when there are no second chances
11: Birthday
Makoto's birthday comes. His mother makes a cake anyway, even if nobody eats it. They all prepare presents as well: the predictable ones because Makoto's always running low on canvases and sketch-books and other art supplies by this time. Mitsuru will always get a book of some sort: sometimes art, sometimes something more academically oriented. This time, it's Van Gogh biographies and he realises it's in bad taste but he can't help but feel a little bitter, still.
It doesn't matter, anyway. They'll keep better than paint tubes, which is why none of them brought those. They're thinking practically, at least, even if the entire endeavour is impractical.
Cleaning Makoto's room all the time is impractical as well, but their mother keeps on doing it. It'd be more sensible to store the things they want to keep, and get rid of the rest. Give the clothes to charity or something. Leave the furniture if they're making it into a spare room, or else just get rid of it. Store the paintings and the sketchbooks. Get rid of the used art supplies… especially the tubes of paint which were no doubt long since dried up.
They take out photos. The parents curl up on the couch together and reminisce, one photo at a time. Mitsuru watches them for a bit, and then leaves them. He can see the merit of reminiscing, but they didn't spend a lot of happy memories together, in the end.
He goes upstairs instead. The door to Makoto's room is open, letting the air in. It's just like it always is: paintings stacked against one wall, sketchbooks where there should have been textbooks instead. But Makoto never was the studious type. It was only after he befriended Saotome and decided to go to the same high school at him did he even start to put effort into his studies.
Mitsuru can't help but be a little bitter towards that sentiment as well, because couldn't he have been that motivation instead?
He's inside the room before he quite realises it, after nearly a year of avoiding it.
The painting at the forefront of the stack is of a horse and an angel in the water. The horse is drowning, he thinks. The angel is offering a hand. Or maybe it's not an angel. It looks too human, and what human saves someone else from the goodness of their hearts. Doctors are paid to do it.
He doesn't want to be a doctor after all, he realises. He's thought maybe he doesn't, but here's the conviction behind it. He doesn't want to become a doctor. He wants something else. To understand. To knock down whatever wall had come between him and his brother.
It's too late for any of that now. Unless he believes in reincarnation or spirits or such, and he doesn't, not at all. It might be nice though, he muses, sitting on the neatly made bed. Might be nice to imagine there being another chance, believing that Makoto will return and one day he'll die and return and they might do better at being brothers in the next life and world. But they're also useless thoughts, because he's living in this world and Makoto isn't there anymore.
It's too logical, his father might say. But his father is also a businessman. He's always shrewd, and logical.
But being logical isn't making him any happier. What should I be doing to make me happy?
His hand brushes against something cold. He blinks and stares down. There's a sketchbook on the bed and he's touching the metal bindings. He pulls his hand away, then touches it more consciously. How long has it been sitting there? Probably since someone returned it to their family.
He opens it slowly. All manner of drawings greet him. There are some from the school, and all of them scream of loneliness to him. He doesn't understand it at all. He never has, but Makoto's drawings always have something more than just lines and shades on a page.
That's art, he supposes, and he's a logical guy who can't grasp the abstract meanings they flaunt.
Maybe he'd understand Makoto if he tried harder to understand.
There are art courses in college, too. Art making courses. Art appreciation courses. The first of them would have been for Makoto, but maybe he, Mitsuru, can chase the second instead. Learn about art: its styles, its history, its interpretation…
Maybe his subconsciousness had been trying to tell him something else when he picked up that biography of Van Gogh.