What was it that I was searching for? That’s right, when was it? That time we met, refusing to admit our attraction, it was like a waltz, wasn’t it?
Waltz
Grass is really an amazing thing, I thought as Aoi and I walked up the path that would inevitably take us to the ocean. It’s everywhere. It’s just a tiny little leaf that sticks out of the ground with no support, and yet it’s probably the most abundant plant in the world; It’s something people can barely perceive by itself, and yet there isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know what grass is, that couldn’t draw a blade for you if you asked. And you know what? I bet they’d all draw it a little differently.
I didn’t suppose the gardening club would appreciate me campaigning for grass recognition, but then, that had never stopped me before.
“Chie?” Aoi’s voice startled me a little, but I hid it well. I had almost forgotten that I had her hand clasped in mine; that she was right there, right next to me, so absorbed had I become in my own thoughts.
About grass. I looked up at her.
“The grass is really pretty up here,” she said, her tone more serious than her words might have suggested. I hid a grin, thinking dude! I was just thinking about grass! a tad inappropriate as a response. After all, I hadn’t even thought about something as simple and straightforward the way the grass had looked. I’d been too focused on everything else.
I shook my head and looked away from her, a pang of something hitting me in my chest. A thread of hair fell out from behind my ears, into my face, and I brushed it back absently. As I did, the grin that I’d been trying to avoid played onto my lips just a little. “Yeah,” I said, taking in the forest past the path, past that little slice of land that we as people felt comfortable on within the confines of this huge, living entity around us.
It was like my single word was a cue for some great omnipotent being. As soon as the word passed my lips, it was like the forest came to life, suddenly possessed of a brilliant orange haze.
It’s like the forest came to life. Just for us.
Just for her.
Aoi gasped, and I turned around to face her, suddenly ready to do…something. I didn’t know what, but something. Something important. I felt in that instant that if Aoi would just look at me, only for a second…that something would happen. Something.
But she didn’t. Her eyes and face had lit up, brighter than what she was gazing at by far; it was like she had entered her own personal nirvana, and for just a second, I felt something remarkably close to bitterness filter through me. I shook it off and squeezed her hand. “We should keep moving,” I said. “Before it gets too dark to find a suitable place to stash the corpse.”
It was strange. I said this easily, but right up until the words formed in my mouth, I had forgotten that we were there to turn some guy down. I had just been…content. Enthralled with what I was seeing. Enthralled with what I was…
Her hand tightened on mine, and I looked straight at her without even thinking about it. I met her gaze, and for a second, neither of us moved. Maybe we couldn’t, or maybe we just didn’t want to. I never really thought about it.
Something started pounding in my chest, and I wasn’t sure if it was my heart or not. Aoi looked as though she wanted to say it; I chanced a glance down at her lips, which were, indeed, moving, mouthing soundless words at me. I couldn’t read them, and it took me a moment to notice
She’s closer than she was a second ago
What is she doing?
that she was moving. She almost looked like she was swaying in the wind, what little there was. Her hair gently pushed out from her, onto my face, tickling my cheeks, but I couldn’t move away.
Am I afraid?
Afraid of what?
Afraid of that?
I was struck with the realization that I had no idea what “that” was, and that made me feel like a second grader. This feeling gave me some clue as to what “that” was, but something else in me refused to acknowledge it.
What is she doing? I thought again as she got even closer. What is this girl; this student of mine doing? She is my student, isn’t she?
This isn’t…
“We should keep moving,” I said abruptly, and everything started moving around me again, cueing me into that it had frozen in the first place. “Like I said, it’ll be tough enough to hide a corpse in the daylight.” I tried to start walking again, but Aoi caught me, refusing to move.
“Why are you so angry at him?” she asked. “You’ve been propositioned before; you never got angry then.”
“It’s nothing,” I said quickly, and tried to move again. No luck.
“No,” she said, her voice a little throatier this time; a little more serious. “It’s not nothing.”
She was right. She was always right about me. But that didn’t mean that I could explain to her why I was angry. That I could explain to her how the way her face had dropped—as though it was her I was turning down—had been enough to send me on a pseudo-murderous rampage.
I never did pay close attention to the things that were closest to me.
Never.
“Why are you turning down a boy you’ve never met without meeting him? Is it because you don’t want a boyfriend?” she said. “Or do you have somebody…” a pause, as though steeling herself, and then: “somebody you like already?”
It occurred to me that I didn’t. Not really; I had never been a person to dream about boys or girls in my spare time.
