I am harrowed, hallowed. I am stone, stone.
I have not trembled. Love nails me to the world.
(Traci Brimhall)
He had chosen a Wednesday because it had seemed kinder, having the week half done but not yet over. Leaves out the "anymore" after the "I don't know if we love each other" delivered as rehearsed, realizing only in the moment that she'd be the kind to nail the whole weight of his confession to that slight of a word, then nail herself to it, too.
As it is, she doesn't appear surprised either way. Looks at her shoes mostly, bowed head. A smart pair of heeled, black Oxford brogues, plain only to the immature eye. She'd finished the subtly elaborate custom stitching herself only a few nights before, the pads of her fingers pricked so coarse he could think of little else on his walk home but the ragged feel of them on his cheek when she'd wiped off her lipgloss there. She's only learned that was their last kiss just now; he'd known it would be for longer, guilt ridden. Mismatched, or too young from the start, an overdone script of a pairing that had never made sense.
"I want to be friends." Still, just, someday, only. Leaves it to her to choose, thinks she deserves that much.
She nods. Her bangs are uneven. When she finally looks up, one eye's lashes brush tangled with the ends of a long strand of her hair, shielding her gaze from him. Blinks quickly to clear her view, less the watery shine. Seventeen, but refrains from being openly emotional, or too stereotypically teenaged. He admires this of her, because he still can't sort out how to keep his emotions off his face, his hands. Seventeen, and skin thin as paper, for all the effort he makes to present himself unbruised by the world.
"Me, too." And Yamato's relieved, because he knows she means it. Sora's never said anything she doesn't mean.
It hadn't lasted a month.
Taichi's the one who tells him, confirming the rumors with a poor transition, bluntly delivered: "Saw them outside Soumei's east gate. Seemed friendly." Looking at him sideways, never one to be light handed. "I think he's a second year there. He gave us the campus tour."
Yamato already had his own suspicions. It wasn't anything to be surprised by, how quickly she'd said yes to someone else, even though she always seemed taken aback anytime the ask came. Sora didn't seem to understand her natural beauty, attractive in a way that felt out of reach, or a challenge. Boys liked Mimi, but men liked Sora.
"Soumei, huh?" As highly ranked as it is, Yamato isn't looking at that college with real seriousness, though he and Taichi had agreed to apply to the same schools, their choosing different ones in the end implied from the start. Appreciates how he doesn't have to say how he feels around Taichi as much anymore. They get their wires crossed a lot less now than in their youth, and still miss each other sometimes, but it helps to be generally understood. This simple fact making the decision of which university to attend all the harder. He doesn't want to be away from his friends.
Taichi leans back on his palms, arms stretched out behind him, feet dangling over the concrete ledge where he's perched. Yamato stands against the same wall, masked from the teachers' lounge at just the right angle to hide the cigarette in his hand. There is no such ledge or good place to sneak a quick smoke between classes at Yamato's own high school, which should have kicked the habit to begin with. As it is, this is his second pack, and it's Tuesday. He knows he should be more ashamed of this than he is. He also knows it's his own choice, but he blames his father anyway.
"I'll find out more at orientation, maybe," Taichi's saying now. His habit of making unasked-for ideas seem like asked-for favors.
Yamato flicks off a bit of ash. "You're accepting?"
"Accepted." Glancing at him again, eyebrow raised. "You were there."
The day before he'd broken up with her. An idea of a future with any familiar regularity stamped out the moment Taichi'd brandished the signed letter, cheekily posing with Koushiro for a picture Mimi had snapped of them for his celebratory announcement with Jou's phone, her arm linked with Sora's, who'd smiled on, quiet and proud. Blinks through the smoke now, waving the air clear from his face. "Right. Okay." Hadn't expected the ending to come up this fast. Surprised he'd forgotten such a soul-punching moment, forced growth.
"You're not going to cry, are you?" Eyeing him with apprehension now, leaning further back. Yamato puts out his half-done cigarette on a concrete block and flicks the butt at his sneakers. Taichi scrambles to his feet, balancing himself on the ledge. "Seriously?"
Pulls the strap of his schoolbag over a shoulder. "You should get to class."
"That's a myth." Taichi walks the edge, and then back. He's grinning down at him, this beam of sunlight so bright it would be impossible to ever dim. A shudder Yamato doesn't understand runs through him, this taste of dread and fear over their futures. Taichi just sees the future. "Passed my exams and accepted the best offer," he says, boastful only when he wants to be. "What can this place do to me now?"
Yamato enrolls at Keidai. It had felt fitting, with the engineering concentration and a wide array of clubs, events, programs, all the more to test, explore, seek out, understand. Made himself curious for all of it, soaking in the world after so many years of distanced observation. He keeps his guitar and his motorcycle, but leaves almost all of his old habits behind, deciding to approach the uni experience as a new start. Not a reinvention, but the actual meeting of the person he had always been, once buried under others' expectations and directions, now freed to choose for himself. Every third weekend he'd go home to see the others, a point they'd all agreed on, or rather relented to after Mimi's many tears on the matter. They took turns hosting, or deciding where the reunion would be hosted, spendings hours like time had never passed.
