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The One That Got Away
For all Mitsui fans out there—cheers!
And to whom it may concern: You KNOW I don't own Slam Dunk. If I did, why on earth would I be writing fanfics?? :D
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There isn't a day that goes by without a thought of her.
Michiko.
I met her when I was in junior high. She was a freshman, I was a sophomore. She's the little sister of my best friend at that time, Rui. Rui was my classmate in my first year, and we immediately clicked when we first started talking about…well, about basketball. He got me off my butt and into more serious basketball play. I haven't even thanked Rui for doing that for me. In fact, I don't even know where he is, or what he's doing, right now.
I used to visit Rui and Michiko's house on Sundays, so Rui and I could play basketball together. Michiko would always watch us, always carrying her pencil and sketchpad around, trying to catch our movements on paper. She loved to draw, and she always drew anything she had mind. Rui was very supportive of his sister, and always spoke highly of her work. I've never seen two siblings so close. They never bickered or fought like in other families. Rui was the silent type, but as you got to know him better he became friendlier and more open. Michiko, in stark contrast to her brother, was the smiling one, the one who liked to laugh and hop around. She was also very sweet and kind, and treated me like family. She saw beauty in all things, and looked at the world in a sort of wide-eyed wonderment.
"Sashi-kun, look at that! Have you ever seen a kite fly so high?" she would ask me, pointing to a red dot in the sky, flailing about madly, like a boat thrown in a wild sea.
"I've flown higher kites than that, Michiko-chan. And don't call me Sashi-kun!"
It's funny how all these come back to me vividly, but I don't remember paying attention to the little details like this. I never did understand how important it was to me until it drew away from my reach.
The problem with regrets is that they always come too late.
We would go to the half-court in the park, Michiko and I, while we waited for Rui, who attended tutorial classes on Sundays. She would watch me play basketball with unmasked interest, and when I asked her why, she would always say that she would like to see how the body moves, so that she would be able to draw it next time.
"Sashi-kun," she said as I shot common shots through the basket. "You're getting very good at this, ne? My brother always says that he wished he could be more like you in playing. I don't know anything about basketball, but if he says that you are good, you must be a wonderful player in games!" she smiled sunnily.
"Aa." I never did pay much attention to her back then, but she didn't seem to mind, nor did it affect her. Nothing could bring her down. Nothing could ever stop her from calling me 'Sashi-kun' too, much to my annoyance.
I was in an unfortunate situation at that time. My family was going through some domestic problems and it was a confusing period for me. I didn't know what to think, what to do, so I usually escaped to Rui's place and basketball to ease my head for even a few hours.
"You're doing fine, Hisashi." Rui once said to me while discussing some of my problems to him. "If I were going through what you're going through right now, I know I wouldn't be able to handle it."
"Come on now, you two!" Michiko shouted, tossing us a basketball, grinning. "Don't look so serious; there's so much things in life to be happy about!" How exactly like Michiko to say something like that. Her cheerfulness was really something. She had a very strong personality underneath the smiles. Rui always said that it is always Michiko was the joy of the family, and Rui's source of strength and encouragement. She was always the one prodding people along, including myself. Yet there was also a deeper, more complex aspect to her character. Whenever Rui and I took a break from basketball, she would show us the sketches she had drawn while we were playing. Castles hewn out of rocks, floating in a cloudy sky. Six-winged angels with swords flashing in their hands. A woman playing an electric guitar with what seemed like blood dripping from her fingers. A centaur playing the violin in the middle of heavy traffic in the modern world. They were all mysterious and there was a dark quality in her work, a dark quality in her that I did not fully understand.
"Why don't you draw me sometime?" I have asked her jokingly one day while we were having lunch, me and Rui and her. She seemed a little surprised at my statement, but before I knew it, she had taken out her sketchbook, pencils and eraser, and began to draw, her hand flying over the paper. She did not even pause to look at me for reference. In five minutes she was holding up a newly finished sketch of my face. It was incredible, a smiling picture of me.
"Wow." I breathed, amazed at her talent. Rui nodded, smiling proudly at his little sister. "It's really good, Michiko-chan. I'm a little surprised!" she blushed at my compliment.
"It looks just like Hisashi." Rui agreed.
Michiko looked down quickly. "Oh. It's the smile, you see."
"What?" I asked, wondering what she meant.
"Sashi-kun's smile is like no one else's." she explained, smiling a little herself. "Only you have this beautiful smile." Beautiful. What a strange word to describe something about myself.