Even the people I had dated, what few of them there were; they had all stopped calling when it came down to the inevitable question: I was thinking about you; were you thinking about me? And I would have to answer no, no I wasn’t, and I could never explain to them that it wasn’t that I didn’t like them, I did; just that I could never…never really dream like they could. And then they would hang up the phone, and I would never see them again.
Just like that.
“I don’t,” I said quietly. “And I’m not seeing anyone, either.”
“Then why?”
I can’t tell her.
“Why, Chie?”
I can’t tell her.
I looked away. Looked at the grass, the grass aflame with orange from the sunset. Suddenly it didn’t look inviting anymore; it looked harsh.
“Chie?” it was almost a plea this time. Don’t look at the grass, Chie. Look at…
I looked at her. She looked happier immediately, but still troubled.
If you’re going to hurt her because you don’t want to hurt her, aren’t you just being redundant and stupid?
I was, and I knew it. And two things I was not were redundant and stupid. I hoped. “I was angry because of the way you looked.”
She looked a little startled, but I pressed onward anyway.
“I was angry because you looked heartbroken when you saw the card.” Not when she saw the card. When you looked at the card like that. Like it was something dirty.
That couldn’t have been true. Where did I get that from? I was looking at the card, not her. Stupid. Stupid. “I was angry because I didn’t want anybody to hurt you.”
She took a moment to digest this, maybe, and then relaxed and smiled a little. A sad smile, perhaps, but a smile. She looked a little like she was composing herself. Maybe she was. When she had, she said, “Okay. We can go now.”
I smiled as best as I could at her; she still looked depressed, and that depressed me. We started walking again, my hand still grasping hers, almost as tightly as hers grasped mine. It was probably going to leave a bruise, but I let it pass. After a second, I started rubbing the back of her hand with my thumb; whether this was to comfort her or me, I’ll probably never know.
It never really mattered, anyway.
A couple of times, I asked Aoi if she was okay with the hill. She had pushed herself pretty hard today, running that mile. She looked a little breathless, and I could feel her sweating into my palm—blasted lesbians and their sweat glands, I thought with a grin—but she always smiled as best she could and shrugged it off. Shrugged me off. She was in her own world as much as I had been in mine earlier. Was I really allowed to be bothered by that?
I was anyway. I wanted her to tell me what the matter was; I was worried about her, and I couldn’t shake this feeling I had in the pit of my stomach any more than I could place it. Maybe people are never really capable of understanding their own feelings and reactions. Maybe the only real judge they have to determine their feelings with is their actions; a person can sit around and declare that he will take a bullet for his love. Maybe he’ll honestly believe it, too; but when the time comes for him to make good on his promise, he might still run the other way, leaving only a thin stream of piss as a memorial to the feeling he really thought he had.
Maybe that was why I hated just sitting around and thinking. Maybe that was why I was unhappy; because, after replacing “sitting” with “trudging up a hill,” that was exactly what I was doing.
But that was the thing about trudging up a hill and thinking. You couldn’t stop.
What is she thinking? I would wonder. What is she feeling? Why does she have that look on her face? Like she wants to cry, but refuses to admit it?
I don’t want you to cry, Aoi. Not ever.
That’s why I have to reject this boy. And the boy after. And the boy after. Until…
But why should that matter?
Maybe there was something to be said for trudging up a hill and thinking.
Until what?
We stopped. Or rather, she stopped, and I nearly pulled her to the ground, so lost was I in my own world, again. I really wasn’t allowed to be bothered by hers, I guess. “We’re almost there,” Aoi said.
The world came flooding back to me, all at once: I was standing at the very peak of the hill, not a hundred meters, down a curved path that I couldn’t see the end of, from the plateau. If you looked out and through the trees, you could see the ocean, sparkling through the woods like stars through a cloudy sky. There was a bench and a sign: overlook plateau, 100m and an arrow helpfully indicating that people should continue following the same path they had just killed themselves on.
The grass was crunchier here; more easily breakable. Aoi looked at me intently, and I said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this? I can go by myself, you know. If you really want.”
She more or less ignored me. She spoke quickly, as though she wanted to get everything she had to say out at once, as though it was potentially the last moment she had to say it in. “Chie,” she said. “If the person over there really is…really is someone you love, I don’t want you to turn them down just because of me.”
“There isn’t any—” I started to say. It sounded pointless all of a sudden.
“Please,” she whispered. “If you love somebody, you shouldn’t let anything stop you. They’re submitting themselves for your judgment. Promise me you won’t hurt them and yourself, if that is really what it is.”
Her eyes were sparkling with tears. I couldn’t hurt her like this, now. Even if it means hurting her later.
