—I give this up.
—I erase you, the one I love.
—So please, send me back.
I was on both knees on the gravel.
In front of the worship hall, half a step from the offering box. The cold dropped from the nape of my neck down my back, and my breath came out white, at shorter intervals than I'd expected. The white thinned as soon as it appeared.
A wind came down from beyond the torii gate. It slipped in at the back of my neck and didn't stop inside my back. Wet snow had begun to fall, heavily. One flake landed on my sleeve and melted at once.
Against the pads of my hands, pressed together before my chest, I felt the corner of a small omamori charm pouch. White cloth, a navy cord. My fingertips had already gone numb. One more time, I traced the embroidered characters on its face with the pad of my thumb. The raised stitching no longer pressed back against my skin. I only felt as though I'd traced it.
Back to before the accident. Once more. I'd stopped counting how many times. Even so, I knew this would be the last.
I closed my eyes. The sound of the gravel faded away.
—I will save you, the one I love.
Around the time the cherry blossoms began to fall, I started going to the library.
The total cost of the books I needed for my senior thesis had made me flinch, and I'd remembered that library in a corner of the campus. That was all.
On weekday evenings I passed through the research building and went down the narrow slope lined with young ginkgo leaves. Partway down, the fingertips of my right hand would tap the air twice without my noticing—the motion of clicking a mechanical pencil and pushing the lead halfway back in, a habit I had between thoughts.
Only the automatic door of the old building was oddly new, and inside, the wooden floor creaked faintly underfoot. The shelves of thick, cloth-bound physics books were at the back of the second floor. The others on that floor were students from other departments or older patrons leafing through papers, and I almost never passed anyone from my own department.
On one of my visits, there was a female student in front of the folklore studies shelves, her long hair tied back in a single bundle. She wore glasses with thin metal frames, and her slender fingers rested on the top of the books she held; she stroked the edge of a cover once with the pad of her finger before returning it to the shelf. At the edges of each gesture, time moved without hurry.
However many times I came, she was always around the same shelves. Gathering material for her thesis, I supposed. Her department seemed to be on the opposite side of campus, and our usual routes never crossed.
One evening, as we passed between the shelves, our eyes met without warning.
The aisle was only one person wide, and I was in the middle of stepping back toward the wall. She looked up, her gaze rested on me just once, then dropped at once to the spines of the books. I felt the area above my ears grow hot, and I pretended to read the lettering on the shelf. She bowed her head ever so slightly and passed by, the tip of her tied-back hair swaying above her shoulder.
The cherry trees that had been in full bloom when I first started coming scattered within a few days, their petals collecting thinly in the baskets of bicycles along the slope. On my way out one of those times, she was standing still on the second-floor landing. A single cherry petal was stuck to my shoulder.
"Oh," she said quietly.
She picked the petal off with her fingertips, slid it once across the cover of the book she was holding, and held it out to me. I opened my palm to take it, and she set the petal there gently. Her fingers didn't touch mine. For the instant after her fingertips left it, the petal looked wet, and then it dried.
"I'm sorry."
"Not at all."
She didn't look up. With her eyes lowered beneath her bangs, she smiled just slightly at the corner of her mouth. Or so it seemed. I couldn't be sure. She was already walking toward the next shelf, and the tip of her tied-back hair swayed briefly above her shoulder.
Light footsteps came up from the direction of the stairs,
"Sakuraaai, ready to go?"
called a female student about her age. She gave a short nod, and two sets of footsteps receded beyond the landing. —Sakurai, I traced in my mind. I knew nothing more than that.
After the footsteps had turned the corner of the stairs, I looked back down at my palm. The petal lay just as it had been handed to me, only its edge curling up a little. It took me a moment longer than it should have to pull my eyes away.
The next week, and the week after that, I went down the same slope at the same hour. I was only returning books I'd borrowed. Even so, before I knew it, I was naturally choosing a route that took me past Sakurai's shelves.
Another evening, as I came out from my usual shelves and headed for the stairs, I held my footsteps back.
In front of the folklore studies shelves, Sakurai had paused, just slightly. In her arms was a single old book of oral traditions. Her gaze wasn't on the book but somewhere around the second shelf from the top. Her eyelids lowered once, then rose again. That was all. She soon walked on in the direction she'd been going, the tip of her long hair swaying briefly against her back.
Before she could see me behind her, I turned down another aisle.
The spring holidays ended, and the night wind softened a little. Beyond the window, in place of the cherry blossoms, a deep green had begun to swell.