sprited away. chihiro & haku. spoilers for the movie. PG. characters belong to hayao miyazaki.
the last train to wherever
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On the nights she's lucky, there's a dragon in her dreams. When she wakes in the morning, she struggles to hold onto the fleeing fragments of what she saw while asleep, but it's never any use. Without fail, the ghost-trails of memory haunt her the rest of the day, and Chihiro aches with the longing in her heart.
Summer passes, and with it goes the smell of the warm air when they met for the second time. Wishing for a third, Chihiro does not go directly home after school, and winds her way up the unpaved path, fallen leaves crunching beneath her feet. The wind is cold and crisp, chilling her as she traces the road through the overgrown trees. She sees the dual-faced statue, the tiny shrines, and -- to her relief -- the wooden archway. Without fear, she walks briskly through the tunnel, lightly running her fingertips along the wall to keep her balance as she goes.
Sunlight filters through the dust as she enters the building, amplifying the otherworldly ambiance of the place. All is utter stillness; Chihiro hardly dares to breathe, lest she disturb the spirits that reside in these shadows. When she spots the far side, she rushes forward and gasps: the door is gone. Desperate, she palms the unforgiving stone, hoping against hope for the entrance to open once more, just once more, but to no avail. There is nothing for her here anymore.
Chihiro stumbles back to a bench and pulls her knees to her chest, sobbing into her jeans for what she's lost.
She never takes baths anymore, only showers.
During another after-school afternoon, she rifles through boxes of her baby clothes in their basement until she unearths her pink shoes. She clutches them to her chest, as if pressing them hard enough against herself could ease this loneliness.
She stomps back up the stairs, catching the attention of her mother. "Your old shoes?" she asks, skeptical. "What do you want those for?"
Chihiro shakes her head. "Nothing, they just... They remind me of a friend," she blurts out, hurrying to her bedroom to avoid any further questioning. Once there, she ties the laces together and places a gentle, almost reverent kiss atop them; he touched these once before. She sets them beside her pillow, and stops just short of tucking them in. Along with her ponytail holder, they're the only tangible proof that he ever existed.
She sleeps next to the shoes for years, until the day she comes home from high school to find that her mother threw them out while she was gone. "They were ratty," she explained, unfazed and not understanding the significance or why her daughter would be so upset. "And they were starting to smell. Besides, Chihiro, you need to grow up from these childish things."
Silently fuming, Chihiro stalks back to her room and curls into a vulnerable ball on her bed, fighting away the urge to cry and resolving to somehow find them later. That evening, to her horror, she discovers that the garbage has already been taken away.
From that day on, she has trouble trusting her mother.
Chihiro grows up.
When she's thirty-two, her father has a heart attack.
She stands with her hair down, wearing the black dress she bought a few days earlier, and watches solemnly as his coffin is carried off to the crematorium, her mother mourning beside her. Her eyes are puffy and red, her nose stuffed up from crying harder than she ever has in her life. She dabs at her eyes with the back of her gloves, an ineffective attempt to dry them.
Two hours later, her father's burnt remains lay spread before them, and she helps her family and her family's friends to lift the soot-covered bones into the ceremonial urn, passing them to each other with too-heavy chopsticks. Chihiro's made herself nauseous with grief the whole day long, and seeing bits of her dad picked up like so many grains of rice is further turning her stomach. She wants to run away, to escape from all of it, to go outside and scream and make everything stop, but she knows it won't help, and stays rooted firmly in place.
Once all the formalities are through, she helps her mother carry the urn to their car. They drive slowly back to the house, riding together as a family for a final time. Not a word is spoken the whole way; when they pull into the driveway, Chihiro gets out with a brief and slightly hoarse, "Mom, I need some air."
It's hard to run in her heeled sandals, so she takes them off and goes barefoot down the slope, back to the supposed shortcut through the woods, gravel digging into her skin with each step. The two-faced statue regards her with its enduringly creepy smiles; she ignores it and enters the tunnel again for the first time in over two decades.
The building with the clocktower is just as empty as it was when she last visited, inhabited by nothing but dust. He's not here. He's never here.
"Why won't you come back!?" she screams like she wanted to that morning, screams and lets it all out, tears running down her cheeks and neck to soak her collar. "How can you just leave me here?"
