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Graduation: Prelude

Our final week, and it was all over.

There was nothing more to be said. We had left our mark on a microcosm of society that would move on and change and in five years, we could revisit Seirei and find it all different. Four years. Two years. Half a year.

For all that we had known, it was now unimportant. All that was important was important only to us and we would leave and take that with us, but realise that what had been important, now wasn't. Perhaps that was what it meant to grow up. Perhaps that was what it meant to leave things behind. Perhaps, to grow up, we need to leave things behind. Maybe to leave things behind, we need to grow up. During our long years concealed in those walls we'd had no knowledge of this. As we stood on the school roof on that day before our graduation, I wonder if the three of us had realised that, just a little.

I left the Student Council building that day feeling a particular small kind of loneliness. There was a kind of melancholy to be gained from merely standing anywhere upon the school's campus, to look at the walls and paths and people we'd known for what felt like so long and to know that our time to be cut so short so soon. It all seemed... almost silly, in retrospect. Those important things, the things that had ended, the things that wouldn't carry on, this school that always would. I stood in the main meeting hall with the heavy light of the late afternoon filtered through the tall windows and thought of what I'd gained, what I'd lost, and wondered which was greater in magnitude; both could, however, be summed up by one simple word, one singular name.

Takumu.

He was that which I gained and all that I lost. Oh, Takumu.

In the past, I'd wondered if what I felt was wrong. Feelings for a friend, for a boy, for--... just for him. They seemed wrong in a masochistic sense; I didn't want him because I wanted him. He told me that it wasn't wrong to want and then punished me for my newfound yearning. We were both wrong. We both wanted more from each other than we were willing to give, these two things so separate. We both wanted everything and learnt we couldn't handle it, we found small reasons to pick apart our larger problems. I demanded more and more of him, knowing that he'd break but hoping that he wouldn't and he broke, he broke away from me and left me broken. I wondered if it was too easy to judge myself as so, especially after I let my manner slip. When I took joy in pain, when I thought it was alright to hurt others because they weren't Takumu and if they weren't Takumu then they were unimportant. I suppose I did it because I wanted him to notice and I wanted him to hurt, but if he ever did then I didn't know of it. In my desperation, I only wanted him to notice me. He did notice, but he didn't care. That was worse than anything else.

Now I wonder, perhaps he did care. Maybe. One of these questions that will never be answered. Maybe he knew that showing any weakness would be to provide me with a weapon, thought that if he didn't notice me then maybe I'd stop trying to get his attention. To show emotion would be to let me enter again, to work myself back into his consciousness and to drag us both down to that destructive cycle we hated and loved both at once. When we'd be alone together, we'd make each other hurt. We hurt each other because we knew that we could. He was as bad as I was, though I think I might have been the only one to witness that. Nobody would believe me if I were to say and by now, to say would only be to stir nostalgia. These events of years past are only the business of memory, now.

In even these two years of being on the Student Council, things changed so much, so hard, so terribly, so awfully, so wonderfully all at once. I would look at the class photo of my first year and see myself, see those eyes which I considered as not knowing this pain. You and I, myself... which of us are better off? The you who knew nothing or the I who knows too much? We have our strengths and weaknesses. You, with your wanton happiness and cheerful demeanour, that nervousness that came from innocence. I, with the steady melancholy and the constant knowledge of loss, the gain of experience not seeming worth the expenditure. And yet this is how things happened and they can't be changed, so I put the photo away.

I left the Student Council building and stood facing the fountain, the school buildings just beyond. These walls that had heard so much and would tell of nothing. These paths I'd walked with him and would now walk from alone. Summer was not far away but we would not be here to bear witness; summer would be quite different to us now. To work or to university, wherever we went would not be here and for that, already it felt as if we were strangers in somewhere we'd taken for granted all these years. Even the expectation of leaving felt alien in the reality of the situation once we left.

I stood on the empty track, dust kicked aside from previous practice. I wondered if it was alright to feel hurt, alright to feel betrayed, alright to feel lost... I wanted to go back to him and ask him these things and hear his comforting answer and the knowledge that I couldn't felt all the worse. He had been my fallback, I'd relied on him and relied on him too much. Being without him was now like falling through an endless sky, too lost in myself to notice the beauty of the clouds around me. This all felt empty, somehow. It was the end of an era and I didn't care. I'd be leaving these places I was so used to and this thought moved me little enough to be of no consequence. If I stayed here or if I went somewhere else, none of it really mattered. I was set to go to university, this was of no concern. I didn't care. I could take care of those matters like a machine if I could set aside my thoughts for long enough. Even that seemed like it might be a problem.

