Chapter 2 – Taki's Introspection
After Mitshua ran off, Taki stood on the stairs of Suga Shrine trying to process what had just happened. A cozy feeling in his chest began to appear, and to contribute to this enthusiastic fire, her contact on his hand and his name were written, as if it were a ticket to the most desired event, although he had the feeling that unlike the other events, in this one he would pay any price, even part of his vital organs just to see her. As he looked at the letters of the contact, a sketch of Mitshua's face began to hover in his mind, and the paper, on which it was forged, began to look like her skin... If her hands (the only part she touched) were already so soft, imagine her face. And as he imagined, without realizing it, he began slowly to bring his face closer to the notepad, until he had his nose close to the blessed page, and he adjusted himself gently to put his mouth close to the soft sheet. The trance continued, and with that he began to kiss the imaginary cheek and sniffing the paper as if trying to catch traces of its scent. But while at that, a lightening of conscience struck him, making him realize what a ridiculous figure he was making. He stopped suddenly, and pushed the notepad sharply away from his face, "What did I just do?" he thought. He looked around, saw an old man walking his dog, and immediately thought of running away in shame. But he thought it only made him more suspicious of the crime of shamelessness and tried to act as naturally as possible: he pretended to be reading something on his notepad, nodded his head pretending to make the "Everything is in order" gesture, put the notepad in the inside pocket of his jacket and started walking as normally as possible with his rigid body from his performance. After that, he passed the old man, greeted him with a "good morning", and after seeing no one around, he started running not only because of the embarrassment he had just had, but also to gain time to search for more job offers in the library. Taki chose to make the way on foot, he had left for that crazy search at the stop before the one from where he would go to the library, at Shinanomachi station, and apparently the stairs where the two were talking were on the way.
After 20 minutes of running most of the way, he arrived at his destination, the Central Library of Sophia University. Before entering the library, he took a few sips of air and sighed. "Finally," he thought. He was sweaty, but above all happy, a strange feeling for an environment where he bothered to find job offers for then to reject him in interviews, he simply got confused in his words without even knowing why. Why was he happy for a girl he only talked to for half an hour, the result of glances exchanged on two separate trains? The desire to search again for Itomori in that environment came back to him, but no, he had to fulfill his tasks, and then come to lunch with his old friends, Tsukasa and Takagi. As he underlined what interested him between the pages of the classified ads, he couldn't stop thinking about that girl, and he had to pinch himself to refocus. In fact, no girl, either in elementary school or college, ever made him act like that, and after his 17 years, specifically, after that trip to Itomori, it seems that he even had an aversion to falling in love with some girl in the environments he frequented. It was as if his heart had already reserved that place for someone who didn't know who or what it was, and it frustrated him internally. Once, a beautiful girl declared herself to him, and he rejected her to the shock of several colleagues. Why did he do that? Something in his heart said it was betraying his feelings, but his feelings for what? By whom? An unsolved riddle to this day. "Until today," he thought. Apparently, seeing a girl on the train, falling in love just by the look and coming up to her in a random place just to ask her name, was already in line with his feelings. And as if that wasn't enough, she corresponded with the same, otherwise he would never have found her. The question that remains is, what feelings? Wouldn't he need to know someone beforehand to have feelings for that person? There are exceptions in fact, such as the nurse syndrome where the patient falls in love with his rescuer. But Mitshua didn't save him from anything! Has he lost his mind? If this sudden passion had only come from him, it was a hypothesis to consider. But it came from both, she also felt the same way. And the probability of two people having a sudden bout of madness at the same time while looking at each other is virtually zero. And to add to this crazy puzzle, she's from Itomori, the same place he went to visit in 2016 and that changed his life forever. Just to understand the scale of this coincidence, the city of Tokyo has 14 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area of 40 million, while Itomori only had 1,500 inhabitants, with most of its former residents having been relocated to surrounding areas. Certainly, none of these areas were close to Tokyo since Itomori was 6 hours from the metropolis, and only a dozen at most must have gone to live there, perhaps part of the economic elite of the small village of which Mitshua could be a part, the costs in the big city are no joke. "A dozen in millions," he thought. Now leaving the game of probabilities, he has the fact that after the trip to Itomori, the first person who falls in love is precisely from there, under the strangest possible circumstances, and with her falling in love equally for his happiness. And the fact that she corresponds only reinforces the theory that he went looking for her in Itomori and that they had known each other before. But why if the village had already been destroyed three years ago? And why would he look for her there if she had already been in Tokyo for that long? And above all, why don't he remember seeing her? None of this made sense, but his conviction that she was somehow connected to that trip was never abandoned, it was impossible to take those connections of facts as mere coincidences. All he had to do was make a truce, sigh deeply, and wait for the next events. The truth of the relationship with her will come out, whether it is far-fetched or not, and he has yet to meet with her. "Practice is the criterion of truth," he concluded, something he learned in his landscape projects, that no matter how much theory there was, if they were not put into practice, the truth of their aesthetic and practical benefits would never be confirmed. The reunion with her was the practice, the criterion of truth.
