August 29th, 2003, Tokyo.
14h32
It's a hot, damp summer afternoon that should have been beautiful, and Izana sits by the riverside on the edge of Showa Kinen Park, watching small broken twigs and blown leaves slowly drifting away with the current. The air is heavy with the pungent scent of rotten fruits and thick with golden dust suspended in the air, and he can't breathe, not when his lungs appear to be filled with boiling water. Time stands still, the world blinking in and out of existence with every breath he takes, and the gentle caress of the wind on his face feels more sinful than it ought to, but he has learned to ignore the itch under his skin a long time ago.
Izana sits on the wet grass, thinking of love and devotion, and their tantalizing pendants, hatred and obsession, but the thoughts are too volatile, and they wrap around his neck to suffocate him. Izana struggles over nothing, and his lungs are heavy in his chest, so much so that every breath feels like drowning and he has to remind himself with every aspiration that you can't drown on dry land when you've never been into the water.
Izana breathes in and out, and he wonders where the strange sort of emptiness that inhabits his chest and presses heavily on his ribs comes from. His insides are cold and part of him knows that it's not something that can be fixed or healed. He will have to learn to live with the heavy nothingness, the unbearable lightness of being, he knows it. Laughter bubbles in his chest.
– Oh, just thinking about it… Izana blinks and the world dissolves into dull shades of gray. For a brief moment, he remembers and his heart painfully clenches below his ribs. He thinks he might throw up, just thinking about it, but hell, it went like this: Izana met Shinichiro, and the world shifted sharply to the left, then went back into place again as if nothing ever happened. But nothing was ever the same afterward, and Izana mourns something he never knew he had until he lost it.
Izana soon decides that he hates this feeling, but there isn't anything he can do about it, so he does nothing and it makes it worse. Shin had been achingly kind, and sometimes, that was the only thing Izana thought he knew. In truth, most of the time, Izana didn't know anything at all.
The water keeps flowing undisturbed in front of him, and he thinks that he could use a cigarette. Izana inspects his jeans' pockets in hopes of finding some leftover tobacco and rolling paper, maybe a lighter and filter tips, but he must have left everything in his room because he only has Shin's old pack of menthols with him.
Izana toys with the idea of smoking away Shin's last mementos, but he knows he might cry if he lights one of Shin's cigarettes to watch it burn to nothingness. He never liked the smell anyway, but more than that, he doesn't want to cry, he can't cry again, because crying only ever serves as proof that he's lost the only thing in the world that could make this life bearable. He would cry and he would know that he has lost his only shot at happiness.
Somehow, he's not sad. He's angry.
It's the height of summer and every day the heat is becoming increasingly oppressive, so he rarely feels like hanging out with Mucho at the arcade or wandering around aimlessly with the Haitanis no matter how much they seem to want him to come along and waste time with them.
Instead of meeting with his friends, he always ends up walking down the path leading to the neighboring temple and inevitably follows the river down the hill. No one ever comes by the river, only quiet ghosts and quieter children hiding from their parents, and so it is the ideal place to sit and watch the days corrode into nights, and only then would time dissolve, and existence would become bearable.
Izana absently wipes the sweat from his brow, feeling feverish. Part of him knows it's just the aftermath of the shock, but that's not something he wants to contemplate just yet – he knows that the fever and the dreams are just that, an aftereffect of losing Shin, his body fighting the infection and trying to prevent the rot of death from spreading. There must have been something wrong with him from the start, he realizes, but it does not help him prevent the dark from seeping through his bones.
Nowadays, when he suffocates at night when he drowns in sweat, he wonders why Shin came to him at all in the first place, and then all thoughts stop – they stop dead in their tracks, and Izana laughs and laughs until his throat is raw and aching.
The river flows unperturbed in front of him, and on the other side, the city is a languid sprawling mass of gooey asphalt and cutting steel, and he hates it because hating comes easier than breathing these days. He hates and his hatred opens to want and more wants until his sense of self fractures. The warm summer breeze flutters through his hair, and Izana recoils thinking of how every touch seems to penetrate his skin through to the bone and leave him empty and aching.
"Hey! It's my spot! You live near?" someone asks, but it feels so distant and irrelevant. Izana turns his head, and in the corner of his vision, he sees gaps of light dappling the ground, golden dust suspended in the air, and the river at his feet, silver and gray, flowing free. He gasps, and someone walks toward him.
