But when she next asked me to visit on Saturday morning, that vague sense of wrongness manifested in visible form.
I arrived on time, and she noticed me right away and smiled and called my name. But her smile seemed slightly stiff.
Her expressive face was like a canvas on which her feelings were painted for me to see, and what I saw was nervousness. I sensed something bad was coming, and I didn’t chase that premonition away.
My legs threatened to take a step back, but I steadied them and sat in my usual folding chair, when she took a deep breath and said something that didn’t help shake my worry.
“Hey…[???]-kun?”
I hesitated, not sure where this was going. “Yeah, are you okay?”
“We only have to do one round,” she said, reaching for a deck of cards on her bedside shelf. “But will you play truth or dare with me again?”
The devil’s game.
“Why?” I asked. I sensed I could get away with refusing then and there, but I wanted to know why she suddenly proposed another round, and why she seemed so unnaturally fearful.
When she didn’t answer me right away, I filled in for her, “There’s either something you really want to ask me, or something you really want me to do, and it’s something I would refuse if you asked me normally.”
“That’s…not it,” she mumbled stiffly. “I think you might actually tell me if I asked you, but I can’t quite bring myself to ask, so I thought I’d let luck decide.”
What was making her act so out of character? I couldn’t think of any dark secret I kept that would trouble her like this.
She stared into my eyes, as if to show me the depth of her determination. Strangely enough, my resistance evaporated under her gaze; maybe because I was the boat of reeds, or maybe something in her had affected me.
I made my decision.
“Well, I owe you for letting me borrow your book. I can play one round.”
She said, “Thanks,” as if she already knew I would accept, and she began shuffling the cards. Something was definitely off with her. Normally, she occupied every silence with chatter, but today she said only what she needed to. Curiosity and worry swirled in me like someone stirring fruit yogurt.
The rules were the same as last time, but because we were only playing a single round, we each picked five cards at random and placed them in a face down pile on her bed. We were to each choose one card.
After some serious struggle over choosing her card, she elected to go with one a little below the middle. I took the topmost card. Since this was a blind draw, each card was an equally valid choice. We also weren’t taking the choice as seriously. She probably would have been mad to hear me say this, but I didn’t care if I won or lost the game. If the match were decided by which of us was more determined to win—if that was the way the gods had created our reality to work—then she certainly would have won.
I imagined she would say life was fun because it didn’t always work out that way.
We flipped our cards simultaneously, and she grimaced.
“Ah,” she groaned, “I lost.”
She clutched her blanket in her fists and seemed to be waiting for her crushing disappointment to pass. All I could do was watch. Eventually, she noticed my gaze, flung aside her disappointment, and smiled at me.
“Can’t go back now! That’s the way it goes!” she said. “That’s what makes it fun.”
“Oh, I have to think of a question now, don’t I?”
“Go for it. I’ll answer anything. Do you want to hear about my first kiss?”
“I’m not going to waste this chance on something less absorbing than an old sponge.”
“But sponges do basically absorb things, don’t they?”
“Sure. So? Did you think everything I say has to make sense?”
She laughed; she seemed to be in a good mood and normal enough. Maybe I’d just been overthinking things. Maybe some big secret hadn’t been causing her to act strange. Her expression could change because of the slightest reasons, like alcohol or the weather. At least I hoped I’d been wrong.
Since I’d won the right to ask her a question—even if I hadn’t particularly wanted it—I thought about what I should ask her. Her hobbies wouldn’t have changed since the last time we played. I could ask another question to find out what had made her into the person she was. To be honest, one or two other questions had me more curious—like what she thought of me.
But I didn’t have the courage to ask her those. Being with her had taught me that cowardice made me the person I was. In her bravery, I saw my opposite.
I looked at her as I searched for what to ask. She watched me back as she waited. Sitting quietly on her hospital bed, she seemed a little more like she was dying than before.
I decided on a question to shake away that premonition, and I asked it immediately.
“What does living mean to you?”
“Whoa,” she said jokingly. “So serious.”
But she looked thoughtful as she gazed upward and whispered to herself, “What does living mean to me?”
Just the sense that she was looking toward life—and not death—relieved my unease the slightest bit. I realized some part of me hadn’t accepted she was going to die. I was a coward.
I thought back to how shaken I’d been when I saw the contents of her backpack in the hotel room, and the question she’d cornered me with at the end of that night.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, pointing a finger upward. “That’s it. I’ve got it.”
I listened close; I didn’t want to miss her answer.
She said, “Living is…”
I waited.
“Sharing connections with other people. I think that’s what we call living.”
I felt suddenly aware of life.
Oh, I understand now.
The hairs rose on the back of my neck.
“To know someone, to get to like someone, to get to dislike someone, to enjoy being with someone, to hate being with someone, to hold hands with someone, to hug someone, to pass someone by. That’s what it means to live. When you’re all on your own, you don’t know who you are. The people I like and dislike are who I am. The people I enjoy being with and the people I hate being with are who I am. Those connections are mine. They define my life as uniquely mine. I know I have feelings because of everyone around me. I know I have a body because other people can touch me. Those connections give me shape. I am alive here. I am alive now. That’s what it means for someone to live—just as you and I have chosen to be alive here and now.”