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SPRING
a cherry blossom
drifting in my coffee cup
i’m slipping away
You’re twenty-two and your life is over.
You were going to die, then you didn’t, then you did, and you then were whole once again. It seems like fate just does the opposite of what you want.
When you got back, he was supposed to be here. He never promised you anything, but you figure he owed you as much—for stabbing you in the back, for watching all the emotions you didn’t know you had slip through your fingers until you feel like you’re going to bleed out from the selfishness of it.
If he didn’t owe it to you, he sure did owe something to his friends. Yet, you can see from their faces that they know about as much as you do. You despise them for getting more time with him than you've ever gotten so much that you’re ready to murder them where they stand. But you’ll let them live for now—he needs a bait, something Akira will be willing to go back to.
Akira Kurusu is many things—the ex-leader of the Phantom Thieves, attic trash, the world's worst chess player, a sentimental fool—but he’s not someone who drops off the face of the Earth without a word.
There’s no doubt in your mind that he’s doing it on purpose. You knew you were breaking his heart by staying away, but you did so anyway. It’s only fair he craves revenge, it’s what you would have done, too. You're confident that your line of reasoning is fairly solid. He loved you, of course he did, how could he not when you gave him your all?
Your unwavering resolve is the one thing you never doubt—you’re the one thing you never doubt. But your resolve is long gone now, and you hate Akira for taking it away from you, like you’re another treasure on his to-steal list.
(It terrifies you that you might not have been as important to him as you initially thought you would be.)
You should have been the one to destroy him. You can’t stand the idea that he’s the one to have the last laugh. You’ll make sure to make him pay for double-crossing even if it’s the last thing you’ll do.
For now, you’re content with drinking the coffee you missed so much while you were gone. You convince yourself it’s the only thing Akira had to offer.
When you go outside, your umbrella is heavy with the weight of cherry blossoms.
SUMMER
the fireworks blooming
right outside your apartment
soon they will wither
The first time he kissed you, you told him you hate fireworks.
It’s the first thing you’ve ever said to him that’s actually true. Maybe that’s why he rewards you with a kiss, for being all nice and honest. He was always so good at discerning truth from a lie like he’s some virtue-sniffing dog. It’s why he’s always on your trail, like he’s a hellhound who’s going to drag you back deep into the depths of perdition.
No matter how hard you try to rationalize it in your head, you can’t justify kissing him back. He’s warm, he’s kind, he’s the closest thing you’ve ever had to having something of your own. You don't know why you're drawn to him. A part of you wants to crack his skull open to see what makes it click—what makes him so different from everyone you’ve ever met.
You’ve known him less than a month but you already sense he’s the only person you could ever fall in love with.
Of course, even then you know you’re going to have to kill him. You have a very good reason to believe he’s the leader of the very group your father told you to get rid of. But even if he wasn’t, you’d still kill him for your own indulgence. If killing people you hate brings you so much joy, you can only imagine how elated you’re going to be once the dead body of someone you love grows cold and rigid under your fingers.
But until then, Akira's bright and full of life like the fireworks blooming in the night sky. You're in one of Tokyo's many alleyways, it's probably what makes it so tempting to kiss him back. He met you here in secret, ditching his friends last second just to meet you. It makes your chest swell with joy—no one’s ever sacrificed anything for you. At the same time, you know that no matter how much you want him to, he’s not going to kill for you, betray for you, lie for you. It makes you feel like the time you spend together is utterly worthless.
His laughter buzzes under your skin with the sound of cicadas in the warm summer evening.
When the rain falls, you promise yourself you’ll do your best to forget him once he’s gone. He's here to prove you wrong.
He’s the type to never run away from the rain, standing in the middle of the street like he thinks the way he’s acting is so special—a god among the mortals who scatter around him in search of shelter.
From now on, you’ll always associate rain with him. So much so that when he’s gone you almost expect the world to die, the drought wiping away every sign of life on the planet.
And yet, the rain still falls in Tokyo.
With each drop, you slowly wash away.
AUTUMN
just realizing
i can’t even spell autumn
without your name (aki)
Your university teacher makes you write his name over and over again. It’s torture really. The full and round hiragana letters roll under your pen like they’re Sisyphus’ boulder.
You’ve never liked writing poetry, you consider it a waste of paper. So when your teacher stops you after class to praise you for the piece you were forced to come up with for the class, you have no doubt in your mind that it’s just another irremovable stain Akira Kurusu left on your soul.
