In the forty days from late January to mid-February, I saw him three times. Twice, I was the one who reached out.
The first time was by chance, at the bookstore in front of the station. Past the paperback shelves, in the section for specialist physics books, I saw a tall back, and while I was going around, he looked up. There was a half-breath's delay before our eyes met. Half a year ago, the corners of his eyes would have narrowed just slightly the instant he recognized me. Today, they didn't. New releases, the construction in front of the station, a drama starting in February. Topics you could talk about even with a stranger. After five minutes of standing and talking, we parted.
I turned my shoulder into the late-January wind. Half a year ago, no matter how busy he was, he had always been the one to get in touch.
—But.
The second time was a message, three days later.
How have you been lately?
It took me ten minutes to send that one line. His reply came eight minutes later.
I'm good. Research is keeping me busy, but I'm doing okay.
Maybe dinner again sometime?
Yeah, I'll get in touch again.
That "again" never came. Outside the window, on the bare branches of the street trees, the tiny swellings of winter buds were beginning to sit, so small you wouldn't notice them unless you looked hard.
Two nights later, I opened the message box again.
Hey, Seto. Since when did you think of me
My fingers stopped there.
His voice from that night began to play somewhere far off in my head. The night before Christmas Eve, in my room, his hands pausing as he closed his paperback. "Um, at the library, on your shoulder, there was a cherry petal." That voice, which had remembered everything, all the way back to the spring of the cherry petal.
If I sent the same question now, he would...
—He'd probably remember, properly.
—But the voice answering wouldn't be that voice anymore.
I knew how the answer would go.
So I couldn't ask.
I deleted what I had typed, one character at a time, from the end. I looked for a while at the empty message box. I turned off the screen. I laid the phone face down. Over the back of the hand that had laid it down, my breath went out once, long. After it was all out, the signal to draw the next one was slow to come.
—On my side, I can't joke anymore.
—On his side, he won't joke back anymore.
At last, just once, I put it into words in my heart.
The following week, when I ended up next to Fujimura, the older student who had gone on to grad school, in a corner of the seminar room, he asked,
"How are things with your boyfriend lately?"
"Oh... it seems like it just cooled off on its own," I answered. My voice came out flatter than I'd expected. There was no other way to explain it. Fujimura said only, "I see," and didn't ask anything more.
On my way back, I stopped just as I was about to turn the corner of the hallway. In front of the bulletin board, two girls I didn't know were talking in lowered voices.
"Hayase in the physics department was saying Seto apparently broke up with Sakurai."
"What? But they looked so good together."
Before the corner, only the tips of my indoor shoes had stopped. It wasn't something I shouldn't have heard, and yet I missed my moment to step out. After their footsteps faded, I started walking again. Only the fact that it had reached everyone's ears stayed, faintly, at the back of my cheeks.
The third time was a phone call at night. It was February by then, the night I pulled a long-sleeved top out from the back of my closet, and the seam at the cuff touched my wrist, cool. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I looked at the name on the screen, stood up once, drank a glass of water, and then called. He answered on the third ring. What we'd been reading lately, our senior theses, and then, once more, our senior theses. When the conversation passed the same place twice, he didn't notice.
"Sorry, I have an early morning tomorrow."
"Oh, yes. I'm sorry, I kept you so long."
After we hung up, the coldness of the square edges stayed in my palm.
—He's tired.
I started to tell myself that, and stopped. Being tired and not being interested come out differently in a voice. This time, I couldn't quite follow it with my usual "but."
Two days later, it was raining when I left the library. When I opened my long dark-gray umbrella, the hemp-cord tag tied to the handle brushed the pad of my finger. The cold February rain, unlike the passing showers of late January, had no temperature in the drops that fell. The smell of the asphalt had changed, too, into a dry smell like paper. A single leaf stuck to the base of a street tree, its veins showing through in the streetlight.
The day near the end of spring when he and I had walked to the station under one umbrella—I started to remember it, and before I could, I closed the door.
—It won't come from his side anymore.
Tonight, I couldn't deny the sentence that had surfaced so many times over those forty days, and that I had denied every time. The signal turned green. I straightened the angle of my umbrella and stepped onto the crosswalk. Outside the windows, the cold February rain kept falling.