December 24-31, 2016

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido

−3°C to −5°C, heavy snow

Winter break arrives without fanfare.

The semester ends on a Friday and by Saturday the campus has shed most of its population — students filtering out through the main gate with their bags and their relief, heading back to Osaka and Tokyo and Nagoya and all the places that are not here. The dorms don't empty entirely — there are always the ones who stay, the ones whose home is too far or too complicated or simply less preferable than remaining — but they thin considerably, and the thinning changes the quality of the air. Fewer voices. Longer silences between footsteps in the corridor. The dining hall goes to reduced hours. The administrative offices close.

Akira stays. I stay. We don't discuss this. It was never a question.

December 24

The snow starts in the afternoon and by evening it is definitive — not tentative, not reconsidering, the kind of snow that has made up its mind. It comes straight down, heavy and unhurried, accumulating on the paths and the rooftops and the bare branches of the east walk trees in a way that changes everything it touches into a quieter version of itself. By seven the campus is white and nearly silent, the only sounds the occasional muffled impact of snow coming off a branch, the distant murmur of Sapporo existing beyond the walls of the school.

We are in his room.

This is where we are in the evenings now, with few exceptions — his room has become ours the way certain spaces become yours when you've been in them long enough and with sufficient attention. My book is on the desk. My tea is in the second mug, the one that started being mine around October without either of us designating it. The hair tie on the windowsill beside his stone, his cracked watch, his folded paper. Small territorial facts, accumulated. The room smells like both of us now, which is something I noticed one morning in November and wrote down and have not thought about again because it requires no further thought.

He gives me the gift without ceremony, which is how he does everything.

It's small — a flat, wrapped thing that he produces from his desk drawer and sets on the blanket between us without particular announcement. I look at it for a moment and then I look at him, and he has the expression he always has when he's offered me something real — not waiting for a reaction, just paying attention. Present. Accepting whatever happens next.

I open it.

It's a photograph. His — one of the ones he takes on his morning runs, when he brings the small camera that lives in his jacket pocket, the one I've seen but never asked about because the asking felt like something to defer until he offered. It's a photograph of the east path, early morning, mist still on the ground, the ginkgo trees from September still in their leaves, still gold, the light coming through at the angle it only does before eight a.m. and only for a week or two before the leaves finish falling. The path is empty. The light is specific and brief and entirely real.

I know when he took this. I can calculate it from the trees, from the light, from what was happening in September that I know about. I know where I was when he took this.

I look at it for a long time.

I've had the gift for him for two weeks, which I've spent reconsidering not whether to give it but what form to give it in. I've started and stopped three versions of the thing. What I've settled on is the version that's most accurate, which is a page torn from my journal — not just any page, the right page, the one from May when I first understood what was happening, when I wrote the word fixed point and then stopped writing because the word was enough. I've trimmed the page so only that part is visible. The rest is mine, stays mine. But that part — I've been carrying it since May. He should have it.

He reads it. He reads it the way he reads everything — completely, without rushing. Something moves across his face. He folds the page along the existing crease and holds it.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. I understand this.

We eat KFC because it's December 24th and that's the thing and we are, in this way and most others, completely ordinary. He walks to the konbini near campus in the snow and comes back with the bag and we eat on his bed with the window showing us the heavy snowfall and Sapporo glittering somewhere beyond the campus wall, the city doing its illuminated Christmas thing, none of it reaching us. We eat and we don't talk about the gifts and we don't talk about the holiday and we don't talk about much of anything, which is perfect, which is the definition of perfect.

Later I take out my journal.

I've been trying to write the same three words for an hour. I write them and they look wrong — not inaccurate, just insufficient, like using a ruler to measure something that requires a different instrument. I cross them out. I write them again. Cross them out. The page begins to look worked-over, which is unlike me, which is evidence of something. I write them a third time and read them back and they still look like they need to be larger, like the words exist in a smaller register than what I'm trying to say, like the thing I'm trying to say has outgrown the available language and I'm going to have to say it anyway because I don't have anything better.

I love you.

I read it. I cross it out. I write it again.

I write it six times before I stop crossing it out.

I look at it for a long time.

I don't show him the page. He already knows. He has known since before I wrote it — I've said it in other registers, in the page I gave him, in every configuration of this year that has led to this room on this night with the snow coming down and his arm eventually across my back and the city's lights blurring through the heavy fall of white. He knows. The words on the page are for me. Evidence. The verification I keep needing to perform because I am a person who verifies things, who locates them in language, who requires the statement in addition to the knowledge.

