“I mean, imagine having your daughter’s corpse suddenly show up on your doorstep one day after three long years of holding out hope for a miracle. For all we know, it could totally destroy her mother’s will to live. At least with the way things are now, she still has a glimmer of hope to cling on to, even if she’ll never find closure. Who are we to decide whether or not she’ll be happier knowing the truth, y’know?”
“So that’s your take, huh… Okay. Fair enough.”
My thoughts were sort of split down the middle in that regard too, admittedly. Would her mother appreciate finally having closure, no matter how painful it might be? Or would it be more merciful to let her go on living with the hope that her daughter might still come home one day?
“I take it though that you really want to go looking for her?” asked Aoi.
“I think I’m about fifty-fifty on it,” I said. “But I’d like to help her, if I can.”
“And where does that desire come from, do you think?”
I thought back to the previous night, to the way Ayane laid her hand on top of her mother’s as the older woman read.
“I’m not sure, honestly,” I said. “But I’m definitely not fishing for gratitude or anything like that.”
“I see, I see. Well, let Detective Aoi spell it out for you, because I think I’ve cracked the case,” said Aoi, with a giddiness in her eyes like a child who’d just been given a new toy. “I think someone’s got a little crush on Ayane-san and is just looking for excuses to keep going to the airfield and meeting up with her!”
“Yeah, maybe so,” I admitted.
“Wait… Seriously?!” Aoi recoiled.
I didn’t know much about love or what it felt like. All I knew was that I had the time of my life flying around hand in hand with her last night. Come to think of it, it was the first time I ever had the chance to take a girl on a “date” to my favorite museum too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but maybe I really was starting to fall for her.
“You might be right, honestly,” I said. “Maybe I really am just looking for excuses to continue going to see her.”
“Man, this sucks…” Aoi huffed. “It’s no fun when you just admit it like that. At least let me tease you about it a little bit first! Sheesh.”
“Anyway, thanks for entertaining the idea, at least, Aoi. I really appreciate knowing where you guys stand.”
“Hey, don’t mention it.”
And with that, the two of us settled the bill and made our way out of the diner as well. The hot air rising up off the sun-beaten asphalt distorted the view so much that it made the buildings across the street look like wavering mirages.
“Man, what a scorcher,” I said. “You’d gotta have a death wish to willingly walk outside in this heat.”
“No kidding,” said Aoi. “We better make sure not to die of heat exhaustion before we even have the chance to commit suicide. That’d be a pretty lame way to go.”
Through squinting eyes, we waved each other goodbye and went our separate ways.
I spent the remaining half of the month of August doing little else but maintaining the status quo—going to and from cram school each day and buying practice workbooks for entrance exams I had no intention of taking. The Common Test for University Admissions was held in mid-January, after all—and I’d long since decided I wanted to be dead before then.
It wasn’t like I actually picked a date or anything, but the idea of killing myself sometime around the end of the year had been bouncing around in my head for a while now. I always liked the way the whole city transformed itself during Christmastime. It made everything feel a little bit warmer in spite of the cold. I figured killing myself on or slightly after Christmas itself would be most comfortable for me, so I let Ryo and Aoi know that I was tentatively planning to do it sometime during the week of the 24th through the 31st—right between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
“Gotcha,” Ryo wrote back. “It obviously depends on my symptoms, but I’ll be sure to swing by your funeral if I can make it. I’ll bring a condolence offering and everything.”
“Yeah, I’ll come see you one last time too, assuming I’m still alive,” wrote Aoi.
To say that I wasn’t afraid of dying in the slightest would’ve been a lie. Why, just the other day when Ayane let go of my hand and let me fall down through the earth, I screamed at the top of my lungs in fear—in fear of death. Given that, I wasn’t entirely mentally prepared to take my own life just yet. I even asked myself if perhaps I was getting cold feet about the whole idea, but the answer there was a decisive no as well. In a sense, I was in my own state of limbo—stuck between not being ready to die and wanting nothing more.
While checking my smartphone during a break at cram school, I saw a news article about a high school girl who killed herself by jumping in front of a speeding train. For a moment, I wondered if perhaps Aoi had taken the initiative and was the first of us to actually follow through on our little pact, but upon reading the article more closely, I found that the story was apparently from a completely different part of the country, so it couldn’t have been her. There were a few other suicide-related articles that caught my eye, though—one about a struggling single mother in poverty who killed her two infant children and then slit her own throat rather than let them all starve to death. Another was about a middle-aged businessman who wrote a confession of guilt for embezzling company funds before drenching his entire body in gasoline and lighting himself on fire in a public park in broad daylight. Then, there was yet another about a town hall worker in her twenties who suffered ceaseless harassment from a superior. She drove to said superior’s house in the middle of the night, lit a large amount of charcoal in her car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning while parked in their driveway. This was a sobering reminder of just how many people there were in the world who wanted to kill themselves and just how many different ways there were to do it.