Izana blinks, and for a brief moment, he sees his own bloody entrails laid out in front of him. It feels like someone has stuffed his belly with ice and broken glass and sown it back together hastily, leaving the remainder of his discarded insides on the ground at his feet. Every move is agonizing, it pulls at the stitches, and his wounds are reopened before they can heal.
He thinks Shin's death has left him with open dreams, a gaping central wound wide open, hollow where his heart should have been. A hand presses against his cheek, and Izana flinches hard. Are you feeling empty yet?
"Hey, I'm talking to you," someone waves their hand in front of his eyes "Do you hear me?" There is a short pause, and the voice becomes softer, "no you don't" they say to themselves, "You okay?" they ask again in a single breath, and the sound of their voice whispers through his hair and ghosts over his skin but it doesn't reach him. The wind blows a leaf in his face and the world blinks.
A girl is talking and Izana is still grappling with the overwhelming sensation of wrongness in the pit of his stomach. He has no words to describe it, the twining sensations of too much and too little, but he reasons that emptiness is always defined in opposition to fullness. To recognize emptiness as a feeling, he must have experienced fullness at some point. Izana doubts he had ever been anything but a study in vacuity, someone unable to retain substance, and maybe that was the reason why he had loved Shin so desperately. He has no name for the absence in his core that Shin left, he doesn't know what it is, so he calls it emptiness because it must be the opposite of what Shin had given him.
"Hey, " she snaps, "Don't space out like that!" and her hands lightly land on his shoulders. The world briefly comes back into focus – but the hours are excruciatingly slow, and every moment that passes reminds him of things he can't feel anymore.
"Wow, you sure seem out of it," the girl remarks out loud. The hands resting on his shoulders squeeze lightly. "Okay, what do we do now…" the girl takes something from her pocket and brings it to level with his face.
The artificial scent of mint fills his nostrils, and a rush of life flows back into his veins, "Can you hear me?" she asks again, and Izana blinks slowly. A smile blooms on her lips, "Great, good job! You like mints?" the girl takes his hand and wraps his fingers around the small candy, "you're lucky it's my last, you can have it" she beams. The candy is smooth, round, and vibrant green and it smells like mint leaves, sugar, and a dash of honey. Izana takes the mint to his lips and places it in his mouth to focus on the flavor. He places it on all corners of his tongue until he can taste honeyed mint and the slight tang of sweat. "Breathe slowly, okay?" the girl steps back and smiles reassuringly at him. "You're better now?" the voice is high and sweet, and it echoes against the curve of his skull in a way Izana realizes he does not dislike entirely.
"What do you want?" he chokes out "Don't touch me," he warns her, and the girl takes another step back but she does not recoil from his harsh gaze. She looks both relieved and annoyed.
"Finally!" the girl slightly pouts "I've been trying to get your attention for a while now" she pauses "You looked so lost. I thought you needed help" she adds after a beat.
The girl is pretty in a way that is both striking and unassuming, pale with stripes of sunburnt skin across her arms, white hair tightly braided away from her face, woven with moss and mud and she's wearing a white dress covered in grass stains and dirt. The girl holds her shoes in one hand and fists the hem of his shirt with the other, staring up at him curiously from below long white lashes. She couldn't be older than ten years old, Izana thought, and he wonders if he had ever looked like her before, a strange creature wrapped in childish innocence and younger dreams. The girl steps closer and looks up at him curiously.
"Do you live near?" She asks rhythmically tugging at his shirt to keep his attention "I always come down here in summer to cool off, but I've never seen you here before. Did you just move?"
She looked to be about the same age as Emma. She might even look like her, all shiny blonde hair, pale eyes, and dressed in white. The sight is both familiar and strange. It reminds him distantly of the last golden days of his childhood when Emma's mother would drive long hours to the beach with the two of them battling sleep on the back seat of her beat-up car.
He wonders if any part of him stayed with them, somewhere locked in time when everything was right. He wonders if Emma's mother, that woman, still thinks of him sometimes, of the days they all spent together. He wonders if she ever regrets abandoning them.
"It's my favorite place here. It's quiet and there's a lot of shade in summer," she gestures to her bare feet and smiles widely "I like walking in the water"
He looks at her in silence, wondering if she is real or just a fragment of his imagination. But she must be real, he thinks, because he can feel her cold muddy hands against his burning skin through the fabric of his shirt. She is real, and he's the one who feels unreal because in the end there is nothing he can do, nothing he can say to dispel the empty feeling of wrongness in his chest.
