Pendulum

13. The hardest part (Tobirama)

Patient name: Tobirama Senju

Date of birth: 25/04/1995

Journal entry: 20/08/2023

Currently: Ward staff meeting, all doctors and ward staff who work daytime this week present. Police has informed the ward that the patient's boyfriend is dead. Patient has not yet received this piece of information. The reason of this meeting is to establish when and how patient is to be told. Patient is distressed as he hasn't heard from his boyfriend in two days, has contacted police after one day (the day before today's date) who started a search party. They have found his body underwater beneath the Thomson bridge. Primary suspicion is suicide. All doctors are in agreement patient must be told. Nurse Steven will deliver the news. All participants are in agreement when meeting ends. 

I smiled up towards the sky.

My first.

My first walk alone this round.

It was just an hour ago Izuna left, and I felt something within me had shifted. I can do this. I can turn this around.

A wave of happiness surged through my body as I realised the magnitude of what this meant. All of our dreams. All of our dreams we'd weaved together during endless nights when we had laid together in bed, or texted about from separate beds, creating the most beautiful carpet through said weaving that would be the foundation of our life together. A life that was built not on need but on want, that was stable and healthy and fulfilling. I saw us dancing together, him taking the lead, on a tropical beach under a starry sky where the moon encircled our dance. He smelled of warm flowers and alive skin, and we kissed, newlywed, happier than ever.

I loved that world. And I loved realising that I could achieve it. I looked up on the moon in this world. It needed to rest. But not in that world. In that world where we danced underneath the tropical sky, the moon did not need to rest but soared through the sky endlessly, never tiring of its world or its life because he was in it.

When it happened, I was sitting in the couch in the dayroom of the ward reading my book, Origin by Dan Brown.

I was deeply engrossed in it, absorbing all of the information it shared, learning new things, trying to figure out who the bad guy was. I had a good guess, and I couldn't wait to reach the conclusion to see if I was right, and then brag about it to Izuna although he was lightyears smarter than I was and also, I had noted, had a tendency to always guess how books would end even before reading half of them.

I hadn't noticed the hours that had passed as I turned pages. I hadn't noticed the movement of the moon outside the window of the dayroom. I hadn't noticed anything in particular. But suddenly, my heart fell. There was no other way to describe it. My heart just fell.

I had learned from Izuna, that seemed to be an endless cornucopia of knowledge, that the heart was not to the left of the body, as was popularly believed, but mid-line. Although it was bigger to the left, requiring thicker muscle walls as the left side of the heart pumped blood through the entire body, whereas the right side pumped blood only to the lungs. The result of that was that your heart took up bigger space on the left side of your chest cavity than on the right. But from its attachments in the mid-line of my chest my heart fell, through my diaphragm and further to my stomach.