November 18, 2016

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido

5°C

The snow arrives without announcement.

This is the thing about Hokkaido's first snow — it doesn't build toward itself the way a person expects weather to build. There's no particular morning where the air says today, no single hour you can point to and say there, that's when it changed. It simply appears. You look out a window and there are flakes in the air, slow and unhurried, drifting more than falling, and you think: oh. Already. And then you remember that this is what you were always moving toward, that the calendar has been pointing here since October, that the cold has been practicing.

I'm at the window when it starts.

Not looking for it — just standing, my tea in both hands, watching the courtyard below take on the particular quality of a Friday afternoon in the second semester. Empty. Or nearly empty: two students crossing at the far end, moving quickly, their breath visible in the cold air. A bird on the path that decides, after a moment's consideration, that it has somewhere else to be. The ginkgo along the east path gave up their last leaves two weeks ago and now they're just structure — clean lines, bare branches, the skeleton of the thing showing through. I've been looking at them for long enough now that I don't see them as diminished. I see what they actually are.

The first flake I notice drifts past the window diagonally, slow enough that it seems to be deciding whether to commit. Then another. Then a dozen, then too many to count individually, and the air between the buildings acquires a different texture — something soft, something that muffles the edges of things and makes the campus feel very slightly like a held breath.

I feel him before I hear him.

This is not a thing I can explain precisely, and I've stopped trying. It's been happening since October — the ambient awareness of him becoming specific a moment before the evidence arrives. A shift in the quality of the air, maybe, or in some frequency below what I can name. He's in the room before I've turned around. He crosses to the window without speaking and stands beside me, his shoulder near mine, and looks at the snow.

We stand there for a while. Neither of us says anything.

"First snow," he says, eventually.

"I know," I say.

The thing about November is that it has been building for months.

Not toward the snow specifically — toward this. Toward the interior, toward the particular gravity that has been tightening its radius since summer, since the festival and the canal and the room with the window open. I've been watching it happen with the same attention I bring to everything. I've been watching us get smaller — not in the diminished sense, not in the sense of loss, but in the sense of a thing becoming more precise, more concentrated, more itself. A flame in a narrowing space burns hotter. I know this. I've known it since September, when I noticed I hadn't thought about anything outside of him and his vicinity for three consecutive days and noted it the way you note a change in weather — with interest, without alarm.

The school is doing what it always does in the second semester: producing pressure. The entrance exam casts its shadow in an increasingly concentrated way, and the third-year population moves through Yukikaze with the collective expression of people who are calculating continuously and finding the numbers uncomfortable. Study sessions in the library. Supplementary classes on Saturday mornings. The bulletin board outside the main office has a running list of mock exam averages, updated weekly, which I have looked at exactly once and not looked at since.

I take my exams. I perform adequately. The work still interests me in the theoretical sense — literature still has a real texture, language still does things I find worth examining. I just don't experience any of it as urgent. Urgency lives somewhere else now. Urgency is where he is.

We skip things together, when the thing can be skipped. We go to the empty classroom on the third floor of Building C where nobody goes after four because the heating is unreliable and the lights take thirty seconds to warm up. We sit in the cold of it and read, or talk, or don't. We go to the off-campus café three blocks south of the main gate, the one that's always slightly too warm and slightly too loud but has a corner table that nobody wants, and we sit there until it's late enough that going back feels like a decision rather than a return. I don't calculate the hours I've spent in these spaces versus the hours I've spent in any other configuration. The calculation is not interesting.

Satsuki's name has not appeared in my journal since October 14th.

I noticed this — the absence of it — the way you notice a sound has stopped after you've been hearing it for a long time. A slight change in the texture of the quiet. I wrote it down and then I didn't write about it again because the absence doesn't require annotation. Things stop when they stop. The journal has moved on.

We eat dinner in his room.

This has become the pattern on Fridays — I bring food from the dining hall, or he does, and we eat in his room with the door closed and whatever weather is doing its thing outside the window. The room has changed slightly since July. There's more of me in it than there was. A book on the desk that migrated here from my room and found no particular reason to return. A hair tie on his windowsill, next to the stone from the coast. Small territorial facts that I haven't authored consciously and haven't removed.

We eat and watch the snow outside. It's not settling — the ground is too warm still, the first snowfall always lost on a city that hasn't quite cooled enough to receive it. The flakes come down and touch the path and disappear, absorbed, as if they never were. The next snowfall will stick. This one is just the announcement.

"It'll be heavier by December," he says.

"You'd know," I say. He's been here for three winters. I'm seeing my first.

"The campus changes," he says. "It gets quieter. The snow covers things."

"Like what?"

He thinks. He's looking at the window, at the flakes catching and dissolving in the path lighting below. "The noise, mostly. The sound that people make when they're moving around. In winter everyone moves faster because they're cold, but somehow it's quieter. Like the snow absorbs the intention."

I consider this. "That sounds like something you've been thinking about for a while."

"Every winter," he says.

I look at him. He's still looking at the window. His profile in this light is the profile I know better than I know most things — the angle of it, the specific quality of his attention when he's looking at something he's actually interested in versus something he's performing interest in. He is actually interested in the snow. He is always actually interested in things, which is one of the facts about him that I have found, over the course of this year, increasingly difficult to hold without it doing something to me.

"Tell me what else it changes," I say.

He looks at me then. The particular look — the one that has been accumulating since April, since the auditorium, since the first time it crossed the room. It doesn't do anything different now than it did in summer. It just has more behind it.