And isn't it a little tragic? Izana is barely 15 years old and his life is already unraveling. There is nothing that can fill the void Shin left behind, nothing to fill the hollow between his ribs, only pointless struggles, renouncement, and seething anger at everything. Of course, it is increasingly easy to distract himself from the gnawing sensation of emptiness. It is easy when all he has to do is pop a pill, light something on fire or punch somebody's teeth in. It is easy, almost thrilling, to wrap himself in violence and destruction so he does not have to bear the burden of his own lack of substance.
(As years go by, he will realize that no matter what, the feeling of emptiness lingers, that he can only distract himself for so long before it comes back in full force. Then he will know that the reason why he feels so low is that others can never be allowed to understand where his pain comes from, how it was born, and why he let it grow. It makes him want to tear down everything they have ever loved so they can be rebuilt to be the same, and this, this might be a feeling he could easily get high on)
"What about you?" The girl asks again but Izana is not listening, intently focusing on the wet patch forming on his shirt, her fingers periodically flexing around the fabric.
It reminds him of the things Emma would do when she was his sister but it could be something else as well since the memory is distant and aching, like an old wound that never healed right – he duly wonders if things are ever the way he remembers them to be. But it is a vague concern, irrelevant in the face of everything else when all he knows nowadays is the tenuous divide between fits of anxiety and the feeling of emptiness.
"You're not paying any attention at all, are you?" she pouts "that's okay, though, I don't mind waiting for you to come around", she adds to herself.
There is also something of Shin there, he decides, something that is not entirely repulsive. Izana thinks about how easily love came to him, how Shin had loved him with a conviction that felt like salvation, that could have compensated for years of abandonment and rejection, but ultimately did not, and inflated into quiet desperation. Shin had chosen him and Izana had believed in him with all that he had. It hadn't been enough to keep him close in the end.
"What are you doing?" he asks warily, and his mouth feels like it's filled with cotton and he's swallowing glass.
Before he can react, the girl has closed the distance between them and grabbed his hand. She stands on her tiptoes, a hand pressed against his chest for balance, and stares at him so intently Izana feels exposed and raw. The sensation is foreign and unconformable, but not entirely unwelcome. For the first time in a long time, it feels that someone sees him for what he is, someone sees through his grief – because of that, part of him wants to scream, to hit something, wreck something. He wants to tear out the hair on his head, claw out his eyes and he does not understand where this agony comes from, and then he knows.
For a brief, glorious instant he has everything, and then he is left with nothing. But the thing is, Izana has always been greedy, he is fiercely possessive of what he owns, no matter how much destruction his obsession causes. It never ends well, but he is a creature of want and desire, so he takes and takes all that he can, knowing that he will lose it all eventually. It always starts like this, broken and beaten but never defeated, he decides that he is allowed to want things, so he takes what he wants and then loses everything. The cycle repeats on and on and on endlessly. All that he's ever held close he held onto death, destroying all that he loves and leaving his hands full of scars with bloody knuckles and black bruises on the underside.
"Why are you standing so close?" he asks, instinctively wary, but he does not step back. He doesn't remember the last time someone has touched him so gently, as if he were infinitely precious and breakable. Izana thinks numbly that Shin used to hold him like that and he shattered anyway. The girl smiles at him and something dangerous gleams in their eyes. Ah, the things we recognize in each other.
"I'm looking for the curve of your eyes," she replies matter of factly. "But I can't see it," she tilts her head and pushes the hair from his face to get a better look at his eyes "You're so pretty though!" she marvels.
"The curve of my eyes?" Izana asks dumbly, caught onto her previous words.
"Huh huh. It's in a poem I've learned about at school," she supplies brightly. "It stuck with me since I've had to memorize it. I only remember the first part though" she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, white lashes lightly brushing against her cheekbones, moving like butterflies ready to take flight.
"The curve of your eyes encircles my heart," the girl begins to recite, and his heart swells to occupy the hollow of his chest.
"a circle of dance and gentleness,
halo of time, safe nocturnal cradle,
and if I can't remember all that I lived,
it's because your eyes didn't always see me," she says with a wide smile on her lips and he does not understand the poem, did not listen closely enough to appreciate it, but something in what she said resonates with him anyway. Izana takes a breath and words of love and adoration fill his lungs.
"It's pretty," he says blandly, willing himself to sound as disinterested as possible, but triumph briefly flashes in her eyes and he knows that she has seen through him. Mercifully she does not insist, and instead, the girl turns around, absently whistling, her attention already caught onto something else. She sets foot in the river to stand in a gap of light and examines her braid in distaste.