I love you. Six times, on a December page, in the sixth year of keeping this journal.

It's true. It's been true. It will remain true, which is all truth ever needs to do.

December 31

The snowstorm arrives in the afternoon and by evening it has committed.

Not the heavy, quiet, steady snow of Christmas — something more insistent than that, wind involved now, the kind of storm that makes the world beyond your immediate surroundings theoretical. I can hear it against the window. The visibility from his room is maybe twenty meters before the world goes white and hypothetical. Sapporo is out there doing its Ōmisoka preparations — the year's last night, temples full, the joya no kane beginning its count at midnight, one hundred and eight bells for one hundred and eight earthly desires that need clearing before the new year begins. Families gathering. The careful ceremonial weight of a culture treating the turn of the year as a thing that requires intention.

We are in his room.

We don't discuss not going out. We don't discuss the holiday. We don't discuss the year ending or the year beginning. The storm has made the decision for us, which is a convenient arrangement, though we both know the storm is not actually the reason. The reason is that neither of us is oriented toward the outside tonight, or most nights now, or for some time. The outside is something that happens to other people. We have stopped requiring it.

He's reading. I've given up on reading and am instead watching the storm do what the storm is doing — the snow moving laterally in the wind, the path below his window invisible under white, the lights of the campus reduced to vague warm glows in the blur of it. There's something sealing about it, a storm like this. The sensation of a perimeter established, of everything outside it made inaccessible and therefore irrelevant. I've felt this before — in summer, in his room with the fireworks outside, in the tunnel of two people being each other's primary fact — but not like this. Not with this completeness. Not with the entire winter as corroboration.

"What are you thinking about," he says.

He's still looking at his book. He asks me this at intervals, the way he always has — not demanding, just checking in, the same quality of attention he brings to everything that matters to him.

"The storm," I say. And then: "The way it makes everything outside stop mattering."

He's quiet for a moment. Then he turns a page. "It doesn't stop mattering."

"No," I agree. "It just stops being accessible. Which feels the same."

He looks up then. He looks at me with the expression I've been watching accumulate all year — the one that started across an auditorium in April and has been developing since, like a photograph given enough time and the right conditions. It's more itself now than it was. It's more everything.

"We don't need access," he says.

I look at him. I think about October 31st, the courtyard, the leaves, the thing I named. I think about November 19th, the shinkansen, the return, the one line in the journal. I think about the journal page I gave him for Christmas, the word fixed point in my May handwriting, the way he folded it along the existing crease as if he already knew where it bent.

"No," I say. "We don't."

He puts his book down. He comes to sit beside me at the window, his shoulder against mine, and we watch the storm together. The world is white and impenetrable and entirely without interest. The bells haven't started yet. They will, at midnight, somewhere out in the city, one hundred and eight of them counting down to something neither of us is counting toward.

"Do you want to go to the shrine tomorrow," he says. Not as if he wants to go. As a genuine question — offering, checking.

I think about it for exactly as long as it takes to think about it.

"No," I say.

"Good," he says.

We stay at the window. The storm keeps going. At some point I become aware that midnight has passed — not from bells, which I may have heard at a distance and may not have, but from the particular quality of the dark shifting almost imperceptibly from the last of one year to the first of another. I become aware of this and I note it and I don't say anything about it, and I don't think he says anything about it either, and then the moment is gone and it's just the storm and the room and us.

The new year begins without announcement.

We don't remark on it. There's nothing to remark on. The year that's ending has been what it's been — the most real year of my life, the year in which I arrived somewhere I had no map for and discovered I didn't need one, the year in which the world got quiet in the particular way it gets quiet when you've found the thing that makes everything else background. It happened gradually and then completely. That's what the summary says. The summary is accurate.

The year that's beginning is just this, extended. More of this. The snow and the room and the window and his shoulder against mine. Everything necessary. Nothing else.

I write in my journal before we sleep.

The year ended. We didn't notice. The storm is still going. I don't know what more there is to say about this.

I love him the way I know things — completely, without remainder, with nowhere left to put the overflow except back into the knowing. I have been accumulating evidence all year and the evidence is conclusive and I don't need to review it again.

I think we are very happy. I think we have been very happy for a long time.

I think this will continue.

I close the journal.

The storm is still going on the window. His arm is across my back, the specific deliberate weight of it. The room is sealed and warm and entirely sufficient.

I close my eyes.

Outside the bells are still ringing somewhere in the city, or have stopped, or I've stopped hearing them. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. What matters is here and here is everything and everything is exactly right.

The year begins.

We sleep through it.