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Where there’s ocean, there’s darkness. Oceans are deeper than anything in the world, and once you reach the point of no return, down under, the light slips past you like hourglass sand through the cracks of your hands.
From within the water, there’s only two ways to go: down, or up.
Sometimes, you get to a point where you can almost reach the light. It’s hovering at the surface, at your fingertips, and just one thrust—maybe if you trusted yourself enough, maybe if someone placed hands on your back and gave you just that one push, you’d make it, bursting out of the water, breaking the glass and leaving the dark behind.
But glass, when broken, cuts and scrapes. And it’s easy, just to float among flotsam at the bottom of the ocean.
“Midori. Can you ‘hear’ the song of the sea?”
Water touches the tips of his toes, lapping at it. In, the water tickles. Out, the water breathes. In, the water swells.
“Not really…” Gentle lapping, a few crashes on shore, nothing about the ocean amounts to anything close to music.
Kanata smiles. “You just haven’t ‘opened’ your ears enough, Midori.”
“O-Open…?” As always, Midori has a hard time understanding Kanata’s strange thoughts and whims, but he went with it. “I’ll… I’ll try harder to listen, but I’m not sure what you want me to do…”
Kanata spreads his arms wide. The sea is blue, blue, blue ; his arms encompass the whole expanse of it, capturing it all. “Listen,” Kanata urges. Seagulls squawk above in an equally blue blue sky, white shapes dappling against the white of clouds.
“There’s seagulls…”
“Si~lly.” Kanata presses a playful fingertip to the side of Midori’s nose. “The sea… has its own ‘voice’... if you listen hard enough, you can ‘hear’ it, too.”
Midori breathes. Tastes lingering salt from sea spray.
“...Shinkai-senpai,” Midori asks, with a slowness that can barely be considered conversational,
“do you ever hear ghosts?”
.
When light reaches darkness, it’s often described as, visually, a beautiful piece of artwork: silk light pouring in like liquid sunshine, spreading its warmth and chasing the darkness away.
Reality begs to differ.
Reality is harsh white expelling the darkness, searching each corner with sharp ferocity; reality is the loud light, the strong light, the overwhelming light, that snap up all black until Midori’s retinas burn with afterimage.
“Do you want to be a hero?”
“Did it hurt when you came onto land…?” As always, Midori doesn’t understand Kanata, but… he’s getting used to Kanata’s odd mannerisms enough to pose such a question. Metaphors, Midori realizes, is something that although he can’t interpret half the time, it comes easily to him when he wants them to.
Kanata, he’s on the same wavelength. “It ‘hurt’, yes. Because the sea is so ‘calm’ and ‘familiar’, the light, it threw me off ‘balance’.” Kanata picks up a seashell absentmindedly, tracing the spiral with his thumb. “But the land is where I met all of ‘you’, so I am ‘happy’, puka, puka. ”
“The light… I’m not used to it, yet…” Suns shine brightly during the daytime, but even during the night, the glow spills over and illuminates the moon. Midori, he was like the moon, and Ryuseitai , and Chiaki, is making him glow when he has no light in himself. “Because it hurts my eyes, and…”
Light, it penetrates through dark like a sword through fabric. “It is ‘unfamiliar’, is it not?” Kanata supplies. Because Kanata has also gone through the same.
“Yea… it’s hard to get accustomed to, when you’ve been in the dark for so long.” Midori lifts his head to the skies, a flat palm over his eyes. The sunlight catches itself on the edges of his hands. “Shinkai-senpai, if… if you… ah, nevermind, ignore me…”
Midori’s head tucks itself into his chest. Even here on the beach with Shinkai-senpai, it’s bright outside.
Kanata reaches out a hand, and it lands on Midori’s head. “I cannot just ‘ignore’ someone who has a ‘question’ I can answer. Fish die if they are ‘stressed’, you know.” He strokes Midori’s hair while saying this; it’s gentle enough not to be a disturbance.
“That’s… that’s rather hero-like, Shinkai-senpai…”
“Hehe~ We are Ryuseitai , are we not? Maybe Chiaki is rubbing ‘off’ me a little? I don’t want it ‘completely’, though.”
“Hahh, me neither… I’d hate it.” Midori turns to face Kanata. “Um… do you…”
Regret.
It’s not a word Midori can just say out loud.
“A ‘confession’, perhaps?” Kanata cocks his head to the side.
Midori’s cheeks are painted with a faint dusting of pink. “Ah, no, it’s not that… I’ve already confes... Not that I wouldn’t consider, er...” He covers his mouth, afraid of saying anything more.