She scrunches her nose and turns back to him again in wonder "Is your hair white for real? Mine is," the little girl asks, perplexed. "I've never seen someone else with hair like mine."
"No, my hair's black. I bleach it. Look," he bows his head to show her his dark roots. "My hair's black but it's curly like yours," he adds uselessly, but the girl looks at him admiringly.
"Eh? But you're a kid too! How come your parents allow you to bleach your hair?"
"They don't," she looks confused. "I don't have parents," he explains awkwardly. "And I'm not a kid, I'm 15," he scowls.
"I see," the girl says gravely in childish acceptance, but there is no pity in her voice, only understanding. Izana breathes out in relief.
"I don't have any parents either," she confesses hesitantly. "Papa died when I was little and Mama left soon after so I live with my grandparents. But they're not really nice. They're always scared that I might do something wrong."
"Look," she lifts the hem of her sundress to show him an ugly black bruise high on her thigh "It's a secret, okay? I don't wanna get in any more trouble"
Izana nods gravely, thinking that there is nothing much to say and no one to listen anyway. He knows it, but he would have liked to say something all the same. And he understands what she does not say.
The girl doesn't seem to mind either way. She doesn't care about the words that he can't form, the whole sentences that die on his lips. There is nothing to say that can make it better, so he does what he does best, that is feel nothing and think – but his thoughts are empty as well.
Shin would know what to say, he was always able to bring him to reason. He would know, but Izana does not because Shin is dead and so he will never show him again what it means to be saved. He wants to ask the girl if she knows, but he doesn't know how to ask so he says nothing about the things they can't talk about.
"They hit you?" Izana asks numbly instead, wanting to trace the contour of the bruise with his fingers, but his hand stills before he can brush over her pale abused skin because he knows where it comes from and where it leads.
"Sometimes" she shrugs, smoothing down her dress so that the pleats would hide the bruises. "Grandma's going to flip when she sees me all dirty". She sighs deeply, pale lashes fluttering and his heart skips a beat. "She likes me pretty and neat" her nose scrunches in disgust, and just as she says that, her hair tie finally snaps, tangled white-blond curls spilling from her braid.
"I hate it so much" she tugs harshly on a snowy lock of hair. "But everyone says girls are prettier with long hair," she says blankly.
"Don't do that," he snaps without thinking, and part of him wants to reach out to her but he stops himself before he can do anything stupid.
"Come here," he orders impulsively, and the girl looks at him questioningly. "I have another tie," he gestures to the elastic band wrapped around his wrist.
"Oh, you're so sweet!" she brightens up "Can you do my hair for me? It's so thick and tangled I can't manage it on my own" the girl adds, as if he were one of her little friends. He'd never done anyone's hair before, not even Emma's when she was a baby, but he wants to touch her, if only for a moment, to see if bruised pale skin feels as soft as it looks, so he agrees with a grunt. He's never met someone like him before, after all.
She sits by the river, dipping her feet into the water, and turns her back to him. She smoothes out the remainder of her braid with ghostly grace and Izana wonders whether he's still dreaming. On a whim, he pulls her to his lap as he used to do with Emma when she was still a little baby, and their closeness gives him elation because it is something that he wants and chose for himself and not the refracted reflection of adult desires and the onset of violence.
The girl freezes completely and casts him a wary glance, but his insides are flooded with relief. "What are you doing?"
"It's more comfortable like that," he offers with a smile, completely unrepentant, and she looks at him cautiously. "You've got mud in your hair" he adds with a small smile, "It looks like shit", the ghost of a smile forms on her lips, and he squeezes her arm reassuringly. She doesn't know what he knows. The girl's eyes light up, she flushes bright red at his words, and the pressure in the air between them decreases sharply.
"Aa? Shoot, I thought so too, it's gonna be such a pain to wash it off," she groans, leaning back against him with a huff.
He combs his fingers through her hair and watches bits of moss, grass, and dirt fall to the ground. The motion is soothing and oddly familiar, it resonates in his bones and propagates to his deadened heart. Her hair is soft and sweet-smelling, the light scent counterbalancing the heaviness of the damp summer air. He brings a strand to his nose and inhales deeply. Another dull throb reverberates through his chest.
"Where do you come from? You don't look Japanese" he asks tentatively, twisting a white blonde curl around his finger.
