A honeymoon.
I knew the word, but never did I ever think it would actually come to mind. However, embarrassing though it might be, I doubted there was any word I could give that better described my time with Chika.
As summer turned to autumn, I obtained no new information of note. The two of us simply spent time together. Our time together tasted of honey, condensed from nectar gathered from so many different places and times, brought here to this secret hideaway.
The picture-drawing experiment had been a success. First, we had her hold the pen and notebook with her hands on top of mine, moving our hands together without pulling away from the items, and we managed to draw a picture. But even just thinking about the picture we drew makes me laugh, so I won’t try to describe it.
I had her write some words too, but of course I couldn’t read her language. Strangely, whenever she pulled the pen away from the notebook and I took my eyes off the page, all the lines that she had written down disappeared. Capturing it with my phone camera was equally fruitless. To be honest, I had already tried secretly recording her speaking, but all that was left on the recording was my own voice talking stupidly to long gaps of nothing. Unfortunately, it seemed that capturing any phenomena between worlds was impossible. I tried memorizing the shapes of the letters she had drawn and looking them up when I got home, but all I could determine was that it was no language that existed anywhere in our world.
In the end, all I had been able to ascertain via the notebook was that Chika did indeed look somewhat like a human woman and that the buildings in her world were also rectangular in structure.
Even though I had been the one to request this drawing and who wanted to see it, I was somehow relieved not to actually get any more details about her appearance. It gave me full confidence that such information was extraneous to the way I cherished Chika, girl of only eyes and nails.
Our days were joyful ones.
The usual eventual dearth of conversational topics that might usually occur between normal friends or lovers never happened with us. We never had to “make” conversation; being from different worlds, our whole lives were entirely foreign to one another, and our interest never waned. There was always some new tradition, some fascinating new philosophy, in every bit of information she told me. All these things and more I learned just from the sounds that came out of her mouth. It was a special time.
Chika always seemed to be picturing various things from my world when we spoke. It would be a bit grandiose to say that the proof was in the pudding, but time and again she demonstrated that she had realized things that I hadn’t even told her, based solely on things I’d talked about and my appearance.
“I’m guessing there are times in your world when there are big shifts in the temperature?”
“The temperature? I guess it does change with the seasons.”
“Seezins refers to a time period, right?”
“Yeah. Oh, do you not have seasons in your world? In this world, or at least in this country, we have four types of seasons. The season we’re in right now is called autumn, and the one when I met you was called winter. It’s cooling down a little bit from the hot season now, and when I met you it was cold.”
“I see. That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“I’d noticed the number of clothing layers you wear and the thickness of them changing. We change our clothing based on whether we’re in a place with a high or low temperature, whether it’s raining or clear, whether the sun is up or down, and based on our jobs, but not with the passage of time. So I figured your world did have some big fluctuation of temperatures, like these seezins.”
“Oh, we change our clothes for different locations too, but fundamentally that follows the seasons. Obviously I can’t see it, but are you usually wearing the same sort of thing when you come here?”
“The colors and patterns are different, but we don’t have as many different varieties as you all have.”
“I don’t really own that many styles, personally. When I come here, I’m always wearing clothes that are easy to move in. During the day, I’m usually in my school uniform.”
I suddenly realized that my explanation here might be lacking, wondering if they had the concept of school uniforms in Chika’s world, until she said, “That’s something that you wear to school, right?”
“Yeah, do you have anything like that in your world?”
“No. We just wear our normal clothes.”
Frankly, I was surprised. She seemed to have instantly extrapolated the function of a uniform based only on the fact that I went to school during the day and that I wore those clothes during that time. It made me happy to realize just how much of a force to be reckoned with she was, and that it seemed she thought of me even when we were apart.
“Are girls colder than boys in your world?”
“Hmm. I think it depends on the person. Is that how it is in your world?”
“I once read that women have lower body temperatures than men. I wonder how close they are, though.”
“I know that women here usually do get colder.”
“So it is true…”
“I’m guessing you assumed that my temperature is higher than yours because I’m a man, but I think I run hotter than even other guys because I get a lot of exercise.”
“I see.”
“Chika, are you cold?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m never cold when you’re here.”
Yes, we were close enough for her to feel that. Obviously, she hadn’t planned to turn my bones to jelly, but sometimes intention and result are two wholly separate things. In that, we were the same.
There’s a reason I say in that.
Though it was trivial at this point, we had established that on the organism level, we were two totally different things. One day, I had gotten a really good feel of her hair. This happened for no reason other than we had incidentally moved close to each other. Anyway, when I placed my hand on what seemed to be the back of her head, I was surprised to realize that I was touching her hair.
“What’s the matter?”
“Is this all your real hair? Even from the part where it’s tied back?”
“Yeah, it’s real. Is it weird? Is it different from your hair?”
It was different.
Probing with my hand, I found that her hair was tied into what would probably be referred to as a ponytail in our world, but there was a clear difference between the texture at the top and where it was tied. Not only did no single hair of mine possess such a huge difference in texture along its span, but I was shocked at how peculiar the tips of her hair felt compared to the roots, which were already a bit stiffer than I’d expected.
If I were to compare the last ten-odd centimeters of her hair to the closest material that I knew of at the time, I would say that it was like soft, supple wire. I say wire, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that would stay in any one defined shape. Like our hair, it bunched and curved and swayed. I had perhaps accidentally touched her hair before but not even realized it from its texture. However, I got the impression that if she wanted to stab someone with it, it might even pierce skin. Perhaps that was why she kept it pulled back.
Was there, in fact, anything in my world that resembled that texture?
“You don’t have to touch it if it feels weird to you.”
I suddenly deeply regretted taking the time to figure out how it felt to me, as I seemed to have caused her some undue concern.
“It’s not like anything I’ve ever touched, but it’s not unpleasant. I’m happy, actually. There are still parts of you that I don’t know about.”
I knew, of course, that there was still plenty of Chika that I didn’t know about, but I was honest when I said that getting to know those parts little by little made me happier than anything. But although I hadn’t conveyed it to her, there was more than that to my words. I was happy that I had found yet another new part of her to love.
“Could I touch your hair too?” she asked.
“Oh, of course.”
Chika touched my hair, which I had put off cutting lately because of the cool weather. It was refreshing; it was the first time that being touched by someone actually put me at ease.
“It’s soft all the way through. It feels nice. It really is completely different.”
Yes, it was. Regardless of whether she was a completely different life-form, here we were, able to touch one another and try to understand each other.
It really didn’t matter if she was a person or not.
That day we experienced the closest proximity of our two worlds.
A honeymoon.
It truly was one.
The word in Japanese, mitsugetsu, was originally a literal translation of the English word “honeymoon,” referring to the first month of a marriage, a time like the sweetest honey.
I was happy.
I could live now, knowing that sweet honey truly existed.
My…
Who could ever say something as universal as that?