October 14, 2016

Yukikaze Academy & Sapporo, Hokkaido

14°C, cold rain

The rain arrives before dawn and doesn't apologise for it.

By the time I'm awake it has already made its decision about the day — steady, cold, the kind that comes in from the sea and settles in for hours. The campus receives it without complaint. The leaves on the east path trees are at their peak now, the ginkgo going yellow and the maples a dark red that is different from summer red, more deliberate, more final. In the rain they're darker still, wet and heavy on their branches, a few of them released and plastered flat against the path stones. The grounds are mostly empty. A Friday in mid-October with rain like this, the Bunkasai preparations happening somewhere inside — the hallways decorated, committees meeting, the school's social machinery running at a volume Akira and I have been successfully avoiding for weeks.

The school festival exists around us the way most things exist around us now. Present. Irrelevant.

I dress and make tea and stand at my window with the cup warm in both hands and I watch the rain come down and I think about the day the way I think about most things: practically, forward-facing, already arranging it in my head. He'll be up. He's always up before the rain commits to anything. He ran this morning regardless — I know this without checking, the way I know his schedule in every configuration, the way his routines have become part of my internal map of the day. He ran and came back and now he's in his room, which is thirty seconds from mine in the building we both live in now, which is still a thing I find — I reach for the word. Correct. The word is correct.

I finish my tea. I go to him.

We eat breakfast early, before the dining hall fills with Bunkasai energy. The school festival has a particular social texture — the enforced enthusiasm of it, the committees and the performances and the way the school requires participation from everyone while pretending not to require it. In first and second year I participated at a functional level: showed up to the things I needed to show up to, contributed minimally, left without engaging. This year I have not shown up to anything. Neither has he. No one has pushed this. Our teachers have been quietly reclassifying our absence as juken diligence, which suits us, which we have not corrected.

The dining hall in early morning is easier. Fewer people, lower noise, the particular peace of a space before it's been fully occupied for the day. He eats methodically — the same things, the same order, the same quiet efficiency he brings to everything physical. I eat lightly and watch the rain against the windows and we talk about something — I don't remember what, some extension of a conversation from last night, the kind that picks itself back up without needing to be restarted.

This is what our days are. This is what they have become.

Mid-morning I have a class he isn't in.

This is not unusual — we share the literature class and a few others but not everything, and in first semester the gaps were simply gaps, neutral spaces in the schedule where I did what I always did, which was manage my own time adequately. Now they are something different. Not unbearable — I note this, the not-unbearable quality of it, and find it worth examining. Not unbearable. Just — present. A low-frequency awareness of his absence that sits in the background of the class the same way his presence sits in the background of everything else, except inverted, except the wrong sign.

I take notes. I follow the material. I produce the surface performance of full engagement. This is something I can still do and I do it reliably. What I can't entirely do is stop running the secondary process underneath — the one that knows where he is right now, that tracks the distance as a fact, that finds the distance mildly uncomfortable in a way it didn't find it before.

I sit with this between third and fourth period, when I have twenty minutes and nowhere I need to be. I sit in the library — his alcove, which is also my alcove, which has been both of ours for long enough that the distinction has stopped meaning anything — and I sit with the discomfort and I look at it.

It is small. It's not fear — I've checked, and it isn't. It's more like the sensation of a frequency you've been hearing continuously that has briefly stopped, and the stopping is what you notice, not the original sound. I've been hearing him continuously. The brief absence produces a kind of — silence. Not silence exactly. The wrong silence. The wrong shape of a room.

I find this interesting in the particular way I find most things interesting. I note it. I note that I'm noting it without alarm. I note that the not-alarm is itself a piece of information — that somewhere in the architecture of me, this has already been filed under normal. Under expected. Under: of course.

The twenty minutes end. I go to the next class. He's there — different subject, same room by coincidence, and I sit two rows behind him and can see the back of his head and the slight slope of his posture and his water bottle on the desk and the discomfort resolves immediately, quietly, without drama, like a frequency resuming.

After the morning classes the rain is still going and the campus has mostly retreated inside. We meet at the east path junction — no plan, no text arranging it, just the mutual knowledge of where the other will be at this hour — and walk without deciding to walk, the rain light enough to be in without being unpleasant, the campus empty in the particular way of bad-weather afternoons when everyone else has made smarter decisions.

The leaves are coming down in the wet, not dramatically but steadily, the kind of leaf-fall that happens when the weight of water becomes more than the branch can keep arguing with. The ginkgo are the worst — or best, depending — the yellow so saturated in the grey afternoon that they seem to be generating their own light. I watch them as we walk. I think about the fact that in a week or two there will be nothing left on these trees and the campus will be a different campus and the rooftop will be too cold and this particular configuration of things — the wet leaves and the empty path and the two of us walking through it — will be over.

"We should go up," I say.

He looks at the sky. The rain has thinned to something barely qualifying. "Now?"

"Last chance before it's too cold."

He looks at me. The expression that means: yes, obviously, I was already thinking this.

We go up.

The rooftop in October is a different place from the rooftop in May.

Same concrete, same ventilation units, same low ledge running the perimeter — but the light is different and the air is entirely different and the view has changed in the specific way that views change when the foliage between you and them disappears. We can see further now. The treeline along the eastern edge is half bare, the gap where the road begins visible in a way it wasn't in summer, the city beyond it more present, more legible. The mountains are clearer too — the suggestion of them in summer has become something more definite, the peaks catching the first of the season's snow that has not yet reached us.

