I searched. I searched and searched and searched. The more I searched, the more I knew it. I couldn’t help but become aware of it, the answer there in the very words that I had dredged up.
Was. Wanted. Believed.
Everything there in my heart was there in the past tense. If I tried to scoop any of those feelings out in their current form, they would crumble and slip through my fingers like sand.
Ah.
“This can’t be happening…”
“But it is.”
How could she possibly prove that? What could she possibly know?
I was offended. I should have gotten mad and brushed her aside, or simply exited the conversation. But I couldn’t. I was standing in my own way.
The amount, weight, size, and shape of the feelings I was once certain I felt no longer existed in present tense. It was like a shed skin, falling from my body, drifting away, vanishing.
No.
No way.
“No.”
Not a single grain of sand remained in my palms. It was like a waking nightmare.
“I don’t want to forget.”
There was nothing to be gained from telling Sunou Sanae that. She couldn’t possibly call my feelings back to me, much less summon Chika here from that other world. She had been nothing more than a trigger—a trigger that made me realize that I had been deceiving myself all along.
Yet here I was, shamelessly praying for a miracle. With every fiber of my being, I prayed for this not to end.
She stared at me as I continued to spew wretched, meaningless words. I thought she might laugh at me. I thought she’d lord over me, say that she told me so. However, she just looked at me, biting her bottom lip.
“It’s okay to forget how you felt,” she said, repeating herself. I shook my head.
“If I forget, then it’ll all have been a lie.”
This time it was her head that moved slowly back and forth, twice.
“That doesn’t make it a lie. We all forget things. No matter how strong our feelings might be, little by little, the memories of them crumble, blur, and fade. But that by no means makes what we felt at the time a lie. None of it is a lie, not how I was so bored in those days that I wanted to die, nor how I found a band that I fell so deeply in love with that it made me want to change, nor the way that you loved Chika.”
“But if I forget, then how can I prove it?”
“You still can. Listen, Kaya-kun.”
She placed her hands over mine, which sat folded on the table. I could never know what it must be like to take the hands of a man whose hands you had let go of just a few weeks prior. The hands of someone she probably hated, was disgusted by, scorned. The hands of someone who had never seriously attempted to face his own feelings.
“I really did think you were a piece of shit.”
Wait, what?
“I thought you must be one of the most vapid people I’ve ever met. You were twisted, drunk on yourself, and only put on the face of a proper working man, and I thought that I must have been a fool to have fallen for someone like you.”
She was right. I treated her the way that I had at the time to make her feel that way about me.
“Do you know how many times I thought, ‘I’ll never forgive him’? But still…”
Her eyelid twitched.
“Despite your attitude, you made me think about my own life and uncovered part of my true self.”
She was wrong. That wasn’t me.
“Kaya-kun, it seemed like you regretted causing that poor dog Allumi’s death.”
I wasn’t that sort of person.
“I thought, this is an idiot who’s crying just because he doesn’t know the distance from his own humanity.” She gripped my hands tighter. “I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going to happen from here on out, but I can say this much—”
Before I realized it, I was hanging.
“Someday, I’ll forget what I’m feeling right now, this feeling of once more wanting to know more about you.”
Hanging on her every word.
“So, right now, I have to be true to myself, unashamed of the things I hold dear. I want to be. We can only build up the present through our own toil and suffering. Once you’ve done that enough, you’ll grant yourself a present where you can be certain that the person who loved Chika once existed. I can give myself a present where I wasn’t wrong to have been so affected by music. And from there, all we can do is it keep living. So, it’s all right.”
A single tear fell from her left eye. An ordinary, non-glowing tear.
“It’s all right to forget me, even.”
The remnants of my feelings for Chika, the last embers that smoldered in my heart, crumbled and fell away. On the way to the bottom of my heart, those fragments vanished. But the smallest sliver of my feelings, something that I never intended to share with anyone, slipped out in the form of words.
“I’m sorry.”
I hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, much less ever let anyone hear them.
“Chika.”
Perhaps I had wanted to tell someone all along.
“I loved her so much. She was the only thing that mattered to me.”
Words that would never reach anyone, anywhere.
“I wonder if she’s already forgotten me. I hope she at least remembers that we once met.”
Only Sunou Sanae was listening. Eyes lowered, squeezing my hands.
The color would never return to my world. It would never get any easier to breathe. I could never be forgiven.
And yet, it was as though I had been given permission to keep on existing in this world.