Kanata gives Midori’s head a light pat. “Midori is a ‘good boy’. You are ‘cute’ when you are ‘shy’.”
Midori doesn’t reply. Can’t reply.
Kanata watches Midori’s profile, somewhat of an interest sparkling in his sea-green eyes. Chiaki… picked this kid, didn’t he? He saw potential, saw a spark waiting to be kindled.
“Midori. You are ‘worried’ about something, are you not?”
Because Chiaki picked this kid, he will be able to survive even the roughest of storms. Midori, when you shine, you are beautiful.
Midori doesn’t reply. But what he does do is lean onto Kanata’s shoulder, his eyebrows knitted and expression dark.
“I was just… thinking…” Nights on end, Midori would spend hours lying in bed, not being able to sleep: lying awake on his back, thinking. When Midori thought things over, they were described in brilliant, vivid detail, a direct contrast to the life around him.
It needs to be that way, because whenever Midori thought things over, his room gets darker, and he lets the light slip. Thinking, combined with feeling, was dangerous—it hurts to breathe, in his bedroom.
(It hurts to breathe, too, for Kanata; Kanata doesn’t let Midori know.)
His mind wanders, derailed from reality. Midori doesn’t notice Kanata shifting his shoulder underneath him so that their heads were pressed together at the sides, both leaning into each other like two cards on the top of a tower of playing cards.
What Midori sees is a storefront in his mind’s eye, much like his own family’s, an array of vegetables displayed outside. From carrots, to potatoes, to eggplants. Midori is standing in the middle of it all, leaning on boxes of fresh produce, wiping his forehead. He’s preparing orders and moving crates, spraying water on the broccoli, sweeping the floor.
He’s sitting in a classroom. People come and go, silhouettes of mouths moving and hands gesturing. If his classroom were a planet system, he would be orbiting on the outer rings, the rest of his classmates intersecting orbits and talking face-to-face.
Bells ring; Midori exits the room. A boy comes over, waves at him. A friend. A girl, voice small, hands Midori a letter before dashing away; it’s a love letter, most likely. Midori keeps them all in a box, and doesn’t bear to read them. After all, why would a guy like him receive such bloated, over-the-top praise he hears in those letters? Mistaken identity, maybe, and yet, it must be my pretty face.
Just nights, spent working through homework. Between a round of problems and tears and sleepiness and sleeplessness, day comes by again and drags him awake. But the rhythm was slow, it was steady, predictable. A rhythm he could get into, integrate with the beat like second nature. Drifting from one place to another, it could have been like that.
Now, it’s fireworks.
Rhythm scattered, shifted, changed into compound time. Chiaki’s voice echoes, Do you want to be a hero? and it’s there, where the road split, when Midori had taken Chiaki’s outstretched hand, and accepted the light’s blinding rays.
The ghosts, they echo in his head.
Do you regret, Midori?
The simple days you could have had, given up?
“But…” Words catch in his mouth, square pegs caught in circular holes. Kanata tucks his head under Midori’s chin, feeling the vibrations there, and the ghosts shrivel away, if only a bit, from the soothing presence. “The thing...about light, is,” Midori continues, hugging his knees closer. Tighter. “The thing about light is,”
Once light has sliced through and taken you into its embrace, you keep on seeing it, over and over again. A stream of afterimages in your subconscious, something you can’t just shake away.
“when you taste it once, how it feels… you start to miss it. You want to taste it again.”
Kanata blinks, eyes widened—out of what exactly, no one but Kanata would ever know. I want to make Chiaki’s dream come true , that was his dream, but Kanata has never realized, at least consciously, just how large the imprint light on water has made.
Water and fire make water vapor, but when sun hit ice, hit ocean, a reflection flares. Have I been chasing the light as well?
“That, if only… if only I didn’t say yes, would it be different? Would I be…”
His voice catches in his throat, and he looks to Kanata. Kanata sees Midori’s expression, and thinks, it almost gives off a feeling of helplessness .
“Midori, this isn’t ‘something’ you need to ‘think’ about,” Kanata says. He picks up a conch shell, its pink underside like frills of a summertime dress, and hands it to Midori. Midori accepts it, a question mark filling his eyes.
“Shinkai-senpai, er… thanks…
“Put it ‘up’ to your ear,” Kanata instructs, and Midori does as he’s told.
Kanata smiles. “Do you ‘hear’ the ocean now?”
Midori nods; even though he knows conch shells aren’t a telephone wire connecting to the sea, it’s nice to pretend. The sound resonates, hums; it’s soothing.
