I thought about her a lot.
Almost obsessively, one might say. It wasn't exactly something a normal person might have done, but it wasn't like there was much that was normal about me to begin with. I'd always had a hard time with emotions; I never really knew what to feel and how to feel it. I didn't quite understand what emotions were supposed to be like.
Ayano . . . made that clearer for me. She'd been a light in my life, one that let me realize that I had, in fact, been dwelling in a deep darkness. She'd shown me how to be happy. She'd let me know exactly how crushing sadness could be.
I had to tell myself to remember the happiness. The sadness and regret came back all on their own, all these painful things she'd given me names for.
I was sad that she died, sad about how she died. I was sad that I didn't help her when she had so clearly needed it. I was sad that she'd left and taken the light with her.
I regretted how I'd treated her. How I'd shut her out and put her down and left her all alone. The shame and the guilt ran on constant loop in my mind, blaming me for everything.
One moment stuck in my head in particular. I shut my eyes and I could see it, clear as day.
It was late afternoon, sometime in August. We were heading home from school, up on the crest of the hill we walked over every day. The heat of the summer was lingering in the air like it wasn't quite ready to let us free just yet, distorting the horizon and making my eyes sting.
She was a few paces behind me. When I looked back at her, she skipped up, smiling, and put her hand on my shoulder. I gave her a look, but she ignored it. "Don't mind me," she just said, tilting her head at that carefree angle, almost acting like she wanted to distract me from how she was touching me.
"God, just go away," I scoffed, brushing her hand away and moving ahead. The hell was she on about? She had a tendency to do things like that, but she was usually a lot more shy about it.
"No," she mumbled, dashing forward to grab my hand. "I won't leave you," she said firmly, and when I looked in her eyes, I saw something I couldn't identify. For a fraction of a second, I was afraid. I didn't know what I was scared of, I didn't know what she was trying to tell me.
I didn't know. And maybe, deep inside me, buried under the years of apathy and the walls keeping anyone and anything away from me, that was what scared me most of all.
"You're so annoying!" I yanked my hand out of her grip and shoved it into my pocket. I didn't want to feel that any more. I didn't want to even look at her.
Ignoring her silence, I just walked away, forging a path through the hazy air. I didn't turn back. She couldn't have said anything to make it less weird.
But, and this was the really weird thing, she didn't say anything at all. She didn't call out to me, or cry, or scream or anything. She was just . . . silent. And as I walked off, she just faded away in the wake of my frustration.
I guess, looking back, that's how she died too.