For Taki, the word lonely doesn't necessarily mean the absence of friends – it means the absence of comfort.
He used to have someone. There's a fuzzy image in his mind of a person with a gentle voice like soft bells and eyes that seemed to wander deep into his soul – but why was it smeared with so so much melancholy?
The answer upsets him: he simply forgot.
Sometimes he'd lie in bed trying to remember, concentrating until his eyes bled tears and the twinge of longing blossomed into grief because of something he doesn't even know about. It feels like grasping air, clawing at shadows... trying to remember dreams.
It's become a ritual every night to hope that he'd one day miraculously wake up with all the answers, but the person at the heart of all of this, whether they were real or make-believe, always seemed so far away –
"So we don't forget when we wake up, let's write our names on each other!"
– like a fading, fleeting dream.
–
"A simple warm-up today," Sensei says, smiling lightly at the class. "Pick a partner and sketch your best impression of them. Good luck!"
Immediately, everyone begins to turn to their friends, dividing up their groups into pairs. Taki sits at the back of the room, his teacher's words barely registering. The canvas sits in front of him, blank. The task fails to catch his attention because he doesn't like drawing people – instead, he likes sketching sceneries. Scenes of a vast lake and soaring mountains. Scenes of a country town, nestled far away from Tokyo –
"Taki?"
"T-Taki-kun? Are you there?"
"Taki!"
"Huh?" A second passes before he realises the teacher's staring at him. "Oh… Sensei."
She frowns. Behind her, the hum of chatter buzzes around the room. "You don't have a partner... Oh, that's right! We have an odd number of people. Would you like to join with a pair –"
"It's okay." Taki diverts his eyes to his canvas. His hand lies still next to the pencil, void of any inspiration. He thinks of the lake. The mountains. The lanterns that lit up a dark town during a festival. "I'll draw something. It's just an exercise right?"
Sensei smiles approvingly, nodding.
After she leaves, Taki thinks for a moment. A person's face…
He concentrates, trying to conjure an image of someone he knows as well as his own soul. Eyes, hair, a nose and mouth. He sees those features every time he looked into the mirror.
The pencil flies effortlessly. Slowly, a face begins to bloom to life in black and white, so real Taki wondered if he'd met the person before. It looks a bit like Okudera-senpai, but Taki hasn't seen her since he quit his job. Plus, Okudera-senpai has longer hair... Instead, it looks like a typical Tokyo high school girl with brown eyes and a shy smile.
Maybe something was influencing him there. For a brief moment, he forgets about the hole in his chest that he woke up with a few weeks ago. Art revitalised him. The feel of the pencil between his fingers lit up a sense of purpose that he thought had been gone for a long time. Maybe this was the feeling he'd been searching for.
Or maybe it's the person he's drawing.
The realisation strikes Taki suddenly. His fingers become numb. His eyes stare, dry, though they were starting to become hot. The world narrows into a tunnel with just him and the girl. The chatter in the classroom fades until he can only hear his own blood pounding.
Short black hair... recently cut.
How did he know that?
He sits back and looks carefully. The face he'd drawn smiles sadly, the ghost of laughter on her face. There's grim determination in her eyes, which reflect something blue in the sky… something long and beautiful and falling – a comet? It looks like a memory – a dream.
The colouring pencils drop out of his hand with a loud clatter. His classmates glance over but he doesn't notice – nor does he care. The artwork eats his attention, the way this feeling of longing ate his soul.
There's something there in her hair that catches his eyes; something he's sure he didn't draw consciously; something that twists his heart and makes his mouth dry: a red ribbon.
I used to have one.
He remembers. A red ribbon. Someone who gave it to him.
"What," he murmurs to the girl, "is your name?"
–
It's New Year's Eve of 2017 and Taki can't help but fail to appreciate the fireworks that Tokyo squandered a fortune on. Besides, he can't really enjoy it with the face of the girl haunting him. The picture hangs from his bedroom, gazing at him every night until he succumbed to a dreamless sleep.
He tears his thoughts away and tries to appreciate the new year. The explosive fireworks show, breathtaking a decade ago when he was younger, leaves a trail of smoke visible above the city lights, clouding even the dark night sky with a thick blanket of fog. Would everything lose its vigour as he aged?
Or maybe he's just depressed.
Turning around, he walks back into his apartment.
Fireworks. Happy new year. Yeah, right.
He'd much rather see the stars.
Yeah. Stars. He remembers the first time seeing a night free of city lights. They spread across the sky like a path of diamonds, twinkling brightly in spite of the darkness as if telling him that it was going to be all right in the end. He doesn't believe them. The empty pit in his soul feels as if it can never be filled.
Standing on the balcony of his apartment, a sudden yearning to see the stars again touches Taki, wrenching him by the heart. It must be nostalgia, or so he thinks. The shattered feeling feels more like heartbreak.
He needs to see the stars.
...
No. Not just that.
It's better to look at them with someone else.
–
Tsukasa and Miki visit him at school today. How annoying.
He feels ashamed to think such things. Tsukasa spent every free period checking on Taki, and Miki occasionally drops by when she didn't have a shift. He should appreciate such friends.
