There's a haze on the horizon. A brilliant shade of red-orange and pink that eventually fades into blue, and dissolves. The evening is soft.
Watanuki remembers an age, a lifetime ago, when he looked at the world with innocent eyes, and it was simple and lovely. When white was white, and black was black, and there was a right and a wrong.
There was an age, before hitsuzen, when love meant springtime and butterflies and Himawari's smile, instead of many shades of dulling silk and regret for not regretting.
He remembers...
There was an age, when he didn't whisper tendrils of smoke that curled gently across Doumeki's cheek, and wonder questions that were never given the chance to not be answered.
..do I love you?
Watanuki remembers an age, succeeding the last, when he wonders a question he never forgets, and can't answer until it's irrelevant.
He rubs at the space between his forefinger and thumb and shifts a languid gaze to the grandson. He smiles.
"You really do look like him, you know." The other hmn's into the dark, and their silence gives way to the whispering night air.
Watanuki knows the answers now, but he supposes it doesn't matter. It's not as if he would've chose any different.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference."
-Robert Frost
A/N:
The excerpt, sampled from the poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, is trying to say is that no matter what decisions we make, we will never be able to know what would have happened had we chosen differently. In this way, the poem becomes a lament for the loss of all the alternate futures we forgo for the sake of pursuing the one we end up with.
~Jasmina Lejandra