The rain has stopped, or paused. The sky is the flat grey of an afternoon that has spent everything it had and is resting. We stand at the ledge the way we've stood at this ledge all year, side by side, looking at the version of the city that October has produced.

I think: this is the last time.

Not the last time for us — I don't think in those terms, I haven't for a long time. The last time on this rooftop before the cold makes it impossible. Before the rooftop becomes hypothermic rather than private. Before we move inside for the winter and the bunker and the places we've found that the cold can't reach.

He puts his arm around my shoulders. Not the formal version, not the weight-with-intention he uses when we're horizontal — just easy, warm, the way you put an arm around someone who has been standing close enough to you long enough that the gesture is its own kind of grammar.

I lean into it.

"I've been thinking," he says.

"About what."

"About how much smaller the world has gotten."

I look at the city — the buildings, the grey sky, the mountains. "Does that bother you?"

A pause. He's considering it genuinely, not performing consideration. "No," he says. "It's the right size now."

I think about this. The right size. The world being the right size. I think about the library in April, the alcove, the first time the silence between us felt like a country rather than a gap. I think about the rooftop in May when he said we're already not pretending and I understood what he meant. I think about the summer, the festival, the wish I wrote that is still in my drawer because I couldn't find a reason to throw it away. I think about the canal walk at night, the corner in Susukino, I think about you constantly.

I think: yes. The right size.

"I was talking to you earlier," I say. "In my head, I mean. Between classes. Just — continuing a conversation we'd already finished." I pause. "I don't think I've thought about anyone else in weeks. Not properly. Not the way I used to."

He doesn't respond immediately. He looks at the city.

"Is that what you were going to say?" he asks.

"No," I say. I'd been saying something else — I don't remember what. The sentence had been going somewhere and then I'd noticed where it wasn't going, which was anywhere involving anyone who wasn't him, and I'd stopped. "I was going to say something else. And then I noticed."

"Noticed what."

"That there isn't anyone else. In my head. Just — you, and then the rest of it, which is just background."

He's quiet for a moment. The wind moves across the rooftop, cold and steady, carrying the smell of wet leaves from below.

"I know," he says.

And then: "I know because it's the same."

I look at him. He's looking at the mountains — the snow on the peaks, the distance. Something in his face has the quality of a thing being said for the first time that has been true for much longer than it's been said.

I don't say anything. I lean further into him and he tightens his arm around my shoulders and we stand at the ledge in the October cold and the city does its city things below us, entirely without our participation, and that is exactly right, and we both know it.

We come down when the cold becomes something that requires acknowledging. The campus is still mostly inside — the Bunkasai preparation visible through the windows of the gymnasium, coloured paper and string lights and the muffled sound of a committee agreeing about something. We walk past all of it without engaging. It exists on a frequency we are not tuned to. We have been not tuned to it for long enough that the not-tuning has become its own kind of default.

The afternoon is short — the light going by four-thirty, the campus lights coming on, the particular quality of October dusk in Hokkaido which is fast and absolute and slightly ahead of schedule. We spend it in his room, studying in the way we study, which is: genuinely, because the exams are real and the preparation matters, and also: together, because not together has started to feel like the wrong shape of a room.

He makes coffee. I drink tea. The rain starts again outside, softer now, the end of it rather than the middle. We are mostly quiet. Occasionally one of us says something. The light changes as the evening comes and neither of us turns on additional lights for a while, just letting the room darken around the work, the two of us visible to each other in the grey from the window.

At some point I look up and find him already looking at me.

Not the studying-look. The other one.

I hold it for a moment. Then I go back to my notes, and he goes back to his, and the room is warm and dim and the rain keeps going and we are both entirely, completely, exactly where we have decided to be.

That night I open my journal.

I've been opening it less, I realise. Not avoiding it — just finding less occasion for it, the processing that used to happen in writing happening instead in the ongoing current of him, the continuous conversation, the way the interior monologue has someone to address now and so addresses him, internally, constantly, without needing paper.

But tonight I write.

I write about the rooftop and the leaves and what he said about the world being the right size now. I write about the library between classes, the wrong silence, the frequency resuming when I could see the back of his head. I write about the mid-sentence stop — what I was saying, the realisation of what I wasn't saying, the absence of anyone else as a background fact of my mind.

I have been trying to identify when this became total. I can't find the moment. It didn't have a moment — it had a process, which is different, which is more permanent than a moment, because moments can be located and examined and a process just is, just has been, is simply the state of things that you notice one day when you look.

He said the world is the right size now and I understood immediately what he meant, which is that neither of us is using the part of ourselves that used to be oriented outward. The part that managed other people, navigated social space, maintained the surface relationships that constitute ordinary life. That part still functions — I can still do it when required, I did it today, I will do it tomorrow if it's required — but it's not the primary function anymore. It's maintenance. Upkeep on something that is no longer the point.

The point is him. The point has been him since some time in May and I have been watching it become total all summer and autumn and I am watching it now and I find that the watching doesn't produce any corrective instinct. There's no part of me saying: this is too much, this has gone too far, this is something to manage back toward some middle distance. There is just the recognition. Just: yes. This is what's happened. This is what I am.

I write one more line. I don't examine it before writing it. I just let it happen.

I don't think I could stop this if I tried. I don't think the trying would find anything to grip.

I close the journal. I don't reread it. I lie down in the dark and listen to the rain and I feel — I reach for the word, the accurate one — settled. The word is settled. Like something that has been in motion for a long time has found the place it was always going to stop.

I close my eyes.

Outside, the rain keeps going.

The campus keeps doing what the campus does.

None of it is relevant.