When I woke, the room was still blue.
—It was the same as always. Once I had set it down that way, the days that followed settled into that shape.
Waking while it was still dark was a habit I'd had since I was a child. At the window by my pillow, the blue light at the border between night and morning was stretched thin. Feeling with my fingers the chill of the cotton at the edge of the futon, I lay without moving and watched the blue grow paler.
I boiled water in the kitchen. I rose onto my toes and reached for the teapot at the back of the cupboard. Two scoops with the silver spoon. A single fleck of leaf fell onto the rim of the teapot, and I pushed it back with the tip of my index finger. The green scent of the tea leaves stayed faintly on my fingertip.
As I put the lid back, my fingers lingered on the rim a beat longer than usual. What I had been trying to make sure of, I didn't really know myself.
At the mirror by the front door, before leaving the house, I put my grandmother's wristwatch on my left wrist. I fastened the clasp.
I left the house at eight-thirty. The tips of the branches on the roadside trees kept their winter outlines, not a single leaf budding. The dry cold stung my cheeks. In front of the florist on the corner, my stride slowed by half a breath. White button chrysanthemums in a bucket, and pale orange ranunculus. I wasn't going to buy any. Pausing only as long as no one would notice suited me that morning.
The New Year's holidays had only just ended, and the campus was still sparsely peopled. When I passed through the library's automatic doors, the air of the empty reading room touched my cheeks, cool. The sky outside the windows was still a deep, bluish gray, drawing faint shadows along the edges of the desks. Beneath the hum of the fluorescent lights, the air conditioning began to make a sound like a long, low breath.
Holding in my own arms the several books on oral tradition I'd borrowed for my senior thesis, I headed for the folklore studies section to return them. As I passed between the reading desks, my footsteps gave one small jump at a seam in the floor.
I started to count on my fingers the months since that spring when our fingers had touched, and stopped. Since then we had met only once, at the café in front of the station. He spoke in his usual voice and laughed the way he always did. That voice hadn't lost a single note since spring. What had gone missing was on my side. The tautness that used to run through the middle of my voice, back when I laughed often and talked often, had slipped out over the course of a month without a sound. I was probably the only one who had noticed.
It was past ten when I stopped at the folklore studies section on the third floor. The morning light came in at a slant, laying faint stripes across the spines of the books. Cloth tinged with madder red, grayish blue, deep purple, and here and there, worn gold leaf. I put back the books I had borrowed one by one and stood in front of the shelves. The second shelf from the top was at a height my fingertips could only just reach, or not quite, even on tiptoe.
Second shelf from the top, seventh book from the left. Oral Traditions of Eastern Japan. On its grayish-blue cloth spine, the title, its gold leaf flaking, faintly remained.
On that day in spring, here, his fingers and mine had touched.
I began to reach my fingertips toward the spine, and stopped about a centimeter short. The soles of my feet, up on tiptoe, had gone faintly numb. I lowered my hand and brought my heels back to the floor.
On the other side of the shelves, I sensed someone pull out a book and put it back. I heard no footsteps. The hum of the air conditioning thinned for a beat. That was all.
I went down the stairs and passed the seminar room. Fujimura poked his head out from inside the door.
"Sakurai, want to go to lunch together?"
"Yes."
I walked down the hallway. It was an ordinary Monday.
—It was supposed to be an ordinary Monday.