Hello to everyone. Sorry again for sinking to oblivion, but I am doing my best. Inspiration is a fickle thing, and not always something I can reach. Maybe I needed a rest from writing (be it essays for uni or fics). But I hope you can enjoy this chapter. Please R&R. Thank you.


Interlude: Sei

Do you ever think about the past?

Maybe unfortunately for me, I did, even as I pushed my trolley onwards at the Hawaii International Airport, even as the rhythmic screech emanating from the wheels grinding against the smooth marble floor clogged my brains, making it so difficult to think about anything coherent. Other than the past.

The walls were filled with oversized advertisement posters, and judging from their almost spotless polish, they had been pasted there very recently. Their colours were too bright, their images too beautiful, and yet I almost wanted to be deceived by them. The almost imperceptible dots of black and brown that spoiled the impression could only be seen by someone with exceptionally sharp eyes or someone, who had little else to do than to press every minuscule detail around her in her mind. In other words, someone like me.

Looking out of the window, I saw some seagulls fly through the air, and I thought they must have had strayed far from their nests. Just like myself. The steel birds were ascending and landing, too, and the broad runways seemed to boil under the radiant sun.

It seemed as if my blood was boiling, too. The sensation which mixed simple uneasiness with something almost resembling suffocation had plagued me since I had left my apartment back in Tokyo. My eyes could not rest no matter where I looked, because everywhere were disturbing sights - Hostile-looking people, their faces twisted to resemble monsters rather than humans, and they eyed strangers as if they all were heaps of filth rotting in a bin; subtle cracks on the walls, small blots of dirt where there should have been none, and I found myself imagining how the cracks would spread and the walls would break down, how the dirty spots would grow larger until they had consumed everything around them… Amidst all the ugliness, there were people that might have once struck me as pretty, but now they were nothing but creatures of grey, unable to captivate me for a single second.

Yet at the same time, the rational part in me was certain that nothing I now found repulsive differed in an elementary way from the very same things I had once been attracted to. It did not take a prophet to understand that it was me who had changed, and in such an irrevocable fashion that what had once held meaning for me had become nothing. Except for one.

The corridor to the exit seemed to stretch on forever, and I walked, walked and walked... My feet were suddenly hurting, although the distance could not have been a long one, but as I so well knew, one's imagination could be the most powerful force in the world.

When I finally could see the exit before my eyes, I was so tired that I soon found myself sitting in the airport cafeteria. The coffee was bleak, and I could hardly force myself to swallow even a mouthful of it. Instead, I concentrated on whisking the coffee with the spoon. The phenomenon I created was curious in its absurdity; dark liquid and white foam, an occasional splatter on the table, the clinging voice of the spoon against the clay.

As I was performing my small childish act, my eyes were almost instinctively scanning the people going about the airport. Had I been younger, I surely would have found someone beautiful enough to make an impression amidst the exhausted-looking clientele, but now, there was no-one to pique my interest.

An exceptionally tall Asian woman in a somewhat provocative outfit consisting only a miniskirt and a sleeveless shirt with a low cleavage swept past me, and for a moment my gaze lingered on her beautiful long legs and shapely bottom, but it was a fleeting attraction, gone as soon as it had awakened.

Had I been my past self, it would have taken little effort for me to write my apathy off with a laugh and a few witty remarks. But now, I was already thirty, I looked like anything but my former, charming self, and every confident joke would be like a crude replica of a truly authentic painting lost long ago to the fangs of time. Too many times had I been horrified by my appearance, and while the dark rings around my eyes could be healed by a good night's sleep and a decent dose of happiness, the grey strands in my hair and the wrinkles on my forehead could not.

A wrinkle for every moment which had bended my heart, ten for every moment which had broken it; it was a thought I had once played with. Still, although I had already had my good share of heartbreaks and wrinkles along with them, I was irresistibly drawn to the single thing which had caused me most pain and which would most likely continue to do so. Like a moth towards a flame.

Once I had been the flame around which so many had circled, and one day I had woken up from my dream to discover my new self as the moth, who could not avoid getting burnt, but who nevertheless did everything get closer to the one thing she could never reach. It was a childish endeavour, a foolish crusade against my past.

