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Elation
Chapter 2: What Can Love and Death Show You?
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Yamagi Taichi
"What's wrong with you?" he asked me.
I turned to face Yamato at this point, in total disbelief. He had remained almost silent all day, answering everybody in monosyllables, and falling into total silence on the way home. (The way I followed him back to his apartment every day was making the sunlit flat feel more and more like my home.) I was there to keep him company, I thought, and he didn't blink when I moved to walk with him. It's what we've been doing. He never asked. We made it back to his apartment and it took him ten minutes to speak, and he asks me this?
What's wrong with me; what's wrong with him?
But I answered: "I don't know." Because I didn't.
Ran my fingers through my long dark hair, let out an exasperated sigh, as if I were exhaling the whole day. He gave me a quizzical smile, and I stopped, and laughed.
"What?"
"Nothing, you're just sitting in my living room and it's funny because I haven't spoken to you all day."
"Whatever," I said, "I come home with you every day."
"Why?"
"We're friends," I answered without thinking. But the moment I said it, it seemed... I don't know. Completely and utterly false.
Now, I am lying on Ishida Yamato's floor. I have to figure out why it is I follow him home every day. I kept unconsciously thinking it was to keep him company, but now he's laughing at me. He's sitting on the arm of the couch, his suddenly bright eyes bent inquisitively towards me, not even pretending to read his book. His long white fingers hold open the pages, and I can't even think. I am suddenly terrified.
I just like being around you, Matt. Maybe that's it. I'm curious, but I'm just used to being around you.
(I say this.)
"Why?" he answers me. "Do you like not having to speak to people?"
He laughs at me and I laugh softly with him, disarmed. It's like he knows the answer to his own question, but he's just taunting me. I grasp blindly for the answer to "why you?"
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Yamato's body rested lightly on the arm of the couch, like he was keeping vigil over Taichi, stretched out below. The open window behind him flooded the room with light and the smell of fall. He felt like he wasn't even there.
Slowly, in his mind, he descended. He knelt, (in his mind,) by his friend on the floor and traced the line of his torso with his palm, from the hollow between his collarbones, down his sternum, to his solar plexus - and there, he rested his hand. Then, he stooped and traced the line of Taichi's jaw with his nose, from just right of his chin to just under his ear, and he kissed his jaw, and then his lips, and then his throat, and then he lay down with his torso half on top of his friend, and buried his head in his shoulder.
In reality, he blinked, and asked Taichi, "What's wrong with you?"
The reason for this was that Taichi's face had a look of uncommon concentration, and he had entirely abandoned his homework. He was biting his lip, and his dark eyes were staring at the ceiling; he looked like he was thinking very hard. (It might have been nice to just ask what he was thinking about, but Yamato just said the first thing that came to mind, what was "what's wrong with you?")
"I don't know."
Yamato smiled, they both laughed.
"What?" asked Taichi.
"Nothing, you're just sitting in my living room and it's funny because I haven't spoken to you all day."
"Whatever, I come home with you every day."
"Why?"
"We're friends,"
Taichi's face suddenly reverted to its expression of intent concentration, and Yamato suppressed the urge to laugh, remembering what he had just been thinking about seconds before. Why on earth had he been thinking about that? He'd given up mediating his thoughts. The most random thoughts just passed unabated through his head.
There's a strange thing about thoughts; they are sometimes continuous. A train of thought can run through two people like a flood of water overwhelming one person after another. Seconds after Yamato thought about trespassing whatever assumed boundaries of friendship existed between his and Taichi's nebulous bodies, the same thing occurred to Taichi, who lay less than a foot away from him. Who knows why.
Taichi, unlike the amused boy still laid out beside him, reacted with profound fear.
He turned his head to Yamato, and razed his body with his widened eyes. Everything caught him at once, the pale hair, the pale lines of skin, the washed out clothes, the laconic smile, the accusing irises, the troubling stare, the walks home from school, the silence and the furtive glances in class, the long fingers that held the book - Taichi was painfully and terrifyingly reminded of the time when he had had his first crush, Sora, when he'd lain in bed at night imagining her for months while his hands roamed his body - and it struck him that that intense first craving was completely childish and unreal in comparison to what had just occurred to him -
'Forget that,' he thought loudly. His gaze snapped back to the ceiling, and he laughed aloud.
'What an absurd thing,' he thought. And he tried to summon up another image: playing soccer at lunch, laughing with his friends, grinning Taichi, whose relationship to Yamato was that he was his friend, and who walked Yama home every day after school because his friend was going through a strange phase, and Taichi didn't want to leave him alone, silly, brave Taichi, Taichi, reduced to a reassuring headstone.
Ran the fingers of both hands through his dark hair, and the laugh subsided.
Yamato spoke from beyond Taichi's field of vision, and his voice was level and familiar.
"What's wrong with you?"
Taichi paused.
"I don't know, what's wrong with you?"
"I've just been feeling different." Yamato searched for words. "Like a stranger in my own life."
"That sounds wretchedly familar."
"Do you feel it too?"
"Sometimes."
"Hm. If we're both feeling it, then maybe it's true."
"You think we're strangers? Everybody recognizes us."
