“There’s nothing in the world that’s right in the real sense. That’s the one thing that is right.”
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That was an obvious contradiction.
The logic was circular, like a snake eating its own tail.
But it had a ring of plausibility to it.
“…”
Slowly but surely, the silence was drawing the two of us apart.
No—maybe this was preferable to me disappointing her with something else insubstantial.
Hinami gazed at me, waiting a long time for my reply. In the end, I was unable to say a thing.
“—”
Then she said something softly with a sad smile.
The words she said were lost a few steps away from me, but I’m sure they weren’t for me anyway. But she must have been disappointed in me.
I couldn’t look at her sad expression—it was as if she was proving her own helplessness.
My gaze fell on the cold asphalt.
“…See you.”
Her voice was weak, as if letting the world abandon her.
The relaxed scrape of her feet on the ground was so slow, it wasn’t even half the tempo of my racing, impatient heart, but it was clearly moving away from me.
The hinges made a strained creaking noise, then the ill-fitting door closed flatly. And then Hinami and I were divided into separate spaces.
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My heart was full of self-loathing.
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Hinami had been waiting for me to say something.
I think we would have been able to exchange something true.
I knew how it felt to doubt the way you were and think you would suffer if you didn’t change. Maybe some desire to change that, the wish to change herself, had arisen within her. To me, it seemed she might have been considering it—leaping over the divide between us and stepping into a colorful world.
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But she was just missing the reason to do it.
And if she didn’t have a reason, she couldn’t believe in herself.
And because she couldn’t believe in herself, she couldn’t get away from that indescribable loneliness.
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So she had been hoping that the greatest gamer in Japan, nanashi, would be able to do something, anything for her.
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And yet—I hadn’t been able to find the words.
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If I’d said something, it might have reached her, but I hadn’t been able to.
Ever since the day I’d almost lost my friendship with her, when I’d sworn that I would teach her about how fun life could be, I’d been unable to change that one thing that I wanted to change more than anything, even more than myself.
What I really wanted to do had been right in front of me, and I had been helpless.
✦ ✦ ✦
When I made myself face forward again, the closed door was barring my way.
I’d heard her footsteps so clearly, but there was basically no sign on the floor or on the door that Hinami had been there. Only the reddish-brown rust and the cold, blackened metal reflecting my lonely heart.
“…I…”
As I stood there alone, under the night sky—
The starlight was neither warm nor cold.
It just shone down on me as an unchanging reality.