is torn. You would be if you were him, too.
You wonder if the pain that twists in your chest is real. You ask yourself this knowing the answer.
It is not.
It is the same pain that you have felt in all the years that Suguru had taken over your mind and your life.
It is not the same as Satoru’s, either. His is real because he had gotten to experience Suguru, in every bit of his glory and his tragedy. You hate him just a little more for never noticing that darkness in Suguru. You pride yourself for the fact that you’ve always been there for Suguru, even if...not really.
So he’s gone. What follows after him is only all the color in the world, all the life in the seas, all the vastness of the sky, all the shine of the sun, and all the stars of the universe.
You find it funny when you are in your bed that night, staring at his picture on your phone, that you are grieving for a loss that was never your own in the first place.
You will never feel it as much as Satoru nor Shoko. You will never know what it is like to have salvation and sovereignty and God in your arms. You will never know the feel of his warmth and his cool, never know which wrinkles on his skin face stay after he’s smiled.
Never know to which extent you will ever come close to such the beautiful fallen angel that is Suguru. Never know how long it has to be of him knowing you when his gaze will finally grow fond and your name would be instinct to utter and rest on his tongue.
You will lie in bed and forever you will be consumed by the thoughts of him. The what ifs wouldn’t matter. First friend, first smile. It wouldn’t matter to ponder because they have already passed, and they will never come back again.
Because you know that because it is you, Suguru would have still smiled at Satoru first anyway.
So think of him. Think of him in your arms and in your bed. Think of his smile and think of the way he would whisper your name. Think of all the ways he has looked at Satoru and pretend you are in his place.
Even if, after Suguru’d gone, Satoru had never been the same.
But for you, his absence hadn’t affected any aspect of your life. The pain is still the same as it was. You are still left yearning, like you always have.
Your phone shuts off and his picture disappears with it. Right, it is just a picture. A picture of your darling dear.
Just in case you forget.
His name is Suguru. His smile is billions of stars bursting into the most awesome of supernovas, of the whole universe ending and birthing forevermore, and you are the human who will die eons before you lay witness to any of it.