She always gave me a reason to smile. Sometimes she abandoned pen and paper to try and play basketball with us. She was very bad at it, but at least she tried. "You're bad at drawing, I'm bad at basketball, so we're even. You can't complain! In short, we both suck!" The laughter from these practices would go on and on, like it would never stop. It was a happy time.
When I went onto senior year, everything changed.
I don't know how it happened, but I do know it was my fault. Rui and I weren't classmates that year. I became the captain of our basketball team, and slowly growing more and more popular because I was now a senior. I suppose all that praise that came from my schoolmates got in my head because you see, I was never praised so much before in my life. The Sunday practices stopped because I started thinking that I had to be more serious in my training, not realizing how the same Sunday practices had helped so much to improve as a player. I started looking at Rui not as a friend but as another bench warmer in the team. I went so far as to stop treating him like a peer, but I treated him the way I treated the freshmen. I started to befriend people so very different from the kind of people Michiko and Rui were. In short, I started to change for the worse. How easily I have forgotten all the kindness they had shown me for the past two years.
Michiko, whom I intensely liked last year, was nearly forgotten, too. Girls were coming up to me by the dozen, enough to make any guy's head spin. The most interaction I had with her was the tentative smiles she gave me when we met each other in the hallway. I was careless with her smiles. Sometimes I acknowledged them; sometimes I didn't so in the end she stopped smiling at me altogether. Up until now, I cannot forget how crestfallen her eyes she was every time I saw her.
We also met at the weekly club meetings, where the club presidents met to discuss their agenda with the student council. She was the president of the art club, and I was the captain of the basketball team, so we had to be there. She was always the one who livened up these boring meetings, bless her. Despite the estrangement in our friendship, Michiko was exactly as she always was, her cheerful nature unchanged. I was glad for that. I also noticed that she avoided looking at me, or when she spoke, she was careful to speak to the direction that was not mine. Had I become so repulsive to her, I wonder.
As for Rui, he dropped out of the basketball team one day. No explanations other than that he had to focus his studies in order to get into a good college. No apologies, no nothing. I had no right to feel hurt, as I was the one who broke ties with them, but I felt hurt anyway. I began to see what an idiot I've been, but I decided to ignore it, leaving it as an unalterable mistake. Another mistake for me.
For all the mistakes I made that year, there is one error that I will always, always regret.
It was a chilly autumn afternoon, and I was walking home from practice. Michiko was waiting for me outside the school gate, her school bag still strapped on her back. She looked slightly apprehensive at the sight of me, her usual confidence faltering.
"Konnichiwa, Sashi-kun." She greeted me.
"Michiko." I replied, wondering why she was talking to me. I honestly thought that she hated me now, especially with the fact that her brother just dropped out of the basketball team.
"I didn't want to disturb your basketball practice so I waited for you instead." She said. "I just wanted to return something to you." She dug around her pocket and produced a silver watch—my watch that my grandfather gave me before he died. I thought I had lost it somewhere in the house. Why was it with her?
She read my puzzled look. "You don't remember?" she laughed softly, albeit a little bitterly. "Don't you remember, Sashi-kun? It was last year," she dropped her voice, almost in a whisper. "You and Rui were going to play basketball, as always, at the court in the park, the day before we went abroad for our summer vacation. You were wearing your watch, and you gave it to me, and you asked me to take care of it, and watch it until the game is over. I intended on doing as you asked me, and return it to you before you went home, but somehow it slipped my mind. Apparently," here she gazed up at me, with a pained look in her eyes. "You've forgotten, too."
I was unprepared for what she said next.
"I felt very guilty for only remembering it after the vacation, but I thought that you would recall and get it from me. But you didn't. I waited and waited but you didn't come. I know I should have given it to you…demo ne…I was too selfish. I didn't want to part with it, the only time anyone has entrusted me something so precious…but you didn't remember it was with me. Then I began to doubt if it was really important to you. After all, if it was important, you wouldn't leave it with someone like me, eh?"
I took the silver watch and turned it over my hands, listening, thinking.
"So you thought that if I liked you enough, I would come at my own accord and ask you for the precious thing I had entrusted to you? Is that it?"
My words seemed to pierce right into her heart. Her face paled, and the light from her eyes disappeared. It was like she was rudely awakened from a lovely dream. She shook her head mutely. When she found her voice…
"That's not it, that's not it at all, Sashi-kun!" she cried.
"So what is it then, Michiko?" I couldn't help but sneer cruelly at her. Why was I doing this? Why was I hurting her? She didn't do anything to me.
She lowered her head, defeated, humbled, her heart breaking before my very eyes. "It's just that I—I miss you. One cannot help but miss the one they love." Then her eyes widened with realization and horror, and she clamped her hands over her mouth.