Taichi stops joining first, not for any reason but that his schedule could no longer accommodate the long commute. Between joining the campus pick up football league, studying for a coveted winter term clerkship at the Norwegian embassy for his international relations concentration, and getting his first serious girlfriend, he says he can't even find the time to call home once a week.
Jou soon has boards to begin planning for, and an internship of his own at his father's family practice clinic, so he bows out second, and to not much fanfare. They'd known what Jou's life would be like since they were all children, but he keeps surprising them, too. Announces he'll go into veterinary school halfway through his medical exam preparation, with a focus on infectious diseases and environmental studies. He's terrified of Taichi's cat, Jiji, who he swears hates him, but somehow the announcement of his chosen career had left them all sagely nodding in agreement, an inevitability.
Koushiro files paperwork for his own start-up almost right after, and finds himself at his new office more often than at the classroom, to the point that he almost earns his first probation one month before graduation, eventually compromising with his parents and homeroom teacher to finish secondary school before devoting himself to his company. He even brings in a co-partner to bring the consulting business off the ground, and has a staff of eleven by the time the others finish their first and second years of uni.
Mimi begins packing homemade breakfast breads and boxed bentos that she delivers to Koushiro and his small staff twice daily to such great acclaim that instead of applying to uni she opens a business of her own. She runs it out of the storeroom and kitchen of the rented office suite Koushiro had found in a modestly busy neighborhood about an hour by train from the women's college Sora had chosen.
Despite this, Sora has never joined their reunions. Mimi thinks she's reinventing herself, too, but Yamato knows Sora has always known herself. She just needed to be away from them to know herself better.
This is also why Yamato is the least surprised of them to hear how, in their third year of uni, Sora switches her concentration from nursing to fine art, and moves in with another new boyfriend, an adjunct professor of photography closer to her father's age than her own. Her parents had been equal parts livid and confounded, but Sora had never smiled as much as she did that year, even posting pictures of herself to her Instagram instead of the usual interior shots and window views her page had been carefully curated to feature at highly selective intervals before.
That is also how Yamato learns she'd gotten rid of her bangs and cut her hair to her chin, dyed it a rich plum red, and gotten a nose ring. Sora'd always been fatally beautiful, in a different way than Mimi's pretty brilliance, but now she carries an attractive confidence in her posture and presence, grown into herself in college, this whole new person. She wears darker color lipsticks and vintage clothing that gets thinner and more low cut and heavy eyeliner, and someone he still doesn't care to acknowledge had taught her how to make the camera love her.
After he finds himself thinking about the picture she'd posted of herself on her back in a translucent white G-string bikini with sand grains rubbed into her wet skin, her forearm stretched over her forehead to shield her shy smile from a harsh afternoon sun, as he's inside someone else, a someone he was almost certain he could possibly be serious with before this moment, he deletes his account, and puts their group chat on mute to avoid having to see Sora's name, more embarrassed than ashamed. No, the shame arrives later, when Mimi says Sora broke up with her older boyfriend, and that same night Yamato creates a new handle, a fake one that follows nothing and no one, to look at the photos she continues posting of herself only when he's certain it won't take more than a few strokes to come into his own hand.
He never thought about her this way in school, the handful of years they fumbled through a teenaged relationship that didn't go further than heavy making out and immature handjobs whenever her mother wasn't home pretending not to be chaperoning from the kitchen beside Sora's childhood bedroom. Mostly, they had just spent time together talking, doing homework, cooking meals, sharing their ideas and expectations of the future, and taking naps on top of her sheets. The Sora he'd dated then didn't like being held too closely against someone else, claustrophobic and afraid of being unable to move, but she'd press the top of her head under the hollow made by his chin, her soft, short bangs tickling the skin of his neck. This is the sensation he thinks about most when he looks at her Instagram, like thinking about the chaste way she'd let him hold her then would make how he uses her pictures now okay.
After graduation, Sora breaks up with her senior year boyfriend and moves to Canada, then stops posting photos to her page entirely. She calls her mother frequently and Mimi twice a week without fail, but Yamato doesn't see her for almost three years. None of them do.
Anna is the kind of pretty that imprints behind your eyes like a shock of light, so that even when you close your eyes she's all you see. Her short bob is pin straight with ice blonde highlights she maintains with monthly appointments at her technician's salon, and she keeps her nails perfectly manicured, to the point that he sometimes gets distracted thinking about how nice they are when she sends him nude pictures of herself, using her fingers to hold her body open to the camera, with little text notes about what she'd like him to do to her accompanying each one. Yamato didn't know what to do with the photos when she first sent them, taken aback by the boldness. He met her in the Russian language class he signs up for in his first year of his doctoral program. Anna had already passed her oral exams in the same program but remained the TA for the elective language course. He'd been assigned to her study group, though none of the other three students also assigned to the group came to the meetings but him.
