I passed through the ticket gates and walked the night streets alone. December twenty-fourth. The melody of a hymn flowing low from the shopping street's speakers passed by the outside of my head, along with the blinking of the lights strung over the storefronts. I put my hands in my coat pockets, and soon forgot I had. That a thin white film had settled over her name was something I couldn't tell anyone.
When I got back to my room, a cloth-bound book was sitting in the middle of my desk.
—Oh, it's the book I borrowed from Sakurai.
Nothing in particular rose up over the name "Sakurai." I sat down in the chair, stroked the round stain on the cover with the pad of my thumb, and opened it. Where it swelled slightly in the middle, there was a thickness separate from the pages.
—Oh. Did I put this here?
A stack of letter paper had been tucked in, its edges squared. On the very top was written,
"To Shiori Sakurai"
It was my own handwriting. More careful than usual. I remembered the fact of having written it. Sitting down at the desk, picking up the fountain pen, even the feel of the paper. Only, what I remembered and who I was now didn't connect in one continuous line.
I read it. On every word on the paper there remained a trace of breathing. The trace of someone who had been breathing, I thought. I noticed, belatedly, that I had thought "someone."
—While I am writing this, I still love you.
That line had been placed almost exactly in the middle of the fifth sheet, at the same spacing as all the other lines. The fibers of the paper I stroked with my fingertip were no different in any way from those under the other lines.
—Someone else's letter. Someone else's feelings.
I finished reading. Below the last line on the final sheet, two lines' worth of white margin were still left. Before I could decide anything, my hand had reached for the drawer. I took out the fountain pen and set the nib at the left edge of the margin. I began to write.
With this, I saved her.
I tried again and again, failed again and again, and in the end, I offered up the her inside me.
Just as the legend said.
She is alive.
That's enough.
That should be enough.
But I no longer know whether I love her.
When I look at her, I feel nothing. I have all the memories. Her face, her voice, the way she laughs, I remember all of it.
And yet my heart is too quiet.
Why won't this unease go away?
I set down the pen. A tremor of something ran through my right palm, and was soon drawn off in a direction that wasn't mine, and lost its outline. A single point below my left collarbone, no bigger than the tip of a needle, had faintly taken on heat again. When I pressed it with my finger, I felt almost nothing.
—I'm tired.
Even before I'd finished saying it, it was an answer with a clear outline. I squared the sheets and tucked them back between the same pages. I closed the cover slowly.
—Should I give this to her?
—If I gave it to her, it would only confuse her.
I put the book back in its original place in the middle of the desk. The hand that put it back came to rest once more on the round stain at the lower left. Without knowing why, I stroked across it with my thumb, there and back once. I crossed to the switch on the wall in three steps and turned off the light.
With my eyes used to the dark, I went to the window. I moved the edge of the curtain aside with my finger. It was a perfectly clear winter night. Beyond the tiled roofs, low in the western sky, a single strong blue star had come out, tilted. It was the star of the instrument that she and I had looked up at side by side on that summer night. Then it had been directly overhead; now it had tilted low over the rooftops, and was about to set. I remembered hearing, in someone's voice, that there are stars whose light no longer reaches us from somewhere in the dark. Whose voice it had been, I started to recall, and stopped.
I thought it was beautiful.
My vision went dark.