Her Regrets
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Sometimes things just don't happen how they should, no matter how hard you wish for it.
Chihiro had known this for a long time. This knowledge didn't keep her from hoping, in the beginning, at least. She kept her firm belief at first, certain and unmovable. Haku would come to her, he had promised. There was a sprit world. It was real. Nothing could change the truth, she decided, and she believed in love and happiness and magic and adventure. The years went by, passing slowly while she waited, and her hope started to wither and die.
She felt bitter inside.
Why had she left them, anyway? She was happier where she didn't belong, in a world where she was the lone human. There, she wasn't really alone. There were people who cared about her there, who understood more than she wanted them to in the first place. She came wanting to leave, and she left wanting to stay. Now that she was back in the human world, she felt as thought she was the last living thing on the planet. No one could ever really know what she had gone through, what she had seen and done. She felt more alone than she did in the mahou no sekai. It was like she was set apart from the rest of humanity now, secluded, contained. Chihiro could never go back to how she was before she met Rin and Kamaji, before she was employed by a witch and fell in love with a dragon.
Some love he was. Some promise they had made. Maybe he never really meant any of it. Maybe he had never been real. It was possible that Chihiro had made it all up, fallen asleep and had a vivid dream while her parents ate at that restaurant in the closed down theme park. Maybe she had found the little purple hair tie on the ground while walking and made up some story so she would feel brave about moving, and forgot where the line was between fantasy and reality.
Sometimes she wished it were that way.
Chihiro was a senior in high school now, and the prospect of graduation loomed in front of her while she tried to figure out what to do with her life. Where would she go to college? Would she go at all? What was there to do when you knew it was all meaningless? She wondered constantly if anyone else knew that there was more to life than their jobs and their money. Chihiro wanted to know if people really could mean what they said when it was all a lie. If anyone else knew that it was different, that there were other things out there. Her parents thought she was depressed at first, then just a pessimistic girl. It wasn't that she was unhappy, but that she refused to see the good in anything anymore. She was hurt, and she wanted to bury it. If everything hurt, then the loss of the Aburaya would be lessened. But then, on those nights when she couldn't sleep, when she felt like the world had stopped spinning, she would look at the hair tie and remember that you can't dream things up like that. You can't invent love.
Maybe she was crazy, but there was always something otherworldly the way the purple hair tie shone and reflected light that wasn't there.
The time to apply to colleges came and went, and graduation passed her by. Chihiro found herself with an empty life and little to rely on. It was then, driving home from her meager job at a bookstore that she stopped by the ocean to stare out into the vast nothingness before her. There was so much more to think about than the small portion of her life that she spent out of her own world, but it seemed to monopolize her mind nonetheless. Thoughts of a guy from her work bubbled up in between her musings. She considered him for a moment. He was nice enough, and had been showing sincere interest in her for a few weeks, but she had to let him down earlier that day. She never wanted to be with someone who she couldn't tell her deepest secrets to, her most honest and terrible feelings that tore her apart every day. It was infuriating the way an incident at the age of ten was controlling her life.
The wind blew at her short hair, which she had recently cut. After graduation, Chihiro wanted to be a new person, just someone who wasn't Ogino Chihiro and hadn't fallen in love with a river god who never came running after her. Piercing her ears and cutting her hair had made her look different enough, but she still felt as meaningless inside. With no hair to hold anymore, the purple band had taken up residence on her wrist. It burned with everything that was destroying her, but she hadn't been able to part with it. If only they had never gotten lost that day and driven to that tunnel. If only she had stayed in the car, maybe her parents wouldn't have gone to eat the god's food.
If only she hadn't fallen in love, she could be happy. Damn him. Him and his beautiful name.
Damn Rin and Kamaji, Zeniba, Bou, Yubaba even, for making her fall in love with a world where she didn't belong.
Torn with a sudden anger, she ripped the hair tie from her wrist and threw it into the ocean. It went an unsatisfying distance and fell lightly into the water before washing up in a wave next to her feet. There was not enough weight to throw it, she decided, and picked a rock out of the sand. Around it she wrapped the only proof of her other life, and threw it far into the ocean, where it stayed.
And she cried.
Where had Haku been when she needed him most? Not when she had to save her parents or sneak into the Aburaya, but every night she cried herself to sleep because she was alone, and she knew it. Where was he right now, when all she wanted to do was disappear into the cracks of the earth and stop existing? What had become of that promise?
As soon as the rock had left her fingertips, she wanted to take back that action. It only added to her pile of regrets, and in that moment, she could remember as clearly as anything how happy she had been, once upon a time. It didn't matter that she was crying, that she felt worthless right now, but that she had been happy once, that she had felt like someone back then. Chihiro remembered the feelings that she held once, when she saw Haku outside of Zeniba's, when she ran away from the Aburaya with a crowd cheering behind her. She remembered the friendship with Rin, how Kamaji had introduced Chihiro to her as his granddaughter. She thought of how much effort Bou, Kaonashi, the Yuu-bird and Zeniba had put into making a hair tie for her. How it was made from the bond of their friendship.
How Haku remembered her name when he didn't even know his.
And just as she thought of all these things, she could feel them slipping away from her forever. Maybe it had been the sparkling purple band that had kept them with her for so many years, but finally, they were leaving her. In a moment of panic, Chihiro ran to the ocean.
"Give it back! I take it back, give it to me now! I didn't mean it!"
She waded in the sea, cold as it was in November, searching frantically for the stone she had thrown, but there was nothing. Memories of the Aburaya were slipping from her mind like sand through an hourglass, and soon there was very little left. Chihiro backed out of the water, forgetting just why she was looking for a stone so important. She knew there was more to it than that, but it eluded her.
And then, the only thing she could remember about it was a name. Haku.
She was shivering then, so she went to her car and drove home. The panicky feeling subsided when she had a cup of tea, though the emptyness stayed.
But that was okay. She felt better after shouting at the ocean for reasons she couldn't remember. It was alright. She would find meaning this time.