Chapter Text
“Ah ah Diluc, don’t go breaking your promise to me.”
Diluc was getting ready to perform a song after a short interview. However, the host held him back with that reminder. He shyly hid his face and tried to act his way out of it.
“What promise?”
“You know what you said this morning Diluc.”
“I told you nothing, Thoma.”
“Oh really? Okay, let me read out your text messages to me—”
At that moment, the host whose name I always knew was Thoma took out his phone, and Diluc’s face went red.
“Okay I’ll just tell the audience that it’s about you know…—”
“Fine. Just shut up now Thoma. Please.”
The audience found the exchange rather amusing earning the two applause. Diluc finally gets out and it reminded me of how we were before he left. He stood the same way he did when he presented reports in school. I remember him being nervous to present a proposal to the student council.
“As you all know, my solo debut came in a form of an album I called Sunday Playdates. Nine tracks, all about someone. Who this someone is—well that’s for you to wonder about and for me to know.”
“Really Diluc? Oh, what will you do if I tell her name right now?”
“I will actually leave your studio and pray every night that your viewership decreases. You wouldn’t dare, would you?”
The two men banter on stage and everyone laughs. They were after all childhood friends. We used to play with Thoma before he went abroad. It was I, Eula, Kaeya, Thoma and him. Until they all left.
“Nine tracks all about someone? Must be you, Gunnhildr.”
“Obviously Eula. Whom else would he write about? Is she not his muse?”
“I am most definitely not. With looks like that he probably has a girlfriend.”
“So you are admitting he has the looks. And you were even giving me glares for buying you a ticket.”
I did not bother to argue but I knew, it really was not me. There was a possibility it was but it was low. Many girls liked him and I doubt that he ever saw me as more than his best friend. After all, he left me just that easily.
“Sunday Playdates. We always had those as children. Every Sunday I was excited to go meet her and do whatever kids did. If I could describe it in one word, it would be magical. When I went over to her place, she would teach me how to bake cookies and we’d feed that to her little sister. When she was at my house, we’d spend hours reading under the vineyards and then maybe heading down near the shore to pick calla lilies.”
I could feel Lisa’s smirk growing as I could just stare at the stage.
“The lead track—hers—it was the first one I wrote.”
He sat with his ever-so-familiar guitar on stage and performed it. It was all the things he liked about her
Sunday afternoons at the winery
Exam nights where we slept at four
How you never liked flattery
All those things that were yours
Everything that was uniquely hers. How her eyes were the shade of blue he found calmest. How she could stay calm even in the tensest debates. The faces she made when she studied. Her specific way of making coffee late nights in the café.
And perhaps I was simply in denial.
“Must I admit, I got butterflies over this Diluc. I even know who this is about!”
The audience laughs it off but of course the pressing for them to spill the beans on who this mystery person is. Lisa and Eula send me their mischievous looks teasing me about how I can’t escape this.
“Okay, okay. The second track now. ‘lowercase g’. I’ve always questioned people who changed the way they wrote letters. Why not just stick to the standard way of writing we’ve been taught? Why must you go the extra mile to make something that looks like their own font?”
He told the audience how he met…me. We were young then. I wrote my uppercase letter g’s differently. They looked like the lowercase version but in cursive, but they were obviously capitalized. He marked my paper wrong and I told the teacher.
Your handwriting was too unique
But it made my interest in you peak
From then on, you seemed to shine
Your lowercase g was hard to find
Long story short, she made us talk it out. He was too stubborn to just apologize to me and correct my paper the right way. Instead, we spent an hour or two in the room not talking. Eventually, he told me if I could show him pictures of my tortoise that I brought the other day.
From there, it was Diluc and Jean.
“Now for my favorite track. Diluc would you mind telling us about café?”
“Well…we grew up. She liked going to cafés frequently. I could probably tell you every café in our hometown since we frequented them so often. She eventually worked in one in high school to have money of her own.”
It was in the middle of June
You were behind the counter
We were both humming a tune
Thoughts escaped saying “I want her.”
“I often accompanied her on shifts when I had the time. Her manager even treated me as an honorary staff member because I was there often. She liked coffee quite a lot and this song is about the happiness I had with her. Because during these times, I was happiest.”
