"Could you stop calling me your god?"
When I said that, Koyomi's face froze for the first time.
It was a different kind of freezing from the Ice Princess at school. Younger. It was the face of a child who had heard the ground give way beneath her feet.
"...Why?"
We were back on the top floor of the tower condo.
Outside the window was the winter night view. Countless lights spread out below our feet. This room, this view, Koyomi had prepared all of it for me. There is not a single chore in this world you should be troubled with—she always says.
I'd been thinking about it the whole time.
Koyomi calls me her god. Without my story, she couldn't have made it through that night. So she clings to me like a lifeline. Takes care of me, supports me, tries to protect only my writing.
I do think that's something precious.
But.
"What if I can't write anymore?" I said.
"What if I'm gone? ...Would you go back to that night again?"
Koyomi didn't answer.
It was the silence of someone who couldn't answer.
I knew the color of that silence. It was the same color as in that six-mat room, when I'd asked, what if I'd quit that day. That time, she'd answered that she didn't know. Only that she'd thought, if I disappeared, her morning would never come again. And then she'd smiled.
"That's what scares me," I went on. "That I'm the only reason you have for making it through the night. I'm not a god or anything. I'm just a hunched-over, broke high schooler chased by deadlines. Your whole life hanging on one guy like that—I can't carry it."
"I have not asked you to carry it."
Koyomi's voice shook.
"I simply believe in you. What is wrong with that?"
I was at a loss for words.
It's not that it's wrong. I didn't want to deny her faith. If someone dismissed those three years of records of 12:02 a.m. as a clumsy story, I couldn't stand it either. It's the proof of how she lived, and the proof of what I wrote.
It's just—is this really okay, the way it is?
As long as I'm her god, Koyomi stays someone who can't make it through the night without me. She's living with a single lifeline, putting her whole weight on that one line. If that line ever snapped. Just imagining it made my fingertips go cold.
There's no knowing when a writer might stop being able to write. There are slumps. There are accidents, too.
It wasn't just imagination. I'd come close to it more than once. She had sniffed out a giving-up I hadn't even noticed in myself, from the placement of a single comma, and run through the rain. The next time I broke, she'd probably run again. And if she ran, and didn't make it in time.
I remembered that diary.
Voice practice. Demerits: three. Piano, forty minutes. Demerits: one. Left hand.
At ten years old, she had graded herself every night. Three years ago, she stopped, and started writing down my update times instead.
She hadn't actually stopped. She'd only changed who she was writing about.
Then—if I disappeared, she'd start counting herself again.
The story that kept her alive might someday kill her. I'd seen that danger. And once I'd seen it, I couldn't pretend I hadn't.
"I," Koyomi said quietly.
"I can no longer imagine a world without my god."
Her profile was reflected in the window. The lights of the night view blurred in her gray eyes.
"As long as you keep writing, I can go on living. So I want you to keep writing, always. That is all I have ever wished for. ...What is so dangerous about that?"
There was no lie in those words. She truly believed it. That as long as I kept writing, she'd be all right.
Watching her profile, I thought.
The danger was probably the same on my side, too.
If I lost Koyomi's one, I wouldn't be able to write anymore either. We had each made the other our lifeline, and if one of us fell, the other would fall too. It looked like we were holding each other up, but maybe we were just two people standing at the edge of a cliff.
To call it love, it had a slightly frightening shape.
God and believer.
As long as we kept those names, we'd probably sink together someday.
But I had no intention of tearing this faith away from her by force, either. It was what had kept her alive for three years. It wasn't something I could roughly deny.
So I was searching for the words in between.
"Koyomi."
I turned my back on the night view and faced her.
"I want you to be able to make it through the nights without a god, too."
Koyomi's lips started to say something, then stopped.
A long silence fell, just like that.
The winter night deepened quietly between the two of us.