A/N: I don't own the beautiful work of art that is known as Five Centimeters Per Second. It belongs to Makoto Shinkai. :3 Prompts are taken from a 121 drabble challenge I found a long time ago, but these are not drabbles. :) PS, Please forgive me for the incessant quotes that will be put at the beginning and end of each chapter, but I am madly in love with the works of Sylvia Plath (as morbid as that sounds) and cannot help myself.
There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.
-Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
[1] Breaking Away
Have you ever thought you found "the one"? Someone you could imagine spending the rest of your life with, and someone who you couldn't see yourself without? If so, then you could probably understand the feelings of Sumida Kanae.
Tono Takaki always stared off into the horizon in a way that was troubling to her. He was kind to her, and it made her feel special until she remembered that he was nice to everyone. Tono was the type of person who always smiled at everyone, even when they weren't so pleasant in return. The pain that Kanae felt when she saw him with his nose buried in his phone or trying to see a faraway land that he loved was unbearable. Tono had the eyes of a daydreamer, but buried under the hopeful look in those wonderful brown eyes were hints of grief and heartache. She remembered one of the first times she saw his emotions slip. They rode home from school together, then made a stop at the convenience store for drinks. When she came out of the store, she saw Tono writing a message with a somber expression.
The day that she realized that he was wanting something very far away was one of the last times Kanae ever saw Tono. She had finally worked up the courage to tell him how she felt, still hoping that he felt the same way. They rode their scooters home from school and made their usual stop at the convenience store. After her scooter wouldn't start again, they walked home together from the store. Her heart started to beat fast, and she tried to bring herself to say the words she wanted to say for so long. As he walked with his back to her, Kanae realized that she would never reach him. She wanted to be the one he confided his feelings in. She wanted to hear what was on his mind –what he was really thinking. At school, Tono was open and sincere to everyone, but she knew by those brief moments when she caught him staring into the sunset or typing messages on his phone that there was more to his feelings than the facade of cheer and hope he put on at school. Even as she stood beside him, he was too far away for her to reach. Whatever it was that he was searching for in that far distance, she could not give it to him.
He was never looking at her, only past her.
"I wish he would just stop," she thought. "Why are you so kind, Tono? Why are you so kind to me? Will you ever tell me what that distant look is about? Will you ever open yourself up? What are you thinking about? Why did you make me fall in love with you?"
She listened to the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees. As the birds chirped from their nests and the squirrels chattered, she imagined that they were all just laughing at her —that the entire world was laughing at her. The butterflies in her stomach from merely looking at Tono seemed to become frozen and then shattered to pieces. She squeezed the handle bar of her scooter in her as if to crush it and bit her lip. Kanae fixed her eyes on the dirt road ahead of her. She didn't dare look at Tono because she knew if she caught his eye, she would begin to cry, and she would be unable to stop herself. Despite her efforts to hold it in, the tears brimmed and slid down her face like droplets of water over the sides of a glass too full. For every tear that escaped her eyes, she regretted having gone home with Tono ten times more. She repeatedly apologized for the letting him witness her fall to pieces.
The day she gave up on Tono was the day Kanae fell off of the great surfboard of happiness. On top of not being able to catch a wave for the past six months, she realized that her only reason to never give up on what she loved the most quickly slipped through her fingers like sand.
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