Yamato had always been a serious student; if he was going to learn something, he'd learn it to be an expert and nothing less. This is how he'd taught himself how to play bass, how to mix his own records, how to produce music, how to engineer sound. The question of how interests him more than why, and he gets obsessed with new challenges, unable to take anything unseriously. It's why he doesn't get complaints from lovers he brings to his bed, delivering orgasms with textbook perfection. "I'd like you to fuck me a little less neatly," Anna told him once, or rather messaged him, the text overlaid over a video of herself on his leather couch playing with her chrome colored rabbit vibrator, and Yamato had absolutely no idea what that could mean, but knows not to look it up online, or to ask the others. Instead, he decides to bring Anna to meet his oldest friends, the first partner he's ever done this with besides Sora, who didn't count. She immediately hits it off with Koushiro, genuinely interested in his company and getting into a drawn out debate about market trends of M&As for tech start-ups. Jou cannot seem to look her in the eye while still being his polite self with her inquisitive questions about the clinic, and Taichi just wants to talk Russian politics.
Mimi is the happiest of them all, because she'd been asking them to make her a girl squad for years, and Yamato had been the last of them to follow through. She gets along with all their partners, but she especially likes Anna. They often go out for lunch and meet for happy hours, just the two of them, and Mimi works all night to make her a tahini mousse cake with burnt honey for her birthday. It's the same birthday Yamato tries a new move he'd studied up for, rewarded in the effort by the neighbor leaving an angry handwritten note on the door of his graduate housing flat instructing Yamato to remember other people live on the floor above, beside, and underneath. Anna reads the note, too, and agrees that they should take it seriously by testing every surface and room for the source of the sound leaks, if he really wants her birthday to be one she'll remember. They don't leave his flat for the rest of the morning, and wouldn't have for the whole day, if Sora hadn't called him about forty minutes after three o'clock in the afternoon.
He doesn't have words for what his heart does inside his chest when she says his name very softly and shyly into the phone. It's not like it had been very long. They'd spoken recently, on a group video chat Koushiro had organized, the only thing he'd asked for on his own birthday a few months back. Sora had blurred her camera background, and the room lighting was dim, and her connection was poor, but her eyes had been clear then, these attentive, enigmatic pools of browned scarlet. Her hair had grown longer, but still didn't reach her shoulders, pinned back by a pair of plastic barrettes Taichi had given her for Christmas when they were eleven, the same day Yamato had first met her.
"I'm sorry," she says now. Her voice is trembling. She's hoarse, too, like her throat is closed up by the late stage of a viral infection her body hasn't kicked. "I didn't know who else to call."
This a lie, or else she is leaving out the rest of her thought process in arriving at him, the bottom of her list. Yamato doesn't bother with pretending he doesn't know where he ranks. Even aware of this he says, "Are you all right?" Next to him, Anna is sitting up in his bed, concerned. Her compassion is his favorite thing about her.
"Can you pick me up?" because Sora doesn't answer questions about herself. To be fair, Yamato doesn't much either.
"Yeah. Where are you?" Already pulling the duvet off him, looking for clean jeans, wondering if it's rude to go rescue his ex-girlfriend smelling like sex with his new one. He says it again, because she's gone oddly silent on the other end. "Sora. Where are you?"
Her breath hitches. He hears the mechanical, repetitive click of emergency headlights in the background. He pictures her pulled over on the side of a road, broken down car, lost in the dark. "I don't know." She doesn't sound sober. "I don't know, I'm sorry," and hangs up before he can respond.
Yamato calls back three times, but all three are sent to voicemail. Anna even gives him her phone to use, but Sora probably wouldn't have picked up an unknown number even if she weren't as distraught as she'd sounded. He cannot get the sound of her out of his head.
The next morning, Anna goes home to her apartment to pick up what she needs for the rest of week, as she plans to stay over as she usually does, and Yamato goes to Jou's flat to tell him what happened. Sora is sitting at the dining table when Jou lets him inside. Her face is calm and gentle, as it was on the video call with all their friends. Her hair is wet from a shower, and she's in Jou's sweatshirt and pink lounge pants that Mimi must have left here. A suitcase lays open at the end of the living room couch, holding everything she now owns, home for good. It's small, is all Yamato thinks, a little dazed, like there's not much of a life there anymore.
Sora smiles when she sees him staring, sipping coffee from a mug with the logo of Koushiro's company printed on the side, Taichi's barrette holding her bangs out of her eyes, which are warm now, if a little glazed, like last night had never happened. "Hi, Yamato."
Yamato stays in the doorway. His heart moves up to his throat again, but he swallows it back, stamps it down. Something is about to go wrong, or all of it will. He can see it coming so clearly, hurtling towards another ending, the way she looks at him like that. "Hi, Sora."