In the meantime, he awoke from his thoughtful pose and realized that he was no longer underlining and discarding job offers. That would normally have frustrated him, but just thinking about the chances of finding Mitshua in his memories, even if unlikely, made him smile: "Today is a special day," he said to himself. Taki realized that he wasn't in the mood to underline jobs, his head didn't allow it now anyway, and decided to burn his planned time inside the library until the appointed time with his friends in a café so that he could better investigate his memories about Itomori and what motivated him to go there. This café they used to go to be, was the La Mille Sunrose Akasaka café where they ordered stuffed pancakes, very good by the way, but quite expensive. "Expensive," echoing in his mind as he wandered, there was a strange time when he spent a lot on pancakes and cakes when he was heavily spared with his part-time money. His friends were so surprised that on one of their normal coffee days they asked what became of the cute and spendthrift Taki. Now that he reviews those memories, he realizes that the most sinister thing was not those misplaced comments, which he has forgotten until now, but because they took place shortly after the trip to Itomori, which means that his strange conduct was before that trip, setting a credible precedent that led him to that long excursion. But there's a catch, he doesn't remember spending that money, or being "cute", although... and a memory of a time which he thought was long forgotten came to him like a flash of lightning, "Though I remember having much less money with me than the day before, and complaining to someone about it, but Ah!" and as quickly as the flash of memory came, as with the same speed came the mist of forgetfulness, interrupting his thinking in such a way that he began to feel dizzy, and had to take a deep breath to try to recompose his thoughts. "So let me recap, my friends told me I was cute and spendthrift shortly after the trip to Itomori, and I remember a time when my money disappeared without knowing why, and I don't remember blaming myself for it, but someone unknown..., but... when?", Taki tried to scrutinize the mystery, and when he realized that his reasoning had returned to the place, he continued the search for clues. He tried to look for more references to form a more coherent timeline, until he remembered the famous failed meeting with Okudera-senpai, something he wanted to forget because it was so embarrassing, but his friends and co-workers kept reminding him of it for a while just to mess with him. And he had nothing against Okudera, quite the contrary, they had even gone out as friends the week before, it was just that meeting... nothing more than that. But now, this memory seemed to be useful to him, because it formed a before and after in his life... "Was it before or after the meeting with Okudera that I acted strangely?" trying to look for a time frame, an oil rig in the middle of a sea of oblivion and meaninglessness. And like a sudden wave in the middle of the storm hitting his head, something striking that Okudera said at the end of the meeting came to him: "She told me that she didn't look like the same person as before... and... wait! She also told me I was into someone else! How the hell haven't I ever remembered that before?!" shouted Taki punching him in the forehead. And just as he was about to try to remember his reaction to Okudera's words, a sudden fog amid a sea of memories that was becoming crystal clear flooded his mind, and everything around that platform, which was the meeting with Okudera, became opaque and obscure. "Fuck! Why is this?" he shouted again when it seemed as if he was going to remember everything. It was hard to see how he could forget something that was situated seconds after something he remembered. None of it made sense! But at least he remembered something relevant to his introspective inquiry, "If what Okudera said to me, about me not being the same person as before, was probably true, it probably referred to the cute, spendthrift Taki I don't remember at all. So... it was before the meeting!" concluded Taki satisfied with fitting that piece of the puzzle together. Now, it remained to be seen what Okudera wanted to tell him about being into someone else. "So that's why she ended the date early!" as if he had uncovered new evidence from a cold case. It wasn't so much because of the awkwardness with girls that the date had ended early, but because he liked someone else! But who? He clearly remembered having a secret crush on Okudera, but for some mysterious reason it had abruptly