But he doesn't.
He's lonely.
And he doesn't know why.
"You okay, Taki-kun?" Miki asks a few seconds after Tsukasa jogs out to grab soft drinks. Their meeting had been stifled by awkward silence.
He hesitates. Now would be a good time to ask. "Okudera-senpai?"
"Yes?"
"Did we ever go somewhere outside of Tokyo?"
"Hmm." Miki blinks, getting lost in that faraway look. "I think so."
"A town with a lake?"
Silence again. Taki felt silly asking these questions – why would someone like Miki bother to remember something as insignificant as a field trip?
"Oh. I remember a lake. And… a town. It's weird. My memory's fuzzy."
His breathing feels heavy again. "Oh, well –"
"Taki-kun!" Mischief lights up Miki's voice. She giggles. The sound of it doesn't warm him up anymore. Weird. "What are you holding?"
He doesn't realise what she's talking about until he glances down. "This?" It's a paper. Again, that feeling of longing heaves.
"Something you drew?"
"Y-yeah…" He unfolds it to reveal the face of a girl with a red ribbon.
Miki sighs contently. "It's a beautiful drawing. Do you know that person?"
Does he?
The question stabs him like a knife.
"Taki-kun... it's me."
"I… I feel like I should."
But he doesn't.
And he doesn't know why.
Half of his soul withers in that moment.
–
For the first time in forever, Taki dreams.
He's sitting at a desk that's not his, wearing a skirt that's definitely not his.
The details are fuzzy. The people around him don't have faces. The dream feels like being below murky water. His movements feel sluggish, his breathing heavy. He can't see anything, but he can hear.
"Kataware-doki; Twilight, when it's neither day or night –"
The dream suddenly sharpens into focus. The notebook in front of him has characters written in his handwriting.
"– when the world blurs and one might encounter something not human."
The sight makes him light-headed. Nostalgia claws at him. A memory that seemed to happen centuries ago comes rushing back in hazy pictures. A train station... a girl with black hair, a red ribbon, a name...
'Who are you?'
–
Sensei assigned them another task: construct a short poem of any style. Literature has never been Taki's strong point, so he jots down five lines hurriedly, heeding the teacher's dramatic advice to peer deep into his own heart and draw out whatever angsty emotion lingered there.
"What did you write?" Tsukasa asks flatly afterwards.
"A poem," Taki replies absentmindedly, then realises how blunt that sounds. Plus, he isn't even sure if the garbage he wrote could even be considered a 'poem'. "A poem about… my feelings, I guess." It sounded cheesy to say aloud but Taki doesn't even care about what other people think of him anymore. Must be an inevitable part of growing up.
"Hmm," Tsukasa hums. It's obvious he only used the poem as a conversation starter. "Okudera and I have been thinking… that girl you drew in Art class –"
"Okudera-senpai told you?"
"Well, yeah. She said it was really good. But then we were just wondering… that drawing – is it related to the person we tried to find in Itomori?"
Itomori.
At the mention of that town, Taki's world halts. His heart stops beating, and for a moment, his mind leaps back to a face just for a brief moment.
He sees it all, not just on a piece of paper but in flesh and blood. The person is a she and she's standing there atop a plateau with a bright smile and a red ribbon in her hair. Behind her, the sun begins to dip, drowning below the horizon in brilliant flares of bright orange and soft violet – but he doesn't care about the sunset. He's too busy looking at the person in front of him, as if she was a dream come true.
The girl – who looks so so familiar that it hurts – laughs at something. The sight makes him feel warm.
"Mitsuha," he murmurs. "Mitsuha. Mitsuha. You're Mitsuha."
He remembers.
The feeling of relief seizes him. Tears threaten to spill. If they'd died in that moment he wouldn't have cared. He was there with her. Nothing – not even time – could tear them apart.
He wants to reach out and grab her hand. If he does that, they'd always be together, right? He and the other half of his soul. The other half of his heart. They'd never be separated again, right?
But he can't. It feels just like being paralysed in a dream.
"Taki-kun!"
Just for a little longer, please, he thinks, dimly aware of everything crumbling around him. The scenery flickers like a dying star. A minute.
But the world doesn't even give him a second. She disintegrates right in front of him like dust, fading into nothing. He wants to grab her. Pull her back. Tell her again and again that he loves her. They were supposed to be –
"I can't remember your name with this..."
– together.
He blinks and suddenly finds himself next to Tsukasa again.
"I…" The sunlight streaming into the room seems too bright. The teacher's droning voice seems too loud. Already, her face begins to fade… leaving a hole where hope had dared to spark just a heartbeat ago.
Your name... he thinks, scrunching his eyes.
He looks at Tsukasa. "I'm going to the nurse. I think I had a hallucination."
No one objects when he stands up abruptly in the middle of Sensei's lecture and half-runs out, headed towards anywhere but sick bay.
Itomori.
I saw the stars there.
...
And they were falling.
–
all that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream
–
Edgar Allan Poe
–
a/n: first time writing in present, will correct errors wherever I can.