Post #12

It was a brisk autumn morning of about 17°C. As Yuuta pedaled manically to school, his mind traveled in a different direction. He was thinking about the spring of his sophomore year when he finally manned up and asked Mizuki to be his girlfriend. They had been going steady, like at least a date a week. There had been a lot of flirting, and sometimes they held hands, but he wanted to kiss her. He decided that if he asked her out, he could really lay his lips on hers. On February 1, he asked her to meet him at the park near the train station. She showed up in this killer dress, like it really showed off her smooth shoulders and slender figure, and her hair was nicely layered and parted in a way that accentuated her round eyes and supple lips. Wow, did she always dress like this, he thought to himself. After an entire afternoon beating around the bush, she told him that she had to go eat dinner with her parents. As she stood up from the grass, he showed no intention to get up. Instead he reached out to grab one of her hands. Her soft fingers ceased the beating of his pulse momentarily and finally he was able to ask her.

At school the next day, he looked for her in her classroom. He was hoping he could walk her home and maybe score another kiss. It feels good to know that you have a girlfriend to make out with whenever you liked. He turned blue when a fellow classmate informed him that she left school early. That was the day Mizuki disappeared.

Yuuta is able to deal with death. He had come into terms with it at a very young age. When he was eight years old, he couldn’t sleep one night because he had been lying in his bed thinking about death. After what seemed like hours of trying to shake off those thoughts, he went into his mother’s bedroom crying and shivering frantically. She asked him what was wrong and he told her that he didn’t want to die because he couldn’t bear the thought of never being able to see his mother and father again. Really, he was just afraid to be alone. The thought of being alone eternally was more frightening than the flames of hell or the torture of being pulled apart by horses. As she held onto him, she told him that his thoughts were silly and she tried to console him by making false promises that they’ll never leave him. Upon hearing his mother’s intended words of comfort, his fears were confirmed. He realized that death was inevitable; it was a part of life, and his goal was to postpone it for as long as possible. That is the kind of kid Yuuta was.

But Mizuki didn’t die. She vanished. This was actually harder for Yuuta to accept. He never thought someone could just disappear like that. After she was gone, there was a surge ludicrous rumors going around in school. Someone claimed they saw a prostitute that looked just like her, so maybe she left school to become one. It was also believed that gangsters had kidnapped her because her father owed them a ton of money. Then there was the rumor that she ran away from home and committed suicide in a hotel in the city. Yuuta didn’t know where any of these stories came from, but he didn’t believe a word of it. She is out there somewhere and soon she will contact him.

That was two years ago. Now, as Yuuta rode his bicycle down the familiar side streets, he thought about Mizuki and that – AND as he made a right turn he had to immediately squeeze the brake levers just to stop inches in front of the red car that pulled up into the intersection. Frozen in reverie, he was still gripping the levers, as hard as a pregnant woman squeezing her husband’s hand in labor, until the impatient driver honked at him to move out of the way. It had been two years and finally she had called him. That night before he received a call from an unregistered number. Mizuki was calling him from a payphone. He recognized her voice even before she said it.

“Mizuki…”
“Hey, I'm using a payphone, so I’ll probably get cut off, but I want to see you. Can you be at the Shopping Center at 1pm on Sunday?”
“Oh, ok. Where should I meet–“
“Go to the eighth floor, where the bookstore is.”
“The usual place.”
“Oh, good. You still remember.”
“Of course.”
She was silent for a while.
“Where were you all this time? What have you been doing?”
“I needed time to mature.”
Silence again. It’s difficult to know what to say at a time like this and so silence easily fills in the gap.
“Oh, it’s beeping. I’ll see you Sunday then!”
And then the line went dead. For the longest time, he stared at the display on his phone. The minute counter on his phone was the only proof that this conversation actually occurred.

On Sunday, he showed up early to the bookstore. Mizuki and him had often spoken about going abroad and seeing all the famous places of the world together, so their spot was naturally the travel guides. They had spent countless of hours on many occasions flipping through pages upon pages of photographs taken around the world. They wanted to go to Paris, Nice, Dresden, Barcelona, and so on, the list continues. He picked up the books as he waited for her and began to look though them again. It felt almost like seeing an old friend. He recalled every image and every memory that went along with it. By the time he go through the third book, he looked at his watch to see that it was a quarter past 1. He placed the book back on the shelf and glanced over at the escalator, hoping the next person ascending would be Mizuki. In the corner of his eyes, he felt a pair of eyes on him. He turned his head in slight degrees toward the direction of the stare to find one of the store clerks looking at him. That was an awkward moment.

Even though he didn’t see Mizuki, he felt that she was there. She definitely came to see him. He thought back to the travel books. She was probably leaving the country and going off to see the world. And she just wanted to see him one last time. That was why she led him here. This was her last message. We can’t possibly go back to the point two years ago, so meet me in our future.