Let’s try to be objective about this.
A person with dangerous thoughts would still experience the gratitude of others if they saved someone, as long as those thoughts were never revealed. So, no matter what feelings lingered inside me, as long as they didn’t come across in my actions, it would be fine. Or at least, it should have been.
Still, it was strange.
I could feel a distinct nervousness running down my spine, clearly different from before. It stung down to my eardrums.
More times than I could count now, I’d cursed my own indecisiveness. Or maybe not cursing, just being disappointed in myself. Though by this point I could truthfully do neither.
“What’s the matter, Kaya?”
Chika was breathing. Chika was sitting beside me. Chika’s eyes were turned my way.
I forgot to even reply. I couldn’t play it off. I was shaken by her very arrival.
“Sorry, I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
About Chika, of course. And about my own foolish thoughts regarding her.
“About you.”
Both as an experiment and as a means of measuring myself, I answered truthfully.
“What about me?”
At that point, I could have just spilled exactly what I was thinking. It wasn’t like she would get the message anyway. The reason I chose not to was for fear that if I did, it would dominate the day’s conversation and waste our time together. There was no point in subjecting her to something that she couldn’t possibly understand, anyway. That said, I had no intention of lying, either. Instead, I put a spin on it.
“I was wondering if the time that I spend with you means anything more significant than us just having fun. Like, whether it’s something that could change both of our lives or not.”
“Yeah, that’s what you’ve been after, right?”
“Been after…?”
“Yeah. Personally, I haven’t really been trying to get anything more out of these meetings than spending time with you. Testing out whether we can have any effect on each other’s worlds is fun in and of itself. You’ve been trying to get something more meaningful out of it, though.”
“Has that…been a burden on you?”
“Nah. It doesn’t bother me or anything. The world runs on people who are looking for things. You might just be setting both our worlds in motion.”
“I mean, it doesn’t have to be anything that grandiose, but yeah. Anyway, I have to reiterate, I do cherish the fact that you and I met at all.”
I really did feel that way.
The fact that I had met her was special. The time I spent with her was special. It was an encounter that might change my whole life. However, my odd uncertainty about what form I hoped this change would take clouded my vision.
One could think it was enough that Chika’s existence itself shielded me from the blandness of my everyday life. That might have been enough—if I was assured that this could go on forever. But maybe it wouldn’t. You could never know when the ties that bind people might unravel.
I wanted something special that could never be undone.
I wanted an eternal high.
Thus, even if the budding feelings I recognized that day might one day grow into a more intense feeling for Chika herself, I couldn’t call that happy. I needed to find something more than our meetings, something that could persist even if she wasn’t there.
The feelings we have for others are nothing more than a momentary consolation. Worse, they impede our clear judgment. I couldn’t accept them so easily.
“Have you figured it out yet? What this time we share means?”
“We still have no idea how much effect we have on each other’s worlds, so at the moment I think all we can do is share information directly. And given that we can’t convey smells or tastes, I was wondering if there’s something that we should be telling each other with our words. Like you said, the world is made of words, of things that we share with our voices.”
The words that we should share. Not something ineffable like kindness or passion, but something tangible that we could both comprehend under our own value systems and carry into the rest of our lives. At the time, I still didn’t know what those words could be, but if we kept exchanging information, perhaps we might stumble upon some shortcut to that.
As I waited for her response, I watched one of her fingernails, presumably her index finger based on the alignment, move to what was most likely her cheek.
“Something we can share with our voices… We could share stories, but that would take up a lot of time.”
“That’s true. Stuff like folk tales would be much shorter, though.”
“What kind of folk tales?”
Thinking on the classics, I decided to introduce Chika to the tale of Momotaro. When I finished, Chika began pondering the meaning of the story.
“I guess it’s a story about helping those who are willing to help you,” I finished.
“So it’s better to have someone there than not, even if those in question are animals?”
Well, that sure was one way to look at it.
