patterns
The moonlight leads her softly to a place she can't quite call home.
It stops her at the gate, a veil for an unease she can't explain. She'd prepared for someplace quiet, with an emptiness familiar. Not the awkward fumbling of these metallic keys, not this reluctance dulling these surfaces.
A coldness roams the hallway as she steps inside; paintings, swords hung à deux, flowered mountains and restless clouds which adorn these walls; here a family is sheltered by this decoration - opaque yet velvet soft, enough to touch.
She does just that: ever so gently, she places her finger, tracing delicately the bumps and curves of these painted mountains on the wall, her sister's room lying around the second crest, as her feet steps lightly across this wooden floor, used yet seemingly unused. She looks at the tip of her index, the ghost of something misplaced haunting her.
It feels like a perverse indulgence, trespassing, it is impossible to wonder what she desires here amongst another family's abode.
So many questions. Maybe these patterns hold a few answers.
…
She stares quietly as her bedroom door somehow manages to appear menacing, two-and-a-half tatami lengths across, closed off yet hollow all the same.
Another threshold to cross, she mutters to herself, and again she finds herself faltering. A room, emptied by her departure, where nothing of hers remains except for these walls and the pale gaze of the stars, where the wooden sill is glazed with a layer of dust.
Nothing belongs to her in this place so obviously undisturbed, devoid of attachment - she can't help but think it to be a sin to stand here, to even dare to touch what had once been her refuge.
I do wonder, she'd thought back then, I wonder if I will miss these floors, these walls, these doors, as her mind traverses back to a room empty much like this one.
Boxes, filled with her belongings, the summation of her existence, lie stacked in an apartment unfurnished, the skyscrapers outside a far cry from the sakura blossoms which adorn the garden from her window.
A mother and a father, dressed formally in their attire as always, stand resolutely outside the apartment, the door ajar with all of its metallic handles and buttons, alike in their motionlessness. This aura of unease permeates the silence, not unlike the coldness she is feeling as she reminisces, where the father rests one hand on the door handle.
The creaking of the door breaks this stalemate, as he removes his hand from the handle and reaches into one of his left blazer pockets, handing something to her.
A key.
"Just in case," he says, in a tone that doesn't quite match his blank expression, before placing his hand back on the handle, the other hand leading his wife away by the shoulder, as the door shuts with a slight click.
She lets out something akin to a sigh, as she moves towards the window, feeling the key in her pocket, and amongst the dust, writes Yukinoshita Yukino in her neatest kanji on the sill. Mundane actions, child's play, even. But still, her actions. Her actions.
A step towards the sliding doors, once, twice and a pull, a threshold surpassed.
…
She makes intention to escape this house, yet her eyes make but a mere glance further down the hallway.
Her father's room.
Opening the door gently, almost fearfully, the key heavier in her pocket somehow, the room greets her with shelves of books with bearded men on their covers, and carrying flourished relics surely envied, most prominently a finely carved desk, littered with paperwork.
What a waste, she'd once thought. All that money on trinkets, when you could be changing the world.
She thinks so again as she looks again at this desk, centred amongst all this lavishness.
A photo frame stands elegantly on it, bordered with swirls of gold, facing away from her.
A family, as she rotates the frame towards herself. A father, resplendent in some manner of tailored black and white, and a mother with two daughters, dressed in a small fortune, no doubt, with varying colours and frills of crafted dresses.
There was a party tonight, she remembers. She admits to herself that she probably wouldn't dare be here if there weren't.
They hadn't bothered to invite her this time, anyways.
Her mouth curls into something of a smirk as she remembers the sill, staring again at these patterns decorating the walls.
A Yukinoshita Yukino is now carved in this place she once called home, as she turns the photo frame back the other way, the frame now tainted by her hand, its glass painted lightly in a powdered grey.