Chapter 6

August 2 & August 20, 2016

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido

Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan

28°C → 26°C, humid to thunderstorms

Summer break arrives the way semester endings always arrive — not all at once but in stages, the school’s rhythm winding down over the course of a week before finally going quiet. Exams first, then the collective exhale, then the campus emptying as students with families to return to return to them, the dormitories thinning out until the population is just the ones who stay. We are the ones who stay.

I have nowhere I need to be. This is new. In Aomori there was always somewhere — a relative’s house, an obligation, the particular pressure of a family that expected presence even when presence was the last thing I had to give. Here there is the campus and the summer and him, and no architecture of obligation requiring me to be anywhere else, and I find this — I reach for the word. Spacious. The right word is spacious.

The days don’t organise themselves the way schooldays do. They fill instead with the particular texture of unscheduled time: late mornings, slow afternoons, the city doing its summer things outside the campus gates while we do ours inside them. We read. We walk. We eat at odd hours when neither of us has been paying attention to the time. We talk the way you talk when there’s no reason to stop — following a thread until it goes somewhere neither of us expected, and then following the next one, and the next. I’ve had more real conversations in the past four months than I had in three years in Aomori, and I’m aware of this, aware of what it means about the conversations I was having before, aware of what it means that I find I don’t miss them.

The campus in summer has a different character from the campus in term. The academic buildings are mostly locked or running skeleton operations — a few administrative staff, the occasional maintenance crew. The grounds are maintained but quiet, the paths emptier, the air less purposeful. What remains is the structure without the activity, the architecture of school without its content, and in that emptied architecture we move like we own it, like the campus has been handed to us for safekeeping and we’ve accepted the responsibility.

He runs in the mornings, before I’m fully awake. I know the route now — east path, down around the athletics track, back through the gap near the library. He’s usually back by the time I’ve made tea. I find this — I look for the word again, and the word I find is right. The mornings have a rhythm now that isn’t mine alone, that is ours, that I didn’t plan and don’t want to adjust.

August 2

The message comes from a class group chat on Tuesday morning. A few people are going to the Susukino Festival — tonight, starting at seven, the Oiran Dochu procession and food stalls and whatever comes after, no real plan, just summer. The invitation is general, cast wide, the kind that expects more people to ignore it than accept.

I type my decline before I’ve consciously decided to. Sorry, I have plans. I’m already opening his contact when I notice what I’ve done — not just declined, but declined without checking, which is not the same as the old habit of not checking, which was simply not thinking about it. The old habit was freedom. This is something else.

I look at the text I’ve typed.

Susukino tonight — some people from class. I told them I had plans.

I read it back. I was telling him, I think. That’s what I intended. But somewhere in the drafting it became something other than telling. The text is a statement but it’s shaped like a question. It’s waiting for something. It’s asking, without asking, whether the plans I said I had are plans he’s aware of, whether they’re plans we have together, whether I’ve been right to assume.

I haven’t asked this. I’ve assumed. I’ve been assuming for weeks, filling in the we in we have plans without verifying it, and now I’m looking at the text I’ve typed and understanding that the verification I’m performing is not verification — it’s consultation. I’m consulting him. I’ve started consulting him.

I send it anyway.

His response comes quickly: Good.

One word. I look at it for a moment. Good. Not yes we have plans or glad you’re not going — just good, which contains all of those and more, which is exactly the kind of answer he gives, compressed and complete. I put my phone down.

Neither of us will mention what I just did. Neither of us will name the new thing that has appeared in the space between I have plans and I have plans with you — the assumption, the consultation, the quiet restructuring of my decisions around a second consideration that has become the primary one. We will simply live inside it, the way you live inside most true things, without commentary.

I think about this for the rest of the morning. I think about it clearly, with the particular precision I bring to things I find important, and what I think is: Yes. This is what’s happening. This is fine.

The social ties have been severing themselves for some time now, and I have not been repairing them.

It isn’t dramatic. No confrontations, no explicit withdrawals, nothing that could be pointed to as a decision. It’s more like attrition — the natural consequence of not being available, repeatedly, until the people trying to reach you stop trying. Yamada sent three messages in July. I responded to the first two with adequate warmth and then left the third on read, and then he stopped. A girl called Nishimura, who sat near me in homeroom and had been making friendly overtures since April, seems to have directed her attention elsewhere. There are two group chats I contribute nothing to and remain in out of social inertia, my name in the member list like a formality.

I don’t experience this as loss. I’ve examined it for loss, checked the filing system where I keep track of things that matter, and the files on these people are thin. What I had with them was proximity and sufficient conversation to be called acquaintance. I don’t miss acquaintance. I have something that makes acquaintance feel like the wrong word for anything.