"But who is it they're really recognizing? Nobody recognizes me. The rest of the destined recognize my face, but when they talk to me, it's like they're speaking to someone who doesn't exist. The rest of the school distinguishes me, even with my uniform, but they see... an attractive mystery? Or else a quiet nobody." Yamato's words were slow and weighted.
"Maybe that's all you're showing," Taichi said in a low voice, defensively.
"They recognize you?"
"I think so."
"Who do they see?"
"Who do you see?"
Yamato almost smiled.
"I see Taichi, who used to be happy enough playing soccer and laughing at everything, but who now has been following me back here every day after school to sit in silence and do math problems because he has a lot on his mind that he doesn't want to be alone with."
Taichi didn't blink.
"I thought it was you who didn't want to be alone," he replied quietly.
And his friend just said, "I don't either."
And then they sat quietly for a little while, before Yamato got up to make dinner, and they began to laugh and to talk about nothing once again, and eventually sat together on the couch and watched films until Yamato's father came home.
Yamagi Taichi
So the qualifiers "half-dead" and "twice alive" are starting to absorb some of each other's meaning.
I have to drum it into my head that we're sitting here, on the couch next to him, with the windows open even though the sun is setting and it's cold… It seems absurd that we were once kids carrying out these defiant acts of violence, protecting something so much bigger than our young selves that we couldn't even conceive of it. Here we are, just heroes discarded, lying on the couch cushions next to each other watching this Sofia Coppola auteur flick on Yama's small TV.
It seems absurd to keep pretending to be Taichi-who-did-such-and-such-with-Agumon-four-months-ago-and-saved-everything. It's cartoonish.
I thought Yama was in another world. He is. I'm in my world and he's in his, but the reality of my world is quickly collapsing on me, and no one seems to notice. Those moments of total disconnect I used to feel from time to time, I'm feeling them continuously now. It's not altogether a bad feeling. It's terrifying, but it's also calming. Like a low vibrational tangle of joy and sorrow.
At this point, a thought streamed from Yamato's head into Taichi's, and pooled there.
Only where do you go from there? That's the thing, if I were to just trust Yamato and slip out of my identity into this comfortable stream of being... not quite anyone, but certainly not no one... it hurts my head. I can't wrap my head around it, but I feel like that's where I'm heading. Never the less.
I was always the leader of the group, but I never led him. I was the solid, rash figurehead, and he was a quiet phantom counterpoint. We were always friends, but there was always a kind of curious antagonism between us. I was horribly dependent, horribly insecure, always afraid that our paths would one day split apart. Those times we fought (we fought so much) and that time he broke with us, it was like he was forcing us to see something we didn't want to admit was there.
I look over at him, stretched out on the couch, a long, solid body, a yellow crown, and a... his face was beautifully familiar. It resonated with familiarity.
I was the one caught between worlds. I was stuck in the complacent world of people who could be reduced to happy images in my mind, people who never changed and always stayed comfortably the same. But my head was straying, and I was feeling uneasy... when I was stuck in the mindset of school and friends and the rest, the happy static world, it was Yama who looked frighteningly estranged. But now that I was slipping into his consciousness, allowing those pretenses of familiarity to fall, I realized that he was the only person who had remained with me.
I'd grown away from everyone else, but he'd followed me like a shadow. Every time we'd fought, every time I'd followed him home, he was... I don't know.
I felt the lines between us blur.
"Yamato?"
He looked up at me lazily, like he'd been expecting me to speak.
"This might seem like a weird question."
"Shoot."
"What... I mean... do you... do you identify at ALL with the world you live in?"
We both laughed, because it was such a ridiculous question.
"Sometimes," he finally answered. "Sometimes. I do, now."
"Why?"
"Because you asked me that question. Most of the time, nobody really means what they ask anybody. They say, 'how are you?' and they really mean 'hello'. The question's just a familiar form, but when you really look at it... it's a question that refuses an answer. It's a question that implies a one-word answer. It's a question meant to silence you. You just asked me a question and you really wanted me to answer it honestly." Yamato stopped for a second. "That doesn't often happen."
The light was dim and rested on both of us like a spotlight, casting shadows on the couch and the room but illuminating my and Yama's skin. He was still looking at me very closely. Where to start? A thread of connection had formed like dew between us, that hadn't been there before. It was like we were both intently focused on each other, and I wanted to hang onto it.
It was then that I realized the extent to which I felt completely alone when I was anywhere else in the world. Except with Hikari, maybe. My quiet sister had a way of listening to me not unlike Yamato. Only her innocence decried that I not tell her anything of the weird things in my head - Yamato's wild eyes and the slightly crazed twist of his lips made me want to tell him everything treacherous and humiliating.
And I wanted to make him stop looking at me, because I couldn't stand that feeling, the feeling of all my secrets being drunk from my pores.
"I should probably go, Yama."
We said goodbye, but the way he was looking at me, I felt like he knew with a certain satisfaction that I wanted nothing more than to get out of that apartment. And that he knew that tomorrow, I'd be right back again, and the day after, until I never left.
I turned on him as I was leaving, and I asked him, "What do you want from me?"
He laughed, and told me we 'were friends'.
I guess that means, 'wait and you'll see.'
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