It was funny. Even with that train of thought so constant, I never figured it out, right till the end. “I promise.”
She smiled, and let go of my hand; the emptiness on my palm seemed to spread through my entire body, and I smiled at her as best I could through an enormous gulp. My throat didn’t seem to want to work properly. “Well then. Shall we?”
She nodded, and we started walking. I couldn’t stop glancing over at her, but she looked calmer now; more detached, maybe. Or maybe more focused. It was tough to tell with her sometimes; she was serious, but she was carefree, too. She was just about everything, all at once. I was so intent that I actually tripped over a protruding root on the path, and only her sudden hand on my shoulder saved me from arriving at what was either going to be my first date or my first murder with bloody, scratched-up hands.
Then, suddenly, the plateau opened up in front of my eyes. All at once, it was just there: A huge, circular section of dirt and fallen leaves in the middle of the trees; just like the path but for one major difference: There were no trees between us and the ocean anymore, and for just a moment, the sun—now a burning red on the horizon—transfixed me utterly.
There was nobody there.
I wanted to curse. I actually dropped to a squat, because I didn’t feel like my legs could hold the bulk of the rage that was rapidly building up inside of me. I wanted to scream and curse and rave and tear down a fucking tree with my bare fucking hands and ram it down the fucker’s gullet and
“He’s not here. The little-…he’s not here,” I said. “We were looking for him all this time and he—”
“There’s a reason he’s not here,” Aoi said throatily.
I looked up at her, and she walked out into the middle of the plateau, tears brimming in her eyes. And then, all at once, it made sense to me. Not just the letters and the looks from today, but every single look she’d given me for the past three years. Every inadvertent touch. Everything.
It had all been right in front of my face, just like the grass. And still, I had looked right past it. And that was the last thing, I realized, that I wanted to do.
But still, I had to hear it from her. I straightened up and looked her straight in the eye. “Tell me.”
She smiled a little, and the tears that had been welling up started to trace little wet lines down the smooth skin of her cheeks.
“I wrote the letters.” She ran ahead and planted the third letter when I was talking with Mai. She probably had Mai plant the second letter.
I started walking towards her, my legs carrying me as though it were the most important thing in the world all of a sudden. I think it was. I think they wouldn’t have stopped even if you had severed them from my torso entirely.
“I wrote them because it was the only way I could think of doing…doing this.”
I was halfway to her. I couldn’t let her do what she was about to do. She was about to break down, and then she’d never be able to
say it.
“Chie…because I really…”
I was there, and I threw myself into her arms with as much might as I could muster.
She stopped speaking for a moment, and I knew it was because she couldn’t as hot tears started to soak into my shirt. I hugged her tight, using one hand to press her head into me, using the other to rub her back.
After a second, I relaxed my arms, and she pulled back. She had the same look that she’d had before, as we stared at each other in silence, as her lips had tried and failed, I think, to say it.
So she said it now.
“I love you.”
I smiled, and I think it was the most honest smile I had ever shown in my life. “I love you,” I echoed, and then I glanced at her lips. They were doing something again, but it wasn’t mouthing words. And she was getting closer again.
Boys never go more than ninety percent when they want to kiss a girl. Girls should be allowed the final ten, so as to avoid bruised cheekbones. Somebody I had gone on a date with once had told me that, as a joke; but I think he was being honest, too.
But I wasn’t ten percent of anything. So I kissed her. I kissed her deeply, finding her lips small but warm, pressing into mine with the same urgency I had heard in her voice just a few minutes before. Like this could be the last moment of her life, and so she had to live it as much as possible.
It wasn’t the last moment, though.
It wasn’t the last kiss, either. There were many, many more after that.
It was dark by the time we finally made it to the base of the mountain. I think that alone is proof enough.
I think we found what we were looking for. Maybe we never even knew what that was, but I think we found it. Both of us, at once. And that, I think, is the most anybody can ever say.
I still visit that mountain, even now, when I have no reason to be anywhere near Fuuka academy. Sometimes Aoi comes with me, sometimes she doesn’t. I’ve marked off the tree she put the letter on, and I visit it every time, and I carve some new words into it with a little hammer and nail. I think people read it, but I’m not sure. I hope so.
Because there are some words that have more influence than others; words that come in unexpected places can impact our lives more than words we see every day.
Maybe that’s why I still write there. Maybe that’s why I still compose words onto those trees.
Maybe.
Nee, nandakke sagashiteita mono / are wa, sou ne itsudakke / bokura ga inryoku ni sakarai nagara deatta koro
Sore wa WARUTSU no you da ne fushigi sa
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