Next, I listened to a folk tale from Chika’s world. I asked her for something very orthodox and was presented with a story about a man who tried to get rich by selling water to a town that was built by the shore. It was probably a much more worthwhile story than Momotaro, with its lesson that it takes ingenuity to accomplish things, but otherwise I really didn’t get anything novel out of it. There were an absurd number of similar stories in my own world.
“Okay, well, putting aside stories for now, I wonder if there’s something else we can tell each other.”
Perhaps history or religion. As I pondered this, Chika let out an “Oh!” from beside me as though she had thought of something.
“Maybe songs,” she said.
“Songs?”
“Yeah. We can’t share our cultures with smells or flavors, but maybe we can share them with songs.”
“Hmm…”
I had, in fact, listened to a lot of songs before, wondering if there was any music out there that could change your whole life. It was around the time when I was really into reading, back when I still had some faith in the creations of others. Naturally, the only conclusion I had come to was Is that all there is?
“Do you not like music?”
Still, there was a chance that songs themselves meant something different in our worlds, so it would be silly to reject the idea outright.
“I used to listen to music, but I lost interest pretty quick. I would like to hear a song from your world, though.” As I spoke, I suddenly grew embarrassed, realizing I was pressing her to sing.
“All right, I’ll sing one then.”
Getting to hear a song from another world was exciting, pure and simple.
“I know it’s a bit sudden, but could you move a little closer? We aren’t allowed to sing loudly.”
She meant that she needed me to move closer so I could hear her even if she sang softly. As though the thing budding in my mind had started to take root, my body felt twice as heavy as it had every other time I’d made the same movement. Still, to avoid any pitiful-looking hesitation, I dutifully followed her orders and moved over to the right.
Chika moved the same distance toward me, and I could feel the sensation of someone moving beside me on my right arm. Normally, I would not have been so sensitive to such a sensation, but now it was as though I could feel the very ripples in the air that her movements set in motion.
Oversensitive to her presence, I faced forward instead of looking at her. I couldn’t look at her.
“I’ll sing now.”
Her voice was so close it was like the vibrations of her vocal cords were transferred directly to my eardrums.
I swallowed back something like a scream, pulling back from where she would have been sitting and turning to look at her. Her eyes were right at the spot where my ear would have been moments before.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, tilting her head curiously. I slackened my pursed lips and took a deep breath so she wouldn’t catch on. I could tell by the placement of her nails that she was sitting much closer to me than she ever had before.
“I was just surprised at how close you were.”
“I see, sorry. I was trying to stay close and sing quietly because I was worried I might get too loud while I was singing. Don’t worry though, I won’t bite. Now get back over here.”
I averted my gaze from her two narrowed eyes, slowly moving back to the spot I was in before. I turned just my eyes toward her and saw Chika right there beside me. The only part of her expression that I could actually know was floating there in the air. I wondered what sort of emotion the rest of her body would have expressed.
“All right, I’m going to sing now.”
I could hear her breathing in, then felt her breath graze my cheek.
Her voice, more a whisper than an aria, seeped into my body. I had been nervous that some part of the lyrics might have used some specialized expression from her world and disappeared into static, but it turned out fine. However, I’m not quite sure how to put this, but the melody possessed a roughness that neither my ears nor my brain had expected. I was absolutely certain that even if she had immediately asked me to hum it back to her, I wouldn’t have been able to, despite the sound ringing in my head.
Still, it was a pleasant song. I felt as though I had heard a new facet of her voice.
As she finished, I could feel the very membrane of her existence that clung to her surface, something that couldn’t even be called body heat, moving away from me. I turned my face cautiously to the side, but her eyes were still right there.
“I’m not sure if I sung it well, though,” she said humbly, at which I explained the sensation I had just felt. “I see. So that’s how it felt to you.”
“Yeah. What kind of song is that in your world, anyway? Like, something that children would sing? Or a song from a popular artist?”
“It’s a song I’ve been hearing a lot lately when I go for walks outside. I’ve heard it so many times now that I’ve memorized it.”