Satsuki is the exception — or the partial exception. She messaged me in the second week of July with something low-pressure and genuinely warm, just checking in, no invitation attached. I responded. We exchanged a few messages across a couple of days — nothing significant, the kind of conversation that exists more as social maintenance than as actual connection. She’s persistent in the way I noted earlier, consistent, and I find I don’t find it irritating. I simply find it insufficient. She’s trying to know me and she’s doing it thoughtfully, and if I were a different person in a different configuration of my life I think I would let her. I’m not. I’m this person, in this configuration.

I expect she’ll reach out again before the semester starts.

The city does its summer things without us.

The Hokkai Bon Odori fills Odori Park from August 11th through the 16th — the sound of taiko drums audible even from the campus on still evenings, faint and rhythmic, the particular deep percussion of festival Japan that carries further than it seems like it should. I know it’s happening. I don’t go. This isn’t avoidance — it’s more that the festival exists on a frequency I’m not tuned to right now, that the crowds and the noise and the organised collective joy of it require a kind of participation I’m not interested in performing.

We walk past the edges of it once, on a Wednesday evening — the sound getting closer as we moved south along the canal path, the glow of the park lights visible above the buildings. We stopped at a corner and listened for a few minutes, the drums and the chanting and the thin, high sound of festival music layered underneath. The city smelled like summer and food and something older, something ceremonial.

“Do you want to go in?” he asked.

I thought about it. I looked at the light above the buildings, the suggestion of crowds and colour beyond.

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. We turned around. We walked back along the canal.

I think about this sometimes — the ease of it, the complete absence of negotiation, the way not particularly was sufficient and received and acted on without discussion. I think about the person I was in Aomori who would have said yes to things she didn’t want because saying no felt like a failure of social adequacy, who performed enjoyment of group activities she found exhausting because the alternative was explaining herself, who expended significant energy managing the impression that she was more available than she was. I don’t recognise her from here. Or I recognise her and find her a stranger — someone who used to occupy my body before I understood what I wanted it for.

August 20

The thunderstorm announces itself in the early afternoon, the sky going grey-green in the particular way of storms that have decided to deliver. By two o’clock the rain has started, heavy and steady, the kind that makes the inside of a room feel sealed and separate from the world. We’re in his room. We’ve been in his room most of the day, not by plan, just by the natural drift of summer days that have no structure to push back against.

It’s been warm in the way August in Hokkaido is warm — not the aggressive heat of Tokyo summer, but present, ambient, the kind of warmth that soaks into the day and makes everything a little slower and a little softer. His window is open. The rain comes in slightly at the bottom edge and makes a small dark stripe on the sill that neither of us addresses.

We’re lying on his bed the way we’ve been lying on it all afternoon — side by side, not doing anything in particular. He’s been reading on and off, his book open on his chest, his eyes closed more than open in the last half-hour. I’ve been writing in my journal, or starting to write, the pen moving and then stopping, the entries beginning and then not finding their endings. The kind of afternoon that resists being written about because it’s simply itself, uncomplicated, requiring nothing of either of us.

The rain makes the room louder and quieter at the same time. Louder: the particular white noise of heavy rain on glass and roof and the world outside, filling the silences. Quieter: everything that isn’t the rain receding, the city going muffled, the campus going irrelevant.

I close my journal. I put it on the bedside table.

“Tell me something about before,” I say. Not a specific question. Just an opening.

He opens his eyes. He looks at the ceiling for a moment. “Before what?”

“Before this. Before Yukikaze, before third year. Tell me something I don’t know.”

He’s quiet for a moment, the thinking kind of quiet. Outside the rain intensifies briefly, a gust pressing it harder against the glass, and then settles back into its steady rhythm.

“I used to run competitively,” he says. “Junior high. I was good enough that someone suggested I pursue it seriously, get a coach, track clubs, all of it.” He pauses. “I stopped when I got here. Didn’t want it to be something I had to do.”

“Was that hard?” I ask.

“Not really. I still run. I just run because I want to.”

I think about this — the deliberateness of it, the decision to protect something from the machinery that turns enjoyment into obligation. “I understand that,” I say.

“I know you do.”

We’re quiet for a while. The rain keeps going. I think about Aomori, about the things I’ve done there that I’ve never told anyone here — not because they’re secrets exactly, just because they’re mine, just because this is a different life with different architecture and the old one doesn’t transfer automatically.

“I had a friend,” I say. “In Aomori. Takeuchi Mio.” The name surfaces without deliberation, without a decision to say it — it’s just there, in the room suddenly, the name of a girl I haven’t thought about in weeks. “We were close for about two years. She was the only person I told things to, before.”

I’m looking at the ceiling when I say it. I’m not looking at him. I keep talking, something about Mio — the way she used to quote films incorrectly and not notice, the library we used to meet at on Saturdays, the fact that we’ve barely been in contact since I transferred. It’s a small thing. It doesn’t feel significant while I’m saying it.

