The whiteness thinned from the outside in. The cold at the edge of the futon came back. The clock by my pillow said two minutes past eight in the morning.
I sat up. For a moment, my legs remembered the cold of the floor. On the desk, the cloth-bound book I had borrowed and brought home last night lay at the same angle I had set it down. I didn't reach out a finger. Now was not its turn to be touched.
I stood in front of the desk. I pulled open the top drawer. The omamori in its paper bag was where it had been since the end of November.
—This evening, it goes back in my pocket.
I confirmed it in my head and closed the drawer.
I took the bundle of letter paper from the back of the drawer and set it on the desk. Plain white sheets, unlined. I took out the fountain pen. I had bought it when I started university, and it had mostly lain asleep. A mechanical pencil's line would be too light, was all I told myself. I held the barrel toward the window and looked through the narrow part of its neck against the low morning light. The ink was half full. In my head, I set the thickness of the paper beside the length of what I meant to write, in the order I meant to write it. Half was enough. A thin film of condensation still clung to the windowpane. There were nine hours until the accident.
I sat down and looked at the wall in front of me for a while. However many times I rearranged the order of what to write, it came out the same.
To Shiori Sakurai
I wrote. As I wrote it, my hand grew careful on its own. I had probably never written a form of address this carefully before. The nib stopped on the paper. I watched the last drop of ink spread thinly into the page. I looked at the name for a while.
By the time you read this,
I may no longer love you.
I had already set out what to write. I brought it down onto the paper in order. Half of how my hand moved was the same as when I wrote seminar reports.
There were several places where the pen stopped. On the final mark of "she, in an accident," it stayed a long time on the paper. Without stopping the trembling, I copied out the passage she had told me at the shrine. I checked it twice so the wording wouldn't waver from the original.
At "two hearts," I stopped the pen once.
I wrote both readings side by side, leaving it ambiguous. Read as "a divided heart," it meant the two halves of the heart inside me. Read as "two people's hearts," it meant two: mine and hers. I wrote that I couldn't decide which reading was right.
I will pray without deciding, I wrote, and then thought: that's a lie.
I tore off the first sheet. I folded it, set it aside, and took a new one.
If I could choose, I wrote. Right after, I added briefly that I was in no position to choose. I left out the explanation in between. I hoped the line I didn't write would remain, faintly, between the two.
I put a triangle mark in the margin of the sheet. A mark for an insertion. On the sheet before, there was a faint line where I had begun to write "you, my unrequited love" and stopped. The triangle marked where it would later be laid over that faint line.
I tapped the barrel of the pen lightly against the edge of the desk, twice. At the same interval, from the same height. It was my usual habit—clicking a mechanical pencil twice to push the lead back in—put into another form.
Before the last page, I set the pen down for a moment. Against the windowpane, the dry rustle of leaves on a winter afternoon struck once.
The day our fingers first touched in front of the library shelves; the day under the umbrella when your shoulder was a little ahead of my right side; your profile as you looked up at the indigo dome of the planetarium by the river; your voice telling me the legend on the mossy approach; your profile when you had fallen asleep on the sofa the day before Christmas Eve—I set them down one by one. The nib stopped at "when you had fallen asleep." I couldn't write the words that followed in the same darkness of ink. I didn't rewrite them.
While I was writing, I still loved you.
I kept the ending short. When I finished writing this, I would go to you. An apology for having decided without saying anything. Even so, you would come back. This much of me, as I am now, I was leaving here.
The line I most wanted to tell you had been decided from the moment I began.
Please forget about me now. And you—be happy, on your own.
I wrote that. Short, and flat. I read it over several times. I didn't rewrite it.
At the end of the last sheet I put the date. The last two digits of the year, the month, the day. Six digits. It was the discipline of writing reports, unchanged. I set down the pen. I squared the sheets with both hands and tapped the corners twice on the desk to even them. I didn't put them in an envelope. Left as a bundle, they would settle better into the thickness of the open pages.
With both hands I drew the old cloth-bound book to the center of the desk. Both my thumbs had come to rest together on a small round stain at the lower left of the cover. I laid the book flat, set my thumbs against the spine, and let the strength go out of them. The book fell the way its own weight fell, and stopped by itself at a certain spread. The marks of having been opened many times were pressed into the paper. I slipped the bundle of sheets in. I let the top edge with "To Shiori Sakurai" stick out about five millimeters past the edge of the pages. I closed the book and laid it in the center of the desk.
—All that's left is to save her.
I leaned back in the chair. The light outside the window was already low. My watch had just passed four thirty. I took the omamori from the drawer and put it in the right inside pocket of my coat. The same place as on the morning I'd left the house.
In the entryway I put on my shoes. With my right hand on the doorknob, I paused for one breath.
—I'm heading out.
I opened the door.