"Everything," he says. "But not in a bad way."

---

Later we have the conversation that I won't be able to describe the beginning of.

Not because I've forgotten — I don't forget things — but because it didn't have a beginning in the way a conversation normally has. It grew out of the silence the way silences sometimes do, when the silence has been warm enough long enough that something eventually surfaces in it. He was reading. I was not reading — I was looking at him, which I do now without managing it, without the self-monitoring that used to run underneath. He looked up and found me looking and didn't say anything about it, which is the thing I've come to rely on the way you come to rely on things you didn't know you needed: he always finds me and he never makes it into a moment. He just receives it. He looks back.

We were talking about something before this — the snow, the winter, the way the campus changes. Then we were talking about something else. Then we were talking about the thing we talk about when we've stopped steering.

"Do you think about other people," he says.

It isn't quite a question. It has the quality of a thing he's been holding and has decided to put down, not because it's become light but because he's found the right surface for it.

I think about this honestly, which takes a moment. Not long.

"Not much," I say. "Less than I used to."

"Since when."

"Since August, probably." I pause. "Maybe July. It's hard to find the exact date."

He's quiet. He's looking at me with the expression that doesn't try to be neutral.

"When I run in the mornings," he says, "I'm thinking about you before I'm thinking about the route." He says it the way he says true things — quietly, without emphasis, like the fact speaks for itself and doesn't need help. "I used to think about the route. The pavement, the distance, the pace. Now I think about the route sometimes and I think about you always."

I look at him for a moment.

"Is that — " I start, and then I stop, because the thing I was going to ask isn't quite the right question. I'm not going to ask if that bothers him. I know the answer. I start again. "What does it feel like."

"Like the way a habit feels," he says. "Not effortful. Just present. Like the thinking that happens before you decide to think."

I understand this completely. It is, near enough, the thing I would have said.

"I had a thought last week," I say. "I was in the library, and I was reading something — the Kawabata. I had a thought about the text, a real thought, a thought I would have found interesting before, and my immediate response was: I want to tell him." I pause. "Not later. Immediately. The thought wasn't complete until I'd told you."

He looks at me with something in his expression that isn't quite a smile and isn't quite something else. Just: recognition.

"Did you?" he asks.

"I texted you," I say.

"I remember," he says. He does. I know this without checking — he remembers the texts the way I remember them, by feel rather than by detail, the texture of them sedimented into the texture of the days.

The conversation drifts then the way it does — sideways, unhurried, moving through questions that neither of us steers back from. What it would mean to need only one person. Whether need is the right word or whether it's something more specific than need, a word that doesn't exist yet in either of their vocabularies. Whether other people have this. Neither of us thinks they do — not this, not the specific quality of this, the completeness of it. Other people have versions. Other people have approximations.

"You're it," he says, at some point that I won't be able to locate later. "You understand that."

It isn't a question.

"Yes," I say.

"For the rest," he says, and then he stops. The rest of the sentence is understood between us. For the rest of — everything. The school year and the years after, the winter and the winters after, the entire arrangement of time that extends forward from this moment. He doesn't finish it because he doesn't need to. I've already received it.

"Yes," I say.

We sit with this for a while.

Outside the window, the snow keeps coming down and keeps dissolving on the path, and the path keeps taking it and absorbing it and showing no evidence, and after a while I stop watching the path and watch him instead, which is the same thing I always do when I'm given the choice.

I take out my journal later, when he's asleep.

This is a habit I've had all year — the late-night entry, the taking stock after a day that felt like more than one day, the practice of locating myself in language before the day becomes the past. I open the journal and I write the date and the weather and the small coordinates, the way I always do.

Then I write about the snow.

Then I write about the conversation. I write it as accurately as I can, which means not as dialogue — I don't reconstruct dialogue in my journal, too much is lost in the reconstruction, the pauses and the exact quality of how something was said. I write it as I received it: he said that when he runs he thinks about me before the route. I said the Kawabata thought wasn't complete until I'd told him. We talked about what it means to need only one person. He said: you're it. For the rest. I said yes.

I read this back. I notice, reading it, that I've written the school three times in this entry, and not once have I written our school. I notice that I've written other people and not named anyone. I notice that I've been writing in a way that treats the world outside this room as a category rather than a collection of specifics — not Satsuki, not Hayase Ren, not anyone's name, just other people, a general noun, a direction I'm no longer pointing.

I notice this. I look at it. I find that I'm not troubled by it.

I write one more line:

The snow came today. It didn't stay. The next time it will.

I close the journal. I lie down. He shifts when I move — not waking, just adjusting, his arm finding its position across my back with the ease of something practiced, something that has stopped needing to try. The room is warm. Outside the window the flurries have slowed, or stopped, or continue without my attention.

I close my eyes.

I'm thinking about what he said — you're it, for the rest — and I'm holding it the way I hold things I've verified, things I've looked at from every available angle and found consistent. It is consistent. It has been consistent since July, since the rooftop in May, since the auditorium in April when the flake came through the open window and turned once in the light between us. It was always going to be consistent. I think, somewhere underneath everything, I've always known it was going to be consistent.

I think: the snow covered everything today and left no evidence.

I think: the next time it will stay.

I think about how those two things are not about the snow.

Then I stop thinking about it, because he's there and the room is warm and I am exactly where I am always going to be, and thinking about it any further seems, in this moment, like a kind of redundancy.

I know where I am.

I know where I'll be.

That's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.