It was not as if I had any choice. On some days, there was little else I could do than think about her. I imagined how she would appear again on my doorstep, how I would forget everything under her wilful stare and how I would slowly make every bit of her composure unravel as I made love to her once again… And on other days, I could almost go on living as usual, notwithstanding the vast emptiness inside me, and on those days my only feelings towards her were those of bitterness and even hatred. She had been the one I had trusted myself to, the one I had expected to always stand behind me in the case I fell. Maybe it would have been better if we never had fallen in love, I would think. Then the bonds between us could have remained unshattered.

There hardly passed a day upon which the the past did not cast its shadow. I did not know what was easier for me; to try to forget her and carry on as if she did not exist, or to pursue her in the hope of discovering some common ground we still shared.

Sometimes I wondered whether she felt the same way towards me. I wondered whether she also spent her nights thinking about me, about all those happy and less happy moments we had shared, about the bliss we could have had, and about all those intractable obstacles that had stood in our way.

Be as it may, I did not know if it held any meaning. Had I not come to Honolulu, whether she was thinking about me would not have mattered at all. Yet, here I was, in this remote island where I could not not help feeling out of place, where every smiling face sunbathing on the beach would make me feel like an abomination.


The hotel I had reserved for a week was quite decent considering the very humble price I had paid for it. My room was stripped bare of any comforts or decorations, but it had everything I needed. I flung my luggage on the bed and proceeded to check the bathroom, which also turned out to be very efficiently cleaned. Not that I would have cared much had it not been.

The next hour or so I spent lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My head was like an eggshell whose contents had been sucked out, and I could not move a limb to save my life. The travel exhaustion had crept on me stealthily.

I had no idea what I would do next. My childish mind had probably expected her to show up as soon as I arrived, as if Honolulu had been some small fishing village and not a metropolitan city. Even though I knew it was the most sensible thing to do, I could not pick up my phone. I still wished for some miracle to happen which would throw us together in some romantic coffee shop in some back alley downtown, or maybe I wanted to wait for her to descend upon me as soon as she sensed my presence, like some omniscient angel.

In the end, I did pick up my phone. But I did not call her.

Instead, Shizuka's sleepy, but amazed voice greeted her.

"Where are you, Mrs. Sei? The lines keeps hushing strangely."

It was not a call I had made acknowledgingly, but maybe my fingers were so used to typing Shizuka's number whenever I felt down that they had acted according to their instincts. This time, too, her number had appeared on the screen faster than it would have been to look it up from my contact list.

"How many times have I told you to stop addressing me so formally? It makes it sound as if we were strangers", I rebuked softly, more out of old habit than because it really bothered me. "And to answer your question, I am at my hotel in Honolulu. Don't ask why I am here, I guess it's just one of these impulses of mine."

"I see", Shizuka replied slowly. "A vacation might do you good."

I sighed. It was obvious that she realised something was going on, something more than just an escape from my dull existence back home.

"To tell the truth, the real reason why I am here is not because I need a vacation, as you might have guessed. She is here, too."

I could almost feel her muscles tighten at the other end of the receiver. A brief silence ensued before she spoke.

"Are you..."

"No, I am alone", I interrupted her. "But that was not the reason I called you, to talk about her."

Silence again, as Shizuka waited me to continue.

She was such a darling, such a jewel, so adorable that it made me disgusted with myself every time we spoke. Especially if our discussion even remotely touched the subject we were not supposed to talk about. Had my lover been anyone else, could I have even mentioned Youko without an outrage? I guessed not. Yet whenever I confided to Shizuka, I did not get derisive gazes or temper tantrums, but sympathetic smiles and comforting embraces.

"I just wanted to hear your voice. It gives me comfort", I said finally.

"I am happy to hear that. I have missed you, too."

Her voice was velvety, and in an instant the translucent image of her drifted in front of my eyes. The calm, ever-understanding Rosa Canina.

"But what I really wanted to tell you is… is…

My voice trailed off. If I sometimes thought that my relationship with Youko was doomed, I held even less illusions about my involvement with Shizuka. She had been somewhat obsessed with me for who knows how long, but for me there was little else than raw physical attraction and the weak reciprocal feelings that her magnificent ones made me reflect back. I knew she would have wanted to take me to Italy with her, and I knew with equal certainty that she realised it was something which would never happen. Sometimes, her love for me hurt me more than her indifference could have. Oftentimes, I hoped I could love her as much as she loved me.