Oh.
It was the saddest for me. Looking back at them is nothing but a painful reminder of how boring I was. That he chose a different life. We could co-own our own café that we joked about but I was watching him on stage as I sat there.
They are not sad on their own, they are miserable because I know now what the future holds.
“Oh no. I hate this track. It feels the least done to me—fables.”
I like this song though.
In a world where we’re examples
For children in their fables
You are right. This song feels…half-baked. Done two minutes before the deadline. Except for the end maybe.
“Fables are well—what I can define as perfect examples for children to follow. It is somewhat every ‘what if’ I had. Every other future where we are together and kids can look up to us and go, ‘Yeah, Uncle Diluc and Auntie mmmm really make me want to fall in love too.”
Auntie mmmm, huh?
What if in this fable we went to college together?
What if this time we stayed forever?
What if we ended up traveling the world?
Or what if we just let the stories unfold?
I hate how cliché it is. I also hate how it makes me pause for a moment and ask myself what if I had never given you that cup of coffee for takeout and just extended the opening hours. Maybe then, you could have said goodbye.
“So tell me Diluc, what is going on in tortoises? This track feels so ominously out of place in this rather romantic album.”
Thoma was right. It always felt heavy, more like spoken poetry. It was not your typical love song, it felt more like watching them burn for someone else when you have been doing nothing but light his own flame.
“I meant for that to happen. It actually was the first track I wrote for this album. Every lyric came naturally to me at two in the morning as I sat in the very café I’ve been referencing over and over again.”
So, he has been there too. Has he been drinking Well’s Reflection as often as I have?
“With her, I always thought it would be well…eternal. That even if everything changed she would be the only permanent thing by my side. I was right. The only person who had left was well…me.”
I am glad he knows that he was the one who broke us both. That he just got up one day and left me here as if all these years never even meant anything.
I told you I would stay until the end
However, I cut off our world too early
With unfulfilled promises and messages unsent
There are things left unsaid, surely
“We had tortoises growing up. They represent eternity and that kind of ties into how we thought we would both be—eternal. Tortoises also move quite slowly and we moved so slowly that I never got to realize in time how much I had wanted her to stay.”
The audience then reacts in a comforting manner. Of course, there would be some of his fans offering themselves to replace me and the other half would just want their idol to have a healed heart. Of course, there was also me. The said girl who he wanted to stay.
He was seven years too late.
“Diluc I hate—I absolutely despise—your album and the transition between these tracks. We go from tortoises that made me want to call my girlfriend and ask her to break up with me then we go to dreams. This song makes me want to call my girlfriend and serenade her. Is it so hard to pick a theme?”
“Is it so hard to call your girlfriend without using my songs as an excuse?”
The track dreams were an epiphany for him. The realization that whatever ‘dreams’ he was chasing felt unauthentic and hazy. That somewhere along the way they no longer were the same dreams and that he had one so attainable—if he was not late by nearly a decade.
Amidst the confetti and glitter
Your eyes still shine brighter
Should I stop making films?
For you are the star of better dreams.
“Diluc Ragnvindr no longer dreamed of being on stage, he dreamed of being with Jean Gunnhildr.”
If someone heard Eula right now, I would, unfortunately, see my name in the headlines tomorrow morning. I could no longer be in denial of the fact that I was her—the girl who was his muse for the album. Nobody else had to know but it felt heavy knowing this.
“Seventh track. Finally almost done with having to expose myself to this live audience. You see words I held back are special to me. It’s just me strumming an instrumental of this song and then you suddenly hear me ranting and arguing with myself in a bathroom, but it’s special to me nonetheless.”
What should I say?
That I love you?
That I do not want to leave but I want to pursue my dreams
And you told me you would be happy if I achieved them so…
I can come back for you…right?
God, don’t look at me like you want to ask me to stay
I can’t even tell you I’m leaving now
If I choose you maybe the world will still know me
If I choose my dreams then I can secure the world for you
You have always been the priority
So I’ll choose to take the world to give it to you.
I have so many things to tell you
But I feel like choking on the coffee you made
So they’ll just be the words I held back
I never wanted to listen to this track. The title says it all. What if it makes me want to run back to him? Who knows what it could do to me and my heart. So I left it there, untouched unlike the rest of his songs. Now that it’s playing though, I hate every sound of it.
