“No way…” What was her social circle like, I wondered. Was she buddies with everyone, letting them call her by her first name? Was she not an ordinary girl like me? I tried to remember her first name, but I couldn’t. “Well, it was nice seeing you. Bye!” she said. “Bye!” We went our separate ways, and as always, I didn’t get the feeling we’d meet again. This was a day of many permanent good-byes for me, with no prospect of meeting anyone new. I had to laugh at the injustice. For some time, I just stood in the street, staring into nothing, the taste of apple juice still lingering on my lips. I looked at the station, my home station, and sighed, accepting that the thing with Umi had ended. The daytime star guided me home. The story was over. It was a tale of two stars on a collision course. They crashed and suffered damage, but they couldn’t help gravitating toward each other. It was a summer story of banal attraction. I wasn’t either of those colliding stars. I was merely an accidental observer, a dirt-covered, earthbound star, envious of the dazzling, beautiful lights in the distance. I slept and awoke, the line between dream and reality thin and translucent. The remainder of my summer break trickled away. Again, I was moving between school and home like a character controlled by someone else, watching the scenery change without any conscious input from myself. Whoever was controlling me was doing well, since nobody was complaining. If they could so easily make me go through the motions of my life, perhaps I should just let them. No, I knew I couldn’t let it go on forever, but not knowing when I was awake and when I was dreaming, I didn’t know when to try to open my eyes. I kept missing the opportunity. Was I up against a wall, or was the path wide open for me? I didn’t know how to tell the difference. I had no energy to sense my surroundings. That summer had been the beginning of it all, and probably the end of it, too. I felt stuck, with no way out. That day, I was walking somewhere, but I couldn’t remember if it was a day off from school or if I was actually going to school. For no particular reason, I suddenly realized I didn’t know if the cicada season was over, and I turned my head this way and that, listening for their chirping. Then I saw something that made time slow down to a stop. At the bottom of the embankment, in the river up ahead, was a space suit. “……” I stared, speechless. Had I finally lost my mind after living for so long through a dreamy, hazy curtain? Was I seeing a mirage in the heat haze? “Whuh…?” The illusion was being carried downriver, the late summer sunlight reflecting off its helmet. What if…what if the space suit wasn’t empty? Was someone swimming in the river, dressed like that for fun? Had they fallen in by accident? Were they drowning? The space suit was drifting downstream, without any sign of resistance, so it might be empty… But what was a space suit doing in the river at all? Was it really there, or was I imagining it? I stared, motionless and utterly confused. What if nobody fished it out? Would it get carried all the way out to sea? “………” Beads of sweat were tracing hot lines on my skin. In the end, I couldn’t ignore it. I climbed down the embankment. I didn’t rush; if I didn’t get down there in time, so be it. I trod down the slope carefully so as not to slip. Not because people would laugh at me if I told them I’d gotten injured chasing after a space suit in the river, but because I didn’t think I had the mental strength to get up again if I fell down. The river current was slow, and I was catching up. I peered at the water to make sure it wasn’t deep, but I hesitated before going in. Once I’d left my bag on the ground, I walked into the water. My foot met the bottom of the river, and I pushed through the water, splashing left and right. I belatedly regretted not having taken my shoes off. After I was pretty far in, my senses awoke, and with each movement, I felt both the heat of the sun and the coldness of the water. I caught up to the rather small space suit…and grabbed it. I heard breathing from the inside, so loud it was almost theatrical. “Whoa.” I almost lost my footing from shock when the inhabitant of the space suit spoke in the high-pitched voice of a young girl. “And who might you be?” “Who indeed?” I replied grumpily, dragging the space suit girl out of the river. The suit looked thick, but it was very light, like a vinyl bag. When we got close to the riverbank, the space suit girl stood up and walked out of the water without my help. It looked like rescue wasn’t needed. What a waste of time. Now I was the one in the river. My waterlogged socks felt icky on my feet. I was knee-deep in the water, which was so much colder than the air above it, it made me shudder. I raised my head to glare angrily at the sun, and I saw the sky. A blue sky stretching high above. My ears popped and sound returned, the buzzing of cicadas enveloping me like a pair of wings to remind me summer hadn’t gone away yet. The sun was baking me, my shirt unpleasantly sticking to my clammy back. Back in the realm of the living, I was again struggling against the stifling heat. I could hear my breathing, so loud it was annoying. Blood was bubbling up my arteries, carrying heat all the way to my consciousness, melting my bones and organs into a throbbing mass. The boiling pressure was chasing up the lukewarm dream that had persisted inside me for so long, squeezing it out of me together with the sweat. As the sun beat down on me, my skin cried like a newborn baby. …Really? Had it been that easy to shed that dream? But while it’d been easy, it left me with a tremendous sense of loss. “Excuse me, Miss,” the girl in the space suit called to me from the riverbank. She was waving her little arm at me, hopping to get my attention. The movement sent blinding reflections off her helmet, so I had to shield my eyes with my hand as I clambered out of the river. I wasn’t sure what’d pushed me to rescue the girl, but the fact I had proved I had some optimism left in me, I thought. “Please accept my heartfelt thanks for your help.” “…Uh.” I’d snapped out of my daze, yet the soaking wet girl in a space suit was still there. I looked down and saw that my shadow had completely engulfed this small person. “I was wondering which way to go, and then