I notice his expression a beat after it changes.

I have to do something I rarely have to do, which is replay the last few seconds to find the cause. I go back through what I just said, looking for the thing that changed the room’s temperature, and I find it: the only person I told things to, before. Before. The implication of a before that contained someone. A someone.

His face is the same. The muscles of it haven’t moved. His eyes are on the ceiling, his posture unchanged, his breathing at its usual rate. All of this is accurate. But something behind his face is different — something has shifted in the interior of him, in the part that usually stays managed, in the very specific quality of his stillness that I’ve been studying long enough to read. What I’m reading is: cold. The same clean, precise cold I felt in the courtyard on July 8th. Not rage. Not grief. Something that has located a variable it didn’t know was a variable and is in the process of deciding what to do about it.

I watch this happen. I watch him manage it — the management visible to me because I know what management looks like in him, because I’ve been paying the kind of attention that sees past management. He doesn’t ask about Mio. He doesn’t change the subject immediately, which would be its own tell. He just goes quiet for a moment with the ceiling, and then he says something about the rain, something mild and transitional, and the conversation moves.

I let it move.

I file what I saw.

Later — much later, when the storm has settled into a softer and more distant version of itself and the light in the room has gone the particular blue-grey of early evening after heavy rain — I think about the symmetry. His coldness now and mine on July 8th. The girl approaching him in the courtyard. Mio’s name in the air of his room. The same mechanism, operating in both of us, the same clean and precise temperature drop at the implication of someone else who had mattered.

I think: we are the same kind of thing.

I’ve known this. I’ve known it since the rooftop in May when he said we’re not pretending and I understood what he meant. But knowing it in the abstract and seeing it demonstrated, watching my own internal weather reproduced in him, watching the mirror function — that’s different. That’s the thing becoming real in a new way.

I’m lying against him now, my head against his chest, the rain still going softly beyond the window. His arm is around me with its usual deliberate weight. His heartbeat is slow and even.

I think about Mio. I think about how infrequently I’ve thought about her since April. I think about the fact that I said before — that I organised my life into before and after without noticing I’d done it, that the before contains Mio and the after contains this, and that I don’t experience the exchange as a loss.

I should probably write to her. I probably won’t.

That evening I open my journal.

The afternoon has left me in the particular state that comes after something significant that wasn’t acknowledged as significant — a low hum of awareness, the mind still processing while the surface remains normal. I write the way I always write, which is: with attention, with precision, without knowing entirely what I’m going to say until I’ve said it.

Summer break ends in ten days. I have not missed school. I have not missed the structure of it or the people in it or the version of myself that navigated it. I have been here, in this summer, and I have been more here than I have been anywhere in my life.

Satsuki sent a message today — another invitation, phrased with her characteristic warmth, a few people getting together before the semester starts. I’ll decline. I find I don’t feel the usual micro-weight of declining, the small social tax of making an excuse and hoping it lands correctly. I just — won’t go. This is what it feels like when the equation has resolved.

I’ve been thinking about the cold thing. The thing I feel when someone comes too close to him, or when — as today — the implication of someone who came close to me is visible in the air of the room. I’ve been feeling it since July and I’ve been noting it and filing it but I haven’t examined it properly yet, which is unusual for me. I examine most things. I think I’ve been avoiding this one because examining it would require me to name it, and naming it would require me to acknowledge the degree to which I’ve already decided.

I have already decided. I’ve known this for some time.

He is the fixed point. I don’t orbit anything else. I don’t want to orbit anything else. The people and places and obligations that used to constitute my life have become — not irrelevant, that’s not quite right — but secondary. They exist in the background the way traffic exists in the background of a conversation: present, audible, not what the conversation is about.

Mio is in the background. She was the closest thing I had before. I don’t say this to be unkind to her — she was real, she mattered, what we had was the best I knew how to do at the time. But at the time I didn’t know what this was. I didn’t have a comparison. Now I do.

He saw her name change the room. He didn’t say anything. He managed it the same way I managed July 8th — quietly, completely, without acknowledgement. We are very good at this, both of us. Managing the thing that wants not to be managed.

I wonder, sometimes, where it goes when we manage it.

I think it goes somewhere.

I put the pen down. I read the last few lines back. I think about what I’ve written and what it means and whether I’m alarmed by it, and I’m not, which is itself a piece of information.

The storm has gone mostly quiet outside. The window is dark. The campus is sleeping, or performing sleep — the lit windows in the dormitory buildings, the occasional sound of someone in the corridor. From here, from this desk, in this light, none of it is real. Only the journal is real. Only the page, and what I’ve put on it, and the things I’ve almost put on it and decided not to yet.

I close the journal.

I go to find him.