Very little moved me and I hated it. Even Takumu's actions had become something distant, something I didn't want to bother myself with. I knew that if I knew of his business it would only hurt more, so I tried to ignore him. I couldn't ignore him. All I learnt of his happiness only brought me the opposite; how dare he let himself be happy! How could he even smile? Even if it were only a facade, I didn't care. He had the strength to put up a facade and I felt like I didn't have the strength for anything at all. My world had been Takumu and without him, even the world was nothing. It was all pointless now; even to have him back would be to acknowledge what had happened, and who could forgive him for that? I couldn't trust him anymore. I knew how he'd hurt me and he knew what I was capable of as well as what I wasn't. This pain had broken that innocence. We couldn't go back to what we had been and I felt like I couldn't move on at all.

My time at Seirei ending felt almost like a relief, albeit an awful one. Takumu was planning to continue his careers both academic and financial in America, I was set to remain in Japan as I went through university. We never did anything by halves, either of us; if we were going to be split apart, then maybe it was just as well that we would be in different countries. He planned to go into acting. Maybe he'd become famous. Why did he have to have such high-reaching aims? If he released a film, I knew I'd go and watch it. I'd see his present self and remember how he was and remember how we were, and that he would even provide the opportunity seemed as cruel as ever we were. My aims were not so creative and likely I'd remain unable to reach him. If I really tried then perhaps I could, but who would want to? I knew there was nothing between us anymore.

I hated to be so melodramatic. I hated wanting to talk but feeling unable to. I hated that it felt like my world had stopped turning, that life had been drained of its colour, that he could continue and I had stopped. I hated that being alive forced me to continue, but I never considered death. The only prospect worse than existing in a reality with Takumu was that of existing - or not - in one without him and if nothing else, I was guilty of many things and living would be that penance. To die would be too easy and I never took the easy way out. Figures such as Kondou might have delighted in that thought but even if just for Aihara's sake, I wouldn't give him that satisfaction.

Aihara would be the next leader of the Student Council. I trusted him to take care of it as I had done, but this felt like an empty promise. I'd trained him so much and so hard and now he bent so deliciously to my will and I felt that might have been a victory if I'd been able to feel something from it. Though he always said Kondou's name, as was perhaps to be expected. He was tainted by me but couldn't let go of him. Was I at fault?... Yes, yes I was. I couldn't be forgiven for such things and yet the only part of me that felt guilt was the part that felt guilty for not feeling guilty. I had started to break others with all the interest that one overlooks an insect, momentarily taken by vague interest which was then quickly lost. Is it wrong to kill an insect? There are thousands more, but a life is still a life. Isn't it? It wasn't only Aihara, though he was my most intense project.

There were quite a few things I felt I should feel bad for and yet only felt bad for feeling nothing, and more than Aihara was the matter of Katsuragi.

Of Keigo.

Of the person who stood by me steadfastly no matter what the situation, who took the pain and endured it because of me. Because it was me. And I hurt him because I knew I could, because I knew he'd take it, because he was selfless and kind and thought that by absorbing my attack, I might eventually run out of ammunition. The human heart is not such a finite thing, but I think he knew that. He knew that maybe even more than I did and yet I wonder if he knew it at all. He, I suppose, was less the kind of person to question such things as opposed to I, who questioned things too much. He'd offer his all to me and I'd decline without knowing a reason when really, he had no reason to give. To him, things just were.

I clung to my terms and conditions because I thought they were how I could stop myself from being hurt. He had no terms or conditions for precisely the same reason.

He stayed by my side and I barely noticed him. He was as much a comfort and fallback as Takumu ever was - even moreso for knowing Takumu's failings - and yet for the simple reason that he was not Takumu, I couldn't accept that. I took what he offered without really considering or appreciating it; I wonder if he ever cared about that. If engaging with the subject was as important as being present with the subject in the first place. If he did care about such things then he never said anything but being verbally straightforward was never his strategy and yet he proved, sometimes, that this was not through simple inability. He just didn't like to.

The day before graduation, I stood on the empty school grounds as the meaningless sunlight fell around me and I wondered if this was all that there was. If the joy now forgotten would always be forgotten and if this bland view of the world would permeate everything. I supposed that, if it did, I would reach the point where I didn't care. Perhaps that was my ultimate fate and if that were so, then I should just resign myself to it.

Usually Keigo remained with me through the day and would accompany me on the way home. That day he seemed to be missing; I thought about heading home by myself and I thought about finding him. Given how doggedly he followed me through our day to day lives I supposed it only fair to try to find him this once, so close to the end of term. I found him, eventually, on the school roof.