Chihiro sinks to the ground, her sobs softening and turning to trembling. "He promised," she announces to no one, licking salt off her cracked lips. "He promised me."
She falls asleep on the floor, ruining her dress in the process.
When she wakes up, she leaves again with no intention to return.
Chihiro takes a job as a nursery school teacher. The children gather around her, seated in a fidgeting circle until she starts to tell them her stories. Her words have them spellbound as she speaks of a girl and a dragon, a magical bathhouse run by a terrible witch, ashes brought to life by a spider-armed man, a train that traveled across the sea, injured river gods, and a no-name monster whose loneliness drove him mad. They beg her to know what happened next, so she lies. She lies about the grand adventures the girl and her dragon friend embarked upon, the fantastic creatures they met in the spirit world, the lands they saved, the places they discovered. It's in these moments that her eyes light up, her memories kindled again as she shares them, builds upon them, immortalizes them in the minds of these young people. She can't help but be happy.
The students draw pictures for her, illustrating the characters and their world in enthusiastic crayon and marker. Smiling, she thanks them all, and hangs them along her wall when she returns home. She sits on her couch alone with one remaining page of artwork: the girl clinging to the dragon's horns as they sail through the starlit sky.
She stares at the picture for a long, quiet while, eventually rising to make herself some tea.
When her mother passes away, it's every bit as painful as losing her father, and nothing about his funeral lessens the harsh blow. She watches as the red ink atop her mother's engraved name is washed delicately away. One of her coworkers puts a comforting hand on her shoulder, and it's only after this gesture that she truly begins to weep for all the things she's lost in both this world and another.
Chihiro grows old.
She knows they talk about her, the strange woman with no husband, no children, who spends her afternoons meticulously picking up the trash along the riverbanks. They wonder what's wrong with her, why she always seems to be daydreaming, why she even bothers to collect the litter that's been discarded all over. Surely her back must trouble her, the way she bends over to grab the plastic bags. Her knees must hurt, the way she has to stoop to reach the cans. A very strange woman, to be sure.
They ignore her.
She sits beside the ocean, letting the waves lap against her feet as she digs her toes into the sand. If she squints and lets her vision go blurry, she can almost pretend that the train is out there, somewhere, breaking through the surface of the water on its one-way track. The sun warms her; all is peaceful and still, save the seagulls that cut through the air like so many pieces of paper.
Closing her eyes against the light, she lets herself fall back against the beach and sleep.
Chihiro lies in her hospice bed, her face pale and her back sore from lying motionless for the past few days. An unread book sits on a nearby table next to an untouched plate of food. She's memorized every detail of her ceiling by now, the endless swirls of plaster pretending to be clouds, the overhead lamp fancying itself the sun.
The stifling silence is broken by the creak of the door. None of her students have visited in months; she's outlived her closest friends. Tired, endlessly tired, she waits for the nurse to go about with whatever needs doing and tries to look like she's not awake.
A soft hand brushes her hair away from her face, gentle fingertips trailing across her cheek. She looks up and smiles in wonder, tears welling up in joy.
"I never forgot our promise," he says, looking exactly the way he did when she was a little girl. His eyes still have a fierceness to them that relaxes only when he looks at her.
"I've missed you," she whispers, summoning the last of her strength to reach out to him, embracing him as tightly as her feeble arms can allow.
"Come with me, Chihiro."
She nods against his shoulder. He carefully removes the worn and frayed band from her grey hair, the gift's original luster and color merely hinted at with the way it's faded over time. Despite its age, there is still magic woven into its threads. He places it in his palm, offering it out to her.
Taking his hand, the hairband clasped between them, she lets him help her to stand. It's somehow easier than it was mere minutes ago; she feels lighter, almost impossibly lighter.
He opens the window, the night air cool and refreshing as it enters the room. Before she can blink, he's changed back into his true form. Without hesitation, she cups his jaw with shaky, wrinkled hands and presses her forehead to his like so long ago.
"Haku," she chokes out, his name sounding almost unreal after years of remaining unspoken. She kisses him and leans her cheek against his white fur for a moment, allowing herself to cry.
When she's ready, she climbs unsteadily onto his back, pushing the hairband onto her wrist before grasping his horns and surrendering herself completely. She trusts him with her life.
In a blur, Haku and Chihiro fly away.