I always yearned for that boy I’d never seen. I’d grown up with that other me—the blind me in my dreams. It felt totally natural for the person she adored to be special to me as well.
I wanted to be worthy of him. Unlike back then, when all I could do was let myself be protected, the current me had the ability to see. I could walk on my own, with my own two legs... It made me happier than I could describe, but I still wanted to be better—to be someone he would be proud of.
I taught myself how to cook because I wanted to feed him something delicious that I’d made. I always worked as hard as I could in school at both academics and athletics, and I was always the top student in my class without fail. Seeing made me so happy that I started drawing too...but, well, I’m not exactly good enough at that yet to brag about it, I guess.
“I heard some guy asked you out again, Hikari?”
“Not just ‘some guy’—it was a senpai this time, and the star of the soccer team, right? That dude’s so popular, they call him the team heartthrob!”
“I can’t believe you turned him down; what a waste! You could’ve at least given him a chance, right?”
Around the time I got into middle school, I started getting a lot of attention from boys. I didn’t know what to make of it (though I think some part of me enjoyed it). I never actually wanted to date any of them, and I felt bad for them when I turned them down, but it was still nice to know that I was attractive in their eyes.
If I could ever meet him, I wondered, would he fall for me? That boy I’d never seen, who probably lived in an altogether different world, who there was absolutely no guarantee I’d ever find?
Whenever I woke up from that dream, everything that happened in it would vanish from my mind, fading away like a wisp of morning mist. I couldn’t even remember his name. But still, just thinking about the scattered fragments I could remember made a warmth spread throughout my chest.
I never doubted that I’d be able to meet him someday. It’s not that I was confident I’d meet him, exactly—it’s just that it never even occurred to me to doubt it. I’m not quite sure how to put it... It was like a child’s unwavering belief that Santa Claus is real, I guess.
These days, though, I’ve been getting scared. What if I never meet him after all? I don’t know when I started to think that way, but that’s a big part of why I always want to put all the effort I possibly can into living my own life. Maybe I’ll never meet him, and maybe someday I’ll fall in love with someone else, but when that time finally comes, I want to make sure that I won’t have any regrets.
...I’m forgetting something. I realized the moment I woke up yesterday morning.
At first, I couldn’t believe myself. Somehow, before I knew it, I’d taken almost a whole week off from school, even though I wasn’t even sick. Why would I ever do something like that? Was it because I’d been asked out by Murata-senpai, my fellow student council member, prompting my classmate Mikura-san to harass me? No, that couldn’t be it—that was nothing new to me; I’d been through that sort of situation plenty of times before.
I thought about it as hard as I could and came to a conclusion: I’d skipped school because I’d found something that I considered to be a higher priority. I’d played hooky to throw myself into that something...no, that’s not quite right. To catch someone’s attention...?
It was no use. I just couldn’t remember.
I’d forgotten something incredibly important to me. The reason I’d skipped school, the “something” I’d wanted to prioritize, the passion that must’ve been burning away within me—it had all vanished. The second I let my guard down, my fear seeped out from me in the form of tears. It felt like my past fifteen years of effort would all go to waste...
I barely managed to muster up the composure I needed to go to school yesterday. It didn’t help, though—not even when I got to talk with my friend, Yuu-chan. I had to force myself to plaster a fake smile across my face the whole time, and I burst into tears the moment I got home.
I don’t really remember much else after that. I made dinner, talked briefly with my brother, and before I knew it, I was fast asleep and dreaming...
“That’s right... My drawings...”
I sat up, turned on the lights, and went over to open up my desk’s drawer without even changing out of my pajamas first. That was where I kept my sketchbook. I’d made a habit of drawing in it whenever anything particularly sad, happy, or memorable in general happened to me. I thought that maybe I’d left a hint for myself inside.
I opened up the sketchbook and flipped through its pages, scanning over the pencil sketches that I myself had drawn. If there were any drawings I didn’t remember inside it, then surely they would be of whatever it was I was forgetting...?
“Ah...”
I found one. It was the last picture in the book. A picture that I knew was mine—I could recognize my own artistic style—but that I had no memory of drawing.
“Why?”
The drawing was a portrait.
“Why, why...?”
But something was missing.
“It’s...gone? But why? Why...?”
The portrait had no face. Or rather, its face had been erased. I could tell from the smudges on the paper that I’d drawn and erased it over and over. I’d tried to draw them properly, but I must have never been satisfied with it. It was obvious that whoever this person was, I considered them unimaginably important to me. Just like how the me from my dreams thought about the boy she knew...