The teacher tells you to give her more—you laugh, because you’ve spent your whole life giving more, and more, and now you’re done. You tell her as much. She doesn’t take no for an answer, stubborn old hag that she is. You say you have nothing to write about—she tells you to write about autumn.
(You wonder if Akira disappeared because he gave people so much there was more nothing left to give.)
Poetry is easy and in its core disgustingly boring, you have no idea why people like it. You choose random sets of words and people trip over their own feet to give it a meaning. Somehow it reminds you of your career as a celebrity. It’s just as fake—if anything giving interviews was a little harder.
Autumn is yet another thing you despise, the red leaves mocking you with every step you take. Maybe that’s why you keep writing about it—you’ve always done your best work when your heart was dead set on hatred. You write until you're all but spent, until you feel like your soul is a little cleaner. You'll never be able to wash away your sins, you never wanted to—but if anything, you feel like you're close to letting something go.
You never realized you can write so many poems about the same thing, over and over again. Your professor asks you if you’ve ever been in love with a girl named Autumn. You say yes and it makes her happy. She says the way you write about autumn seems like it’s clear a personification of someone you once loved, and you’re forced to admit that she’s right.
(You keep telling yourself being in love doesn't make you weak.)
Akira told you once that when he visits Inokashira Park during autumn, he can’t help but think about you—how your costume is a beautiful mix of gold and red he loves so much. You ask him how you feel about white, since it's so clearly the most eye-catching part of your palette. He tells you that white somehow doesn't suit you, that you should only wear colors full of life.
To take your revenge, you slowly get rid of colors that remind you of him, content on living the rest of your days filled with mundane monochrome. You pry them slowly away from your closet and away from your memory.
You’re told you’re the first person to write so much about autumn without mentioning its colors.
WINTER
our kichijoji—
i'm retracing your footsteps
carved into the snow
The one good thing about winter is that it doesn’t rain. You consider it a season least tainted with Akira’s presence, but every year your self-destructive tendencies force you to visit Kichijoji anyway—it's almost like you're going on a pilgrimage.
You have no way of knowing if Akira’s dead, you suppose he might as well be. You’re turning twenty-six next year and so far, not even Futaba has been able to track Akira down. They all mourn him in their own way, but you refuse to give up. You hate to admit you’ve bet your money on the wrong horse.
Your teacher encourages you to publish your poetry, and to her surprise, you agree without a single word of complaint. Poetry might be useless, but you've never done anything in your life that wouldn't serve some higher purpose. When it's finally published, you're somehow content—every poem is a calling card, and you rejoice in the fact that all critics seem to get your message wrong. You made sure to twist the meanings into something only you and Akira would be able to decipher, and you're proud of your work.
(You’re disappointed when Akira doesn’t show up on your doorstep. You still think he owes you, but you’re starting to forget what it is you wanted from him anyway.)
Sometimes you find yourself following a random trace of footsteps in the snow, imagining you’ll find Akira standing on the other end of it—waiting patiently the way you waited for him all these evenings you wasted in this neighborhood when you were a teenager. You feel pathetic for being alone in this game of cat and mouse, but you slowly start to regain some of your resolve. It took you long enough.
You realize you’re doing just fine without Akira Kurusu in your life. Despite everything you anticipated, the Earth doesn’t stop spinning, the rain continues falling, and you start relying on the seasons being the one constant in your life—you find it that it's easier to rely on something that you know is bound to come back.
It’s all just a part of your ritual—each year you revive Akira Kurusu through your memories, retracing your time together, haunting the places you’ve visited with him at your side, but you start accepting that it’s normal, that it’s just what life is, that maybe you were never meant to forget. Maybe you were meant to be the one to keep him alive.
You turn twenty-seven, then twenty-eight, and then twenty-nine.
For the first time, you visit the jazz club—you tell yourself it’s because the evening is particularly cold and nasty. In all these years, you haven’t found the strength to go inside. Maybe because jazz is all about improvisation, and you’re painfully aware you're so reliant on your established patterns you grew scared of the unexpected. Your new life has been built on the most fragile of foundations, but at least, for the first time in your life, you have a foundation.
The owner doesn’t recognize you. It’s only fair, it’s been a long time.
He tells you to take a seat.
You’ll already know who’s going to sit by the counter.
So many seasons you spent without him, you’d think your heart would at least stop. It doesn’t.
He looks different, but you'll forgive him for getting older.
You sit down next to him, and you wait for the unexpected.
“It’s been a long time,” he says.
It’s enough.