Just one more day.

Chapter one.

Chihiro stared longingly out of the window; the sunny street down below was filled with life, people happily making their way down the bustling main street. Unlike the many happy people down below, Chihiro was not happy. Ever since she returned home from the spirit world so many years ago her heart had ached with the longing to return to the only place she had ever felt truly at home.

Haku, despite all his promises had not returned for her, she had never seen him again and Chihiro had began to realise that she probably never would. The rush of joy she had once felt at the very thought of her beautiful white dragon had long since been replaced with an unexplainable emptiness. The older she had gotten the more she realised that she didn't belong in the human world. Not really, she would never find a true home in this realm. The more she realised this, the more she secluded herself from the world, making as little human contact as possible.

She had graduated high school with high marks in every subject. Rather than make friends she had buried herself in her studies, at that time she had seen no point in making friends because Haku, the tall green-eyed boy who saved her life, with his dark hair flecked with a green tint when the light hit it and his serious smile, would surley come and whisk her away form the human world and carry her away into the spirit realm. However, it was not to be.

She sighed and turned; looking around at her simple apartment she lived alone and had few friends. She knew it was childish but she made few attachments in hope that Haku would come for her. She had tried the tell her parents about what had happened, because they had moved away once again only a few years after the incident in the spirit world. They had laughed at her and did not take her seriously. They saw her story only as the product of an over-active imagination. Chihiro had wept bitterly that day, because she had realised that she truly was alone in the human world.

When she had gotten into Art College she had studied various aspects of fine art from drawing to traditional eastern calligraphy. She now painted commissions on request for her customers because the brilliant thing about artwork is that you can draw and paint whatever you wish and very few will question it. She drew out her wonderful story of her adventures in the spirit world bit by bit and sold each memory as an individual work of art. If someone were to look at them all one by one from first to last they would realise however, that it was a story. Her story.

The most popular of her works was a painting of a beautiful white dragon gliding with ease through the sky with a nameless figure on its back. Their hair whipping behind them in the cool breeze, the water below the pair is reflecting the sun's rays off its glassy surface. Chihiro loved this picture she could feel the wind in her hair and smell the fresh sea air, the memory taking her in its comforting grasp.

Chihiro: Haku, listen, I just remembered something from along time ago; I think it may help you. Once, when I was little, I dropped my shoe into a river. When I tried to get it back I fell in, I thought I'd drown but the water carried me to shore. It finally came back to me, the rivers name was the Kahaku River, I think that were you, and your real name is Kahaku River…


Haku: You did it, Chihiro, I remember, I was the spirit of the Kahaku river.
Chihiro: A river spirit?
Haku: My name is the Kahaku River.
Chihiro: They filled in that river; it's all apartments now.
Haku: That must be why I can't find my way home Chihiro, I remember you falling into the river, and I remember your little pink shoe.
Chihiro: So, you're the one who carried me back to shallow water, you saved me... I knew you were good!

Chihiro went into the bedroom and flung herself onto her bed, sobbing with the longing to return to the spirit realm and with the need for friends to understand her, she cried herself into an uneasy sleep. She would give anything just for one more chance to see the spirit world she now considered more of a home than any house or town she had lived in. No one had any idea what she would give. Just for one more day.