"…I am sorry", I forced the words out. "I truly am."

To my surprise, Shizuka chuckled.

"You don't have to keep telling me that every time we talk. That way, I don't have to repeat myself, either. Now, hopefully for the last time will I say that there is no need to apologize."

"Yeah, I guess there isn't", I admitted, but my voice conveyed a wholly different message, and I was sure she had no difficulty in reading it. However, she did not pursue it further, and I was grateful for that.

We went on to talk about some inconsquential matters. She told me about the poor weather in Rome, and in return I recounted what I had been doing in the past weeks. Our discussion soon took the usual course. I asked whether there had been any significant developments in her career, but there had been none. She could make ends meet, but the road to positive stardom still had not opened to her.

At some point of our chatter, I wondered how much I actually knew about the person called Canina Shizuka. All she ever told me about herself was how she had performed in yet another club or theather, and I never asked about anything else. When I thought about it, she could have had a whole life I did not know about; an Italian girlfriend, boyfriend, anything, and I would be totally oblivious. As opposed to me, she never shared the mornings when she would look at the mirror and be appalled by what she saw there, neither did I hear about the times when she had been immobilized by the fear of the crowd or when her homesickness had reduced her to tears. There must have been a few of those less glorious moments as well, but for me, she was always the promising opera singer yet to make her impact and who would always arrive at the airport with such an exquisite polish that it made me look like a scrap of filth in comparison.

"What do you make of us?" I interjected, so suddenly that she broke off in the middle of her sentence.

"I mean, what will come of us? Where will we be in five, ten years time? My life is a mess all right, but I don't want to get you tangled up, too", I tried to clarify, but I made no sense even to myself.

A brief silence.

"In one of her letters to me so many years ago, Mrs. Shimako tried to describe you to me. I think I still remember a line she told me you had once said. I cannot recall the exact words, but I think I undersood then that I would not reject love, even if it would last only for a moment. And frankly, I think ten years is much more than just a passing moment."


In the pictures hanging in the travel agencies' offices, the sand on the beaches were golden, and the seawater was like liquid sapphire. But when I took it in my hands and studied it closer, it was nothing else but ordinary water. To make sure, I poured some of it in my mouth. The saltiness made me gag.

But I enjoyed looking at the ocean, even if it was not as magical as the salesmen claimed it to be. From where I was standing, I could see the open sea stretching into the distance, the all-encompassing blue just never ended, and not a single island dotted its surface. There was something magical and immensely powerful in the sight, which was wholly different from anything I had ever witnessed before. Many times in my youth I had seen the archipelago sea in Japan, but compared to the pure, unrestricted and untamed blue it was like a piece of charcoal juxtaposed with a flawless diamond. I had a vague feeling that if I continued to stare for long enough, I would become one with the sea and all of my earthly worries would become like teardrops to be washed away by the ocean current.

Some children ran past me, splashing water all around them as they chased each other and shouted like there was no tomorrow. The small waves they left in their wake disturbed the almost surreal stillness of the ocean, and the ripples caressed my belly, temporarily filled my navel with seawater, and the cheerful sounds broke my concentration and forced me to acknowledge my more immediate surroundings once more.

What am I doing here?

Exasperated, I started to walk towards the shore. The sand was soft to tread upon, and the water was so clear that I could see my feet and the small scallops scattered on the ocean floor. I made sure not to step on any of them.

Back on the shore, I curled up under my parasol and took a sip from my pina colada every time the heat got to me. My eyes drifted among the folk gathered around me. So many scantily clad people around me, and still not a cute girl in sight.

Three days of my precious holiday had already passed, and I had not made a single move to achieve the goal I had set myself. Three days of aimless wandering on the streets, as if I could really spot Youko if I kept doing that long enough. Three days of waking up with the feeling of misplacement, as if I were a refugee left destitute in the wake of war. Three days of falling asleep in my uncomfortable hotel bed, surrounded my nothing but darkness, and never in my life had I felt so alone.

I knew I had to make a move soon, before what life I still had in my grasp would escape forever. But for now, I would allow myself one more day of cowardice.