It really had been a long time since she had laughed like that. It was such a long time ago, that she had very few memories of the time-infact, they were more like images that flashed in the mind and disappeared soon after. A sunny day. The smell of cut grass. Soap bubbles surrounding her. The impossibly tall figure of her father applauding as she painstakingly blew a bubble the size of her chubby fist.
How very different that time of laughter was to this time of laughter. It was night-time, and the wind ruffled her hair as she sat on a motorbike with a boy whom she knew to be a terrorist. A terrorist she become accomplice to, despite claims that she was not one of them.
It was certainly a strange place to end up. Never in her years of darkness had she thought that she'd be seeing the city at night in all its beauty, under such peculiar circumstances. But thinking back to the life she'd just left behind, she wouldn't have it any other way.
"It's the same for me, too." She almost misses the words, which were half drowned by the noises of the motorbike and the city. Once she's heard them, it takes her a while to connect them to her statement from earlier, but when she does, she finds that she is still confused. The very first time she met Hisami, he was laughing. In almost all subsequent encounters, he was smiling. Her first impressions were that he was the cheerful type. So she didn't understand what he meant.
Then she thought about the way they'd both laughed just now. How it was his laughter that had prompted hers, how she was able to feel it deep inside her because of the way she was holding onto him to prevent her falling off. Shared laughter. Again, something she hadn't experienced in a while. But looking back on all the times she had been with Hisami, she realises that the laughter he had shown was all his own. Lonely.
The sudden realisation makes her sad again.
"Hisami-kun…" What else can she say? They are two messed-up individuals, but their pains are so different. She doesn't even know why he's doing what he's doing.
Luckily for her, he either doesn't hear or just chooses not to respond, so she decides to watch the city.
They are going so fast that the lights blur into colourful lines before her eyes. Red. Blue .Purple. Orange. White. Gold. The sky seems clear, but she cannot see a single star. It is so late, there are only a few other vehicles on the street with them. They left the police car behind ages ago, and so the overall effect is tranquil.
Something she notices is strange: not a single person in the passing vehicles, passenger or otherwise, gives them more than a passing glance. As if it is perfectly normal for two teenagers to be riding like this at midnight. But she knows that this isn't normal. She is a runaway who has been saved by a terrorist.
So, what do they see?
She attempts to imagine the scene objectively. Two teenagers on a motorcycle. Neither of them are wearing helmets. The driver is a boy with floppy brown hair, dressed casually in a t-shirt and jeans. His passenger is a girl with boyishly short black hair, clad in a shirt underneath a dress, with a bag slung across her back. She is clinging onto him for dear life, but seems to be enjoying the ride. Neither of them appears to be talking, but it can be concluded that they are close. Friends, maybe, or even a couple.
Nothing out of the ordinary, in other words.
Does it matter, really?
No, it doesn't. She is who she is. He is who he is. The circumstances that threw them together as unusual and borderline as they are. Some might argue that they were not meant to happen. If this happened and that didn't, if life had gone a bit differently, if one thing had occurred differently, it would have led to something else, and so on. But their lives happened the way they happened, and now she is here, on a motorcycle with a boy she is coming to care about, despite everything.
And that is what matters right now.
Not that he is a terrorist. Not that she is a bullied girl with anxiety disorders. Not that she has run away from home and now there really is no going back. No. What matters is that right now, she is here, holding onto someone she cares about, enjoying her life in a way she hasn't before.
What matters right now is that, in this moment, they exist. And that she is thankful for that fact.