And then what did I do?
I laughed. I laughed and laughed. The hollow, mirthless laugh that I had perfected. My own laughter chilled my blood. When had I start laughing like this? When? When? When people started to use me for their own ends? When my classmates befriended me for my popularity?
When had I started being so blatantly false? How can Michiko, full of warmth, feel something for me?
"That has to be a joke." I said to her, and I walked away. I clenched the silver watch in my hand, cold against my skin. Then I felt the tears beginning to fall.
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I looked in the mirror that day and saw how grotesquely deformed I had become, blown away by the praise and admiration from complete strangers, completely disregarding the pain of the people who were truly important to me. I had become someone I was really not, and I had become bitter and calloused because of it.
Something died in me that day. Michiko and Rui took their roads, different from mine, and I tried to forget. Move onto the next stage, and forget. I could not.
Anata dake mitsumeteru.
I can only see her. The pain of losing something you had taken for granted before is unbearable. I was a breath away from happiness with her, but I threw it all away. She loved me, for who I really was, and I just let her love slip through my fingers. How could I be so foolish?! I realize now, too late, that the only thing I wanted was to be with her. Always.
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There was an announcement on the newspaper about an art gallery that had opened this week. Michiko Okui was one of the featured artists. I had to go. I had to try…one last time…if she can still accept me…and my long-delayed apology.
The art gallery was packed, and it was easy to get lost in it. I passed by various sculptures and paintings, admiring them for half a second, then moving on. Then I saw one painting that took my breath away.
I recognized the style of the art immediately. More importantly, I recognized the half-court in the park where Rui and I used to play basketball. It was a night scene, with the full moon shining brightly upon a lone player, his feet in the air, his arms raised, ready to shoot the ball, his face resolute. The artist had captured the movement perfectly. A small plaque near the painting read:
Playing in the Dark. Okui Michiko. Oil on canvas.
I stared at the painting for a while, not believing how much she had improved in her work, then decided to look for the artist herself. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. A sudden thought—could it be Rui? I swiveled, preparing myself, only finding myself face to face with Fujima Kenji.
The brown-haired man's eyes melted with relief. "Mitsui-san!" he greeted amiably, holding out a hand, which I automatically shook. "I was so sure it was you. Boy, am I glad to see a familiar face here!"
It was not Rui, and I didn't know if I was relieved or disappointed. "So am I. Not exactly a place for basketball players, is it?"
Fujima laughed—a pleasant, light laugh. "No, not unless you plan on throwing some hoops over the sculptures. Have you seen the one at the left?" he pointed behind my back. "It's insane!"
Not as insane as what I'm about to do. I thought to myself. I had to find her, as soon as possible. It was a blessing we were taller than most of the people who came. I turned to Fujima. If he was here on reasons different from mine, he must know the crowd better than I. "Fujima," I said, pointing to Playing in the Dark. "Do you know the person who painted this? Michiko Okui?"
He glanced at the painting I was pointing at. "Yeah, in fact I do." he nodded. "I was talking to her earlier. Why? Do you know her?"
"An old friend." Was all I could afford to say.
That seemed a good enough explanation for Fujima. "Alright then. Follow me." He led me through the knots of people, weaving through various displayed artworks. When I caught sight of her, I felt my whole body stop.
Michiko was standing by one of the windows, alone, looking out with a small smile on her face. She had grown taller and looked more mature now, but she looked exactly the same as the last time I saw her. A lump formed in my throat, I felt my stomach tighten, and I was very nervous. What was I going to say to her now?
Fujima kept on walking towards her. I saw her look at my direction and smile, the familiar sparkle in her eyes. She held out her hand…
I took a step forward.
And then Fujima took her outstretched hand and clasped it into his. I saw him smile and she laughed, as if they had just shared an unspoken jest. She ruffled his hair tenderly. He put a hand on her waist and made a little twirl with her.
I now understood, all too clearly.
I had lost my chance with her, forever.
When he lowered his face to her ear to whisper to her about my presence, I left. I can't meet her right now. I've seen her, and she is happy, and that is enough for me. Yes, Fujima is exactly the kind of person she deserves. I can't change things anymore, and this time, it is really final.
I'll always be looking for her, though. The one that got away.
~ Fin
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Author's Notes: Ahahahahaha! -_-; another angst-ridden fic. Sue me (come to think of it, DON'T!) but I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. I lost a lot of sleep because of this fanfic. O_O So far, this is just a one-shot, but if you want, I can expand it a little—just tell me. This is for my sempai! Hope you like it!! :D