I was suddenly carried away by the river.” “What…?” The situation was becoming more and more surreal as I talked to the girl in that ridiculous space suit. What a summer I was having, meeting all sorts of weirdos. Suddenly, I couldn’t bear standing in squelching wet shoes anymore. I took them off and held them upside down to drain the water… Would you say that, “drain the water”? “You’re a very lost little…lost little girl…?” The girl was so short and sounded very young. My protective instinct kicked in. I’d become quite desensitized to weirdness over that summer, also learning it was the weirdos who looked normal on the outside who were to be feared most. A girl in a space suit didn’t daunt me. “Perhaps it is apt to call me lost. But while I had been adrift, I travel with the purpose of meeting someone.” “Like…a relative?” She wasn’t getting to the point, so I thought asking more specific questions might help. The girl shook her head, though. “I do not yet know who they are.” “Er…” “I shall discover that after I find them and we gradually get to know each other.” She spoke perfect Japanese, but my brain couldn’t make any sense of it. It was as if the conversation was revolving around two different axes… Or, no, as if hers didn’t have an axis at all, but only a distant point I failed to see. The little astronaut continued, speaking in a strangely measured way, “I am certain meeting this person is of crucial importance. I exist everywhere. Existing everywhere, I take on any form or shape, confined to no definite state. Dimensions, including distance, are not limiting factors for me, and hence, I am here now, too.” “…Right.” I understood none of it, but I didn’t think it mattered. The important part was that I had rescued this girl from the river. I’d chased after her in her ludicrous outfit, and in doing so, I had crawled out of the mire of my lukewarm dream. “Now I must decide where to go next.” “Where to next, huh…?” Until a few moments ago, I’d also been lost. We both looked around uncertainly. I gazed in the direction Umi Mizuike had vanished…and then I pointed the opposite way. “Try going there.” I was pointing, but with a tightly closed fist. “Thank you. I shall head in that direction,” the strange astronaut agreed readily. She began resolutely walking where I’d pointed her to, even though she didn’t know anything about me. She marched along the river, in that puffy space suit, as if summer heat didn’t affect her. As if on second thought, she turned her head to look back at me. Her helmet reflected the blue sky, fluffy cumulonimbus clouds, and me. “And where will you go?” she asked. “Me? Um…” Before I could offer her an answer, the little astronaut shook her head as if to tell me not to bother. “In any case, I wish you safe travels,” she said before hobbling away. When she was pretty far away, I saw her rest a fishing rod on her shoulder, even though she definitely hadn’t had anything like that with her when I’d gotten her out of the river. Where might she end up if she kept walking in that direction? An old-fashioned teahouse, maybe? And where would she go to next? Since she had that rod, maybe another river, or a fishing pond, or…the ocean? I had a flashback to that blindingly bright, unforgettable seaside scene. I had to squint from the brightness, unable to make that memory fade. Who would that girl meet? Where would she cast her line? What new beginnings awaited her? We’d only known each other for a few short minutes, and she was a complete mystery to me, but I hoped she’d find whoever it was she was seeking. I hoped whatever she started would lead somewhere. She was a complete stranger, but I sincerely wished her the best of luck. She had gone, leaving me behind. “Um…” I wanted a fresh start, too. As I thought about it, the gears in my head had seemingly made my head turn, too. I lost my balance and slipped. My body twisted as I fell so that I ended up cracking my skull against something on the ground. I saw stars. Stars, which should’ve been forever beyond my reach, touched my eyes and burned them until I was blind. My lower lip was quivering for some reason. I slowly pushed myself off the ground. When I raised my head, I noticed that although it was my forehead that had bumped against something, I felt a strange heaviness behind my ear. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I felt as if something was dripping from my goosebump-covered skin. I was so cold. So cold. I repeated the words that were wrong for summer, my shoulders shaking. Even my fingertips were trembling. No part of my body was static. It was the most visceral way to feel alive. “Travels… Traveling…” I stared at the shimmering river, my thoughts and blood oozing out. I felt as if I’d made it out of stagnant water only to find myself in a quagmire, and now I was stomping down on it to firm it into something I could walk on. I took my soggy socks off, removed my wallet from my school bag, and then threw both the socks and the bag away. I swung my arms, which felt much lighter. “Aaah-hum-hum-hum, hmm-hum-hum-hum, aaah-hum, hum-hummm, hum-hum-hum-hum-hummm-aaan, ee-hee-humm, aaah-hum-hum-hummm…” I broke into a dance, singing a song I’d never heard before. It was a song of joy, coming straight out of the injury in my head. Clouds. Sky. World. Town. What my eyes saw was changing fast. What a new feeling, not knowing what would be next. Was this what it felt like to be reborn? I stopped dancing and started walking in the direction I pointed out to myself. My place to belong was myself. I belonged wherever I was. There was nowhere I didn’t belong. I didn’t have to go anywhere to find a place for me. I didn’t have to search for it. The world under my feet was all there was. Others were too far away. Their skin, their bones, their love. But I—I was always reassuringly within my own reach. I was thirsty and greedy for life. I had a refreshing lightness in my head, as if I’d really broken it open and a pleasant breeze were blowing through it, even though an awful ringing in my ears kept coming back and going away again, tracing an ellipse from delight to queasiness and back again. I walked, each step peeling off a layer of fantasy from my back. I didn’t mind whether I was heading toward a new beginning or a dead end. I wanted to see the ocean.
Chapter 34
12 min read