As I pondered what she meant, Chika, ever the intellectual, offered, “Let me explain: I only knew that someone else had arrived over there because you turned away from me and started talking. I couldn’t see who you were talking to, though.”
“Wha…”
“You very rarely talk to yourself.”
Her voice was tinged with friendship, shared secrets, and the slightest bit of teasing. I wondered how she could know such a thing, but I soon remembered: She had seen me alone in the twilight in this shelter before. This time, however, that fact did not embarrass me.
“So you think that he wouldn’t be able to see you, since you couldn’t see him?”
“Yeah, and I figure that if anyone else showed up in this safe house, you wouldn’t be able to see them either. Just like I couldn’t see your brother when he showed up there with you.”
“So, I can only see you.”
“And the only one I can see here is you. I’d mentioned that before when we were talking about feelings, but the incident with your brother is proof that that might actually be true, I think.”
It was not the places that were connected. It was both of us.
Just the two of us.
Though the very proposal sent nervous shivers down my spine, I wondered if this was a bad thing. The fact that Chika, who had shown me friendship, was saying this gave me some pause, but I had to tell her.
“In that case, that just increases the possibility that you only exist in my imagination.”
“Yep, that’s true.”
This was not a surprising response, given Chika’s nature. Still, her somewhat vapid nod in response was a bit of a letdown.
“I feel the same about you,” she said. “But we have no way of proving that. Still, even if you are just a figment of my imagination, I’m all right with that. I would still cherish the version of you that exists solely inside of me.”
Putting that together with the feelings she’d shared about her room and life choices, things were starting to line up. This made sense.
Still, for me, that was not good enough. If Chika was a being of my imagination, then she would extend no farther than what already existed inside of me. That just couldn’t be. That would mean there was no point to our meeting—that we had never actually “met” at all. Just, no.
“I wonder if there really is no way to prove it.”
“I don’t think there is. There’s no way to tell how much of this is our own imaginations, how much of it is just happening inside of our heads. Like, even if I stabbed you with a knife or something.”
It was a disturbing thought, but I had admittedly been thinking along the same lines. Still, I wouldn’t consider doing anything that might have us harm each other.
“But even that wouldn’t be proof of my existence to you, would it? Even if you felt yourself get stabbed, it might just mean that you forgot you had actually stabbed yourself. From that perspective, it wouldn’t get us anywhere. Even my whole world might just be a product of my imagination. It might not exist at all.”
I couldn’t claim that idea was too far-fetched at this point. I couldn’t even fully deny that even someone as basic and generic as me could spin from my own imagination a nonsensical world of peace and death. Everyone’s dreams feel like reality to them. My entire life, from my first breath up until this moment, could all have been a dream. But that said…
“If you were stuck in a dream that you didn’t wake from until you died, would there be any point in recognizing it as a dream?”
“No, I don’t think so. Hey, give me your hand, Kaya.”
I dutifully extended my hand out to Chika, as I had once before, like I was waiting for a typical handshake. Her cold hand gripped my fingertips. Every last bit of this might just be a dream. Even if I realized that, and even someday accepted it, this was all far too cruel.
“Even if it means nothing, I’d like to say it once more.”
What could she need to affirm? That there was no way to prove whether this was a dream?
“Even if this is all just a dream, I’m still glad that I met you. That’s enough for me.”
Her voice was husky and warm. I could almost picture it wafting through the air to my ears, from where it soaked down into my whole body. As that voice gradually reached each part of me, I felt the skin of that portion rising up, gentle waves of numbness coursing throughout my entire form. When that sensation finally reached my fingertips, where Chika was touching me, I pulled my own hand back.
“I-Is that a goodbye?”
Why had those words come out of my mouth when it was the last thing I wanted to say in that moment? Chika laughed softly, breathily.
“It’s not. Though that did sound like it would have been a goodbye in a story, didn’t it?”
Yes, yes it had, it had sounded exactly that way to me—yet that was not what I wished to say. But then, what did I want to say? I racked my brain, but the words had seeped out of me with that strange pulsing sensation in my body.
“If this were a story, this is the point when one of us would wake up from the dream,” I agreed, saying something that was probably in line with what I’d meant to. I must have wanted to say something to cheer Chika up.
“That’s true. But the fact that no one woke up makes it a little more possible that this isn’t a dream, ever so slightly. Which means that we can only strengthen the density of our own realities.”
The density of our realities—the viscosity of the proof that we were here. Our own realities, according to us, nothing to do with wars or strangers or common sense or anyone else. A way to take this world from dream into reality. The real Chika, who only I knew.
Right. Now I remembered.
“That reminds me. I did something—like what you said before. I did a few things that I wouldn’t normally do to see if they would have an effect on your world. I have no idea if any of them would leave more of an impression than that wound, though.”
“I did the same. Could you tell me about yours?”
“Of course.”
In the week since the new term had started, I had been doing everything I was supposed to, despite my worries about Chika. I was fully aware that I was merely pushing away the anxiety that came with not having a set course of action, but regardless, I’d still done the things I needed to.
“Um, well, for starters…”
I’d done three things that, as far as I was aware, I would not normally do. The first was how I conducted myself towards others. This was a simple one: greeting people. I considered Chika’s recent anecdote about her and the soldier and decided to target a specific person with this action, imagining that each entity that existed around us might have some counterpart in the other’s world.
“Good morning.”
The first time I had been ignored, so I tried again, louder.
“Good morning.”
“Huh?”
In our school, we did not change classes. Tanaka, who had previously sat in front of me during our first year, stared back from beside me with a quizzical expression. I could understand that reaction; here I was disrupting our routine relationship, which usually consisted of nothing more than Tanaka bugging me once every three days. For the first few days, Tanaka seemed to find this creepy, but starting on the fourth day, that greeting would actually develop into a conversation, and on the fifth day, she started showing me some pictures of her dog she had taken that morning. I hadn’t wanted it to go that far, but I supposed it was all right.