"I was born here, I think" She huffs haughtily. "But mama came from Russia" she pouts prettily, and all that Izana can think of is that Shin would have loved her, a fragile child of steel and porcelain meant for breaking, "I look like her so people always think I don't speak any Japanese and they talk to me like I'm stupid or a little baby".
"You're half-foreigner too, right?" She asks mischievously, twisting on his lap to face him. "You don't really look Japanese either," she laughs.
"No…" Izana reluctantly admits. "My mother was Filipino," she looks confused "... From the Philippines"
"Eh? Where is that?" she asks curiously, wide blue-gray eyes intently focusing on him. "Sorry, I suck at geography," she adds sheepishly.
"It's an archipelago southwest of Japan," He says slowly, cautiously choosing the right words. The girl listens with rapt attention.
"I was born in Manila," he adds thoughtlessly and the word rolls strangely on his tongue but the sound … It warms something in his chest. He had been a little child when they left for Japan, but he still remembers the endless ocean, the blindingly white city walls, and the lull of Spanish. He hopes someday he will be able to come back and figure out the missing part of his childhood, to fill in the blank canvas of his origins.
"That's so cool!" She gushes "When I grow up, I wanna go to Moscow and look for Mama," the girl adds with her eyes twinkling. "Maybe someday I'll visit Manila too, and then I'll think of you!" she says excitedly, a wide smile spreading on her lips. "When I'm all grown up, I'm gonna travel the whole world," she adds delightedly, throwing her head back with a short laugh. Tufts of white are sticking to her cheeks, his hands are sweaty and all that he can think of is that he can see her pulse fluttering right below the skin of her neck.
Something twinges below his breastbone. His heartbeat is erratic and the girl must have seen his discomfort because the moment she lays a dainty hand on his chest, his breath hitches.
This time, her smile is slow, starting with a twitch on the corner of her mouth and growing wider, lips parting to reveal white teeth and eyes crinkling.
"I'll show you someday," he says, his voice cracking a little. He brings a hand to his chest to cover hers with a gentleness that feels both foreign and terribly right.
Izana never sees it with his own eyes, but he dreams – he dreams of this girl, years after, setting foot on the shores of his homeland and looking at the endless blue sky reflecting on the deep green sea. He thinks of her and nostalgia floods him, he yearns to return with her and longs for a home that never existed in the first place. In this future he imagines, they met once and then never again, but he never forgot about her. In another world, he sees himself spending a short lifetime longing for the feeling of being missed, longing for the memory of a girl yearning for him, a single ray of light on a hot summer day. It is cold and silent in this world where Izana is always aching for an absent thing, for what could have been)
"I bet you will, so let's be friends from now on, okay?" the girl smiles, and his heart seizes again. He brings a hand to his face to rub the back of his palm against his nose and everything is too much at once.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," she laughs embarrassedly "my name's Sakura," she pauses awkwardly. "Lame, right? I'm 10. What about you? What's your name?" Sakura asks excitedly. He means to say something, but the words do not come out of his lips. She grabs his other hand, squeezes fondly and his heart soars.
"You're bad with words, right? I noticed earlier'" Sakura says bluntly "But that's okay!" she beams.
"Izana," He says after a beat, thinking that it would be nice to hear her say his name, just once, before she forgets all about him.
"Okay Izana, nice to meet you!" she smiles and bows her head, his fingers tangle with her hair and he never wants to let go again. All he can think of is that his name sounds like perfection on her lips.
So he remembers a conversation he had with Shin so long ago that the memory seems fuzzier than a dream and much less tangible. "Do what you want, Izana. Do what makes you happy. Love who you want. But you have to love someone because you can't be alone for the rest of your life. Even as people come and go, don't forget to love despite the hurt and the pain you might risk because it's always worth it in the end," Shin had said urgently, as if he had wanted to give him some of his strength, to impart on him some capacity to love endlessly despite all odds.
Izana turns to the girl and wonders for a moment whether she would still want to be his friend if she knew how wretched he truly is. Something nested deep in his guts tells him she probably would want him anyway, because there is something that reminds him of something long lost and never recovered in the way she sees through him so easily. Izana can't decide whether it was a good or a bad thing.
"Please take care of me too," he says in a single breath that scorches his lungs, and he thinks he doesn't really mind that she might learn to see his vulnerability because the smile on her lips is so achingly gentle that he thinks she might yet not leave him if he holds her close, closer then Shin ever did.
She smiles at him, looking up from below upturned white lashes that could almost reach the sky and he thinks, ah, there it is. The curve of her eyes.
