[FrozenDeadGhost]

I think I understand it now. That empty vial with barely a smudge of dried remnants remaining inside. You were not trying to tell me that I did not need anything. You were trying to show me the life that I would live ahead of myself. Were you able to read the fates? I cannot remember, I was so young then. You looked into my smiling eyes as I spoke about the importance of self. Of knowing who you were and standing behind it. I told you I didn't want to be a hero, and I certainly didn't become one. I said I wanted to stay on the right track and not let me ego get out of hand, and that was why I didn't aspire to be a hero- because I didn't do the things I did for fame. I told you I wanted to be just like Miss Tanya one day, and you spoke fondly of her. 

I asked you ' If you try to understand a person's view and they don't want to try to become a better person, how long do you keep trying before you have to accept that they are beyond helping?' and you answered 'It is not your duty to change a person, only to give them the space to change... People make their choices. They say who they are quite easily themselves, we needn't speak it for them.'

And then you handed me that empty vial. 

You told me that there was a lesson to be learned with it. I was young and I did not understand the lesson you offered me. I believe I do now. You can push someone to change, to pour out those contents of whom they were but there will always be remnants of who they were before that linger. It's about what they do with those lingering parts that matter, what they do when that vial is filled and poured over and over, with each change spilled or sipped from willingly. 

I am sorry I didn't understand your lesson.

Even though I asked the question, I did not understand the depth of your answer.

I was confused. I was sad. I felt like a loser.

So I did what I have always done, and I took that vial to someone who could use it. I gifted it to him even while I felt so awful because I didn't want the gift to go to waste. Because even if I never thought I would have a use for it that at least someone like him would be able to use it for something important. 

I felt ungrateful, and I hated feeling that way. I felt less than everyone.

It was the first time I had felt in such a way and he held me, comforted me. He validated my feelings. 

That's what he did over and over in my life, is validate my feelings. Any time there were sorrows, he loved me. He held me, and because of that he was like a father to me even when my own told me everything bad that ever happened to me was my fault when I was barely sixteen. 

But that vial...

I think on it now, in the middle of the night as my husband sleeps and I rub at tired and teary eyes and realize-

I should have kept that vial.

Not because I ever would have used it.

It would have gathered dust.

It would have sat there haunting me for decades.

But now, as I sit looking out over the gardens in the moonlight, I wish it was here with me so I could feel the coolness of the glass beneath my fingertips, and the faint scent of something long dried. 

Even if 'old glass is still glass', it held a lesson that I have had pushed in my face so many times in my life.

In the good, in the bad.

People will show you who they are, though it may be quiet or it may scream in your face.

I ignored the signs for so long, that they never stopped being who they were, just as I  never stopped being who I was. Even if a few more coats of fresh memories dripped from the rim... we most always do not change entirely.

Thank you, Miyumi.
Perhaps I might have been spared much more pain, if I had understood your lesson then.