“Sometimes, you need a ‘push’ to be able to listen. Just like this ‘shell’, it ‘amplifies’ the environment, so you can ‘hear’ the song of the sea.” Up above, day is giving way to night, and red-violet blooms in a once-blue sky. “When ‘light’ shines through a magnifying glass, it ‘burns’, you know? So it is ‘hard’ sometimes, even for me. But we should not ‘live’ with regret; we should find the ‘new’ things, the ‘happy’ things in life, and replace that ‘regret’ with ‘love’.” Kanata places his hand to his chest then, and feels the heart beneath work itself into a steady thrum. “Midori, maybe the ‘light’ did not ‘find you’.”
“No…” Midori puts the shell down, and stares out into the breadth of the sea. “No, I’m pretty sure, it was Morisawa-senpai who came into my class first…” That’s what light did—it seeps into every crack, nook, cranny—and spreads like butter, or flames in a forest.
Forest fires give way to new life, you know.
“Chiaki is only the ‘amplifier’,” Kanata says. He is a prism, refracting the light within and splitting colors; he’s made Kanata shine like an opalescent pearl instead of like deadly blades. “Maybe you were the one ‘seeking’ the light, Midori.”
“Maybe I was the…” Midori grows quiet. Has he ever wanted to stumble into the high fervor, the vigor and vitality that was Ryuseitai ? Did he ever want to be in the centre of attention, the focus of the crowd as he and the rest of his unit mates sang and danced their lives and hearts away on the stage?
But Midori remembers. Sometimes, only feelings remain in memory; Midori’s heart is pumping blood and beating and alive as he recalls: the faint scent of sweat, yes, but also the smiles blooming from the dark edges of the stage, the bright, bright overhead lights haloing their heads. Sengoku-kun’s brilliant, shaking grin, arms snaking behind Midori’s back to hug his torso. Tetora-kun’s outstretched fist, full of relief, pumped out in a display of power, of strength. Morisawa-senpai’s contagious energy, but also Morisawa-senpai’s hidden tears of happiness, glinting off his eyes for a split second Midori almost wonders if it was a trick of light, or merely sweat.
Shinkai-senpai’s warmth, the calm he carries mixing with the tension, smoothing the waters. “Because I met all of ‘you’ when I came to ‘land’, so I am ‘happy’. ”
What did I feel? What do I feel? Did Midori’s heart beat in the same rhythm as the rest of Ryuseitai ? Did Midori smile without thought; did Midori feel the rush of blood at the back of his head and feel true happiness?
Did he feel the hands clutching his own, and think, I’ve found my place ?
“I’m not… sure about that, Shinkai-senpai, but…” Midori gives Kanata a small smile. “Even though I know that something cannot be made from nothing, but I don’t… want to be nothing, anymore.”
“Hehe… that is a ‘good’ place to start,” Kanata smiles back. “And no one is ever ‘nothing’, Midori—not even the seaweed at the ‘bottom’ of the sea is ever not ‘important’.”
“Thank you… Shinkai-senpai, you’re really helpful, sometimes…” And maybe after this talk, Midori’s hit with a strange bout of confidence, because he takes Kanata’s hand in his own, and wonders about the flitting feeling in his heart.
(Does he feel Kanata’s hand clutching his own, and think, I’ve found my place? )
Beside him, Kanata laughs, light and floaty. “Midori, you are actually ‘quite brave’, aren’t you?” Kanata closes his eyes, a comfortable warmth tingeing his cheeks. “I wanted Chiaki to ‘teach’ me something while I was on ‘land’, but Midori, maybe… perhaps you can ‘teach’ me a few things about ‘happiness’?”
Midori sputters, but he can’t retract his hand or take his gaze away, because Kanata was holding them both, intensely.
Light touches everyone, just in different amounts, in different ways. And Kanata, and Midori, they were still being touched, and they were still reaching for something, an understanding, something more to learn, what happiness means—but they were reaching together; they were not alone, and if darkness threatened to claim one of them, the other would be there to pull them back up—guiding the way with the light they’ve created themselves.
He’s never thought of it before, but Kanata was a sort of light himself, too. But while Chiaki was a supernova, a blinding flash, a solar flare, Kanata was the sunlight that caught on water sometimes, shimmering.
Kanata was the ocean; Kanata is the sea. Where there’s ocean, there’s darkness; there’s murkiness, uncertainty, but the light down here is beautiful, and even more so, the light above. Once you reach the point of no return, you’re deep down under and you are faced with two choices:
one, to go down,
and two, to go up.
(There’s a kiss, somewhere in the middle. Both of their faces drip with leftover sunlight, sunlight they’re comfortable taking.)
Falling in love is both, isn’t it?