“Enough with the sad hours—what if Diluc cries? What if I have to start pulling out cans of beer and telling him it’s alright that he still loves her? On live television too! Our second to last track is entitled are you still there?”
“Like words I held back—the title is literally what the song is about. It’s my public apology, and perhaps my public way of ‘happy birthday’-ing my way back into her life. I want to ask her if she is still there and if she is happy. I want to ask her how she’s been and give her the apology I’ve owed her.”
Will you still answer my calls at night?
Hold me a sign when I arrive
Because I’ll book a late night flight
Just to see you at five
I did not want to accept him back into my life. In fact, I wanted him to completely disappear and be a figure of my past. For him to want to come back when he did not even say goodbye felt like alcohol in my wounds. Could he just…leave? With a goodbye this time too.
As he got ready for his second and last performance of the night, he took a quick glance at our area. Yes, I am here but I do not want to be.
“For the final track—last order—I gues I’ll just sing it and then let you all figure it out. If you can, then you are so good at interpreting because this song is about a moment only she and I shared.”
It was about the night at the café.
“Jean!”
“Yes yes, one warm Well’s Reflection with extra whipped cream on top. To go because well, what the heck it’s nearly 12 midnight and you decide to waltz in here?”
“I’m rating this café a single star because the staff present is rude. Maybe I’ll add four more stars however because she’s cute.”
I rolled my eyes at him as I began to make his last order. As soon as I finished the coffee, I put it in front of him and filed the money into the register.
He was simply smiling at me as he sipped slowly.
“Will you still love me even if I have like a hundred girls chasing after me because I’m famous?”
“I would. Does that inflate your ego?”
“Research purposes, Gunnhildr. Research purposes.”
He got behind the counter as I wiped the work area with a washcloth. I could hear him rip a piece of paper and was writing something down. I looked over my shoulder to see him finish writing a contract.
“Sign.”
“I don’t sign contracts without knowing what they’re for.”
“Fine.”
A contract that Jean Gunnhildr will always be happy for Diluc Ragnvindr—no matter how hard it may be to accept the circumstances that come with the said happiness.
I signed the contract because I had thought that it was for college matters. That I had to be happy if he got into some prestigious yet far university. I thought wrong.
I take my own piece of paper and make my own contract for him. A contract that Diluc Ragnvindr must always choose what is best for him, even if it requires letting go of Jean Gunnhildr.
He then came up to me from behind and embraced me. He whispered something in my ear I never figured out and went back to his cup.
“Well, don’t stay too late here. I’ll have to tell your manager to stop giving you closing shift if you stay here.”
“It’s your fault I’m still here past midnight.”
“I thought a midnight waltz would be good but you keep rejecting me.”
We never had the chance to waltz at midnight because he disappeared without a trace the next day. Months later, I find out he is training to be part of some boy band. Then years later, here we are.
I know that one day
I’ll look in the well’s reflection
Only to realize that
I’m still in love with you
With one last strum, I am sure he is looking at me.
I am looking back at him too, but with a completely different look.
Perhaps this is all right. Looking at him from afar. He gives me a longing look as if those lyrics were the same words he whispered then. However, I tell him through my eyes that it can no longer work.
Jean Gunnhildr will always be happy for Diluc Ragnvindr—no matter how hard it may be to accept the circumstances that come with the said happiness.
So now that Diluc Ragnvindr is living a life where Jean Gunnhildr can no longer fit in—she must let go in order to give him freedom and accept that she is just the subject of an album.
Even so, Diluc Ragnvindr is willing to make space and time for Jean Gunnhildr in his life. This however may result in contract termination, as she is not fit to be his onscreen partner. He also knows that even if she is kept hidden from the public eye her safety and privacy will always somehow be at risk.
A contract that Diluc Ragnvindr must always choose what is best for him, even if it requires letting go of Jean Gunnhildr.
I walk out of the studio without a word. I can no longer turn back and run to him.
Sunday Playdates will always remain just another bittersweet memory met with his fame and my nostalgia.
“Lisa, Eula—would it really pain me to say that I am glad that I am nothing but an inspiration for his music now? Perhaps, this is enough.”