Part 1
My Spring

I wondered why I had never seen you at school before. It was too big to have seen you every day but still small enough to have seen you at least once. And after all, I would have remembered you. No one but Himawari-chan had ever made my heart beat like that. I would have remembered such a face. Lips and eyes.

Now I'm thinking of a certain June just after an evening of yukata fireworks and tsukimizake. It was on the riverbank. The air was so sweet. By my elbow, Himawari let out awed sighs and gasps with each colorful explosion of fire, the sparkling golds, glittering reds, mesmeric blues, silver streaks like bits of broken stars. I kept on expecting to hear the twinkling fragments to tinkle like windchimes on the evening breeze. Yuko-san, in a crimson butterfly-patterned kimono. Doumeki, distant and cold.

The spring before, the cherry blossoms had smelled so sweet, falling upon my tongue drops of sugar. It made the river water so clean and sky-blue, and the evening of the summer fireworks something happened.

Weeks later you came into the shop confused and unaware of what you had instigated from the simple action of crossing the threshold and catching my eye. Catching, and holding. You have this quality that makes me feel like you maybe aren't real and that I'm just dreaming, although you are just a photograph now. Alive somewhere, but only ink and glossy paper to me. Why is it that your printed face is so cold when you look so silky sleek and warm? I keep on running your image through my finger hoping to remember the texture of your skin, the tones in your hair, but the picture, from a 400-yen amusement park booth, is in black and white.

The one spring when the cherry blossoms where the sweetest... The summer that followed with the evening fireworks and sleeping river nymphs... That was when you appeared and unsettled my heart with a single glance.