disappeared. Not even the clear memory of having had a secret crush on her made him escape the question that hammered in his mind: "How the hell did I set up a date with her?" Okudera didn't seem like an easy girl to seduce, she was desired by practically all her co-workers. In fact, just as Taki was thinking about it, another flash memory popped up in him, "My classmates seemed upset with me for Okudera. So does that mean I went out with her before?" asked Taki with a question that seemed to make a lot of sense. But there was something else that came up in that flash, "Okudera winked at me in front of my colleagues, ahahah!", laughing in his mind at such an unusual moment, "That can only mean that I really met her before. But why don't I remember anything? Although... I didn't consider myself responsible for that, there was someone who, ah!", and another veil of forgetfulness fell on him, which made him dizzy again. "Then my co-workers were upset with me for Okudera, and she seemed to wink in front of them," Taki said to himself trying to reorganize his thoughts. "And again, there's that someone... Wouldn't he be the same person responsible for squandering my money?" but a void of answers echoed in Taki's mind.
However, he took his head out of his hands and lifted it up, and in that position, he asked himself a question that gave him goosebumps: Could it be that an entity controlled him without realizing it? He was shaking for a while and was forced to take a few deep breaths in a row to calm himself down, and he said to himself, "Calm down! You're here alive and well, you've found someone special, and whatever happened, it didn't hurt me, just fine... It left me with things without explanation. But I'm safe and sound now!" said Taki to himself, trying to calm himself. After that, he went back through his memories, and realized that something important was missing to know about the meeting with Okudera, something that would better guide his blurred memories: the exact date! The only thing he knew was that it was before the trip to Itomori, which he made in mid-October, two weeks after the comet crashed. "Was the meeting with Okudera before or after the comet crash?" asked Taki. But what did it matter to him? It wasn't as if the comet's birthday was related to these strange events... Or was it? He tried to sift through the two weeks leading up to Itomori's trip, which also preceded the anniversary of that event, and noticed something strange: he remembered almost nothing, almost as if that period hadn't existed. In fact, the same could be said of the period before the meeting with Okudera-senpai, of which he only remembered small fragments thanks to the association of memories with the statements of his friends made in a moment when he had the most lucid memory, after the trip to Itomori. He tried to mark this timeline in his mind, with two events that he remembers something, as if he were rounding up the cattle in the corral, and in what seemed to be a void, fragments of memories began to emerge, with him drawing the landscape of an unknown village, and several fragmented moments of anguish and impatience that seemed to dominate him at the time. But when he tried to understand what was ailing him, again a fog arose in his mind, and he had to stop his thinking again to get his head in order. "Well, then... let's see, I was drawing a landscape of a village with a lake, right?", and his mind lights up at such a discovery, "It was Itomori!", he was drawing that village before his trip, but the strange thing was that he didn't remember researching on the internet or even in books on the subject at the time, besides, from the little he identified in these memoirs, he didn't even seem to mention the name of the village. He only remembers the name Hida appearing on a page in those flashes of memory. "Strange", he thought, but at least he already had a clue, the drawings that he had used to orient himself on the trip according to his friends, seemed to have come from zero research on the place, it can only be that, if he had known about Itomori a priori he would never have researched what surrounded the place. Why he did this research, and what drew him to this site, remained a mystery, however.
Meanwhile, fatigue began to weigh on his head, and Taki, with half-closed eyes, looked at his watch: it was already 20 minutes to noon, and therefore almost time to leave to meet his friends. "I have to go now!" he reminded himself urgently. After leaving the library with a lot of Mitshua chicken and little egg job, he went there. After a smooth walk, he arrived at the café where his friends were waiting for him.