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“Sorry.”
Said in passing, over-the-shoulder, noncommittal and blunt, as you brushed by him in the cramped street. Pushing his shoulder back with yours. Brusque. ‘Sorry,’ stated in the same way one uses ‘How are you?’ as a greeting—marked by insincerity and non-involvement and an implicit obligation to fill silence with niceties. The collision was enough to knock him off balance, and he, torn between reactions of castigation and quiet indifference, found any possible words caught in his throat and could only let out a graceless and choked sound in response; and you, having carried on down the street without a second glance, did not hear him. He scowled and collected himself and looked behind him in one single movement—though he figured you had long since disappeared from view, he also realized, even if he had spotted your form over his shoulder, he would not have recognized you among the swaths of people packed into the street. The crowd itself some featureless and amorphous unity, and you, both in it, lost and of it, a part. All together indistinct.
Within the minute following he could not remember your face or your clothes or even your voice, every tangible aspect fleeting save for the lasting impression of a tactless interaction with another. He thought of the way you had unceremoniously pushed past him and inexplicably flushed, humbled by this reminder of his insignificance. To feel unimportant was now so foreign to him. He was struck with an impression from his childhood—the pervasive feeling of inconsequence which once plagued him, a feeling against which he fought so hard—and he found himself thinking on it wistfully. A yearning perhaps not for the feeling itself but for the idyllic milieu it imbued.
He disposed of his own profundity, for now. He could not think on the past without being consumed by longing. He externalized himself.
Brisk was the afternoon air as he ambled through the town in the eve of winter. The comfort inherent to a year’s closing. The late months were always a welcome change in the face of such blistering summers, though these days, all but the seasons seemed stagnant. Or perhaps he was simply jaded. Today he had earned himself a rare moment of solitude under the guise of searching for a birthday gift for Armin, informing the others he lacked trust in their abilities to keep the present secret. A quest which led him to the town market, a charming and bustling plaza of commerce that seemed entirely separate from the rest of the world. A breeziness so unfamiliar to him. He would once despise this population, filled with the unaware and apathetic, but now, their ignorance, in some way, enviable.
He went where his legs carried him. Partially aware of his surroundings but more preoccupied with himself. He came upon a bookshop, front window rife with leather-bound fiction. Through the cracked door, a draft of must and leather and paper, aged and stained. Homey. Smells reminiscent of that book Armin once presented, in childhood, whose contents were at one time of so much interest. The scent of forbidden knowledge. The building’s edifice, familiar—all wood and stone and slated roof, indistinct among the surrounding architecture. Grime burrowed in the dips of the stone exterior. He touched this roughness as he stared through the shop window. Each book had its own red-ribbon marker, a fiery tongue laid tame between parchment and words inked by those with greater minds than he. As he entered the shop, he understood Armin’s affinity—the smells, the quietude of dampened sound, a tangible embrace. One could lie on these grounds and sleep for eternity, for in this shop, surrounded by the unspoken intellections and lamentations of others, time lulled and itself seemed to arrest. As he browsed the shelves and scanned words and names so alien to him, he was overcome by the realization that he was entirely a stranger to Armin’s interests. He shifted from foot to foot and thought uncomfortably on it—there was something odd about the idea of discovering something new about someone with whom you had spent your entire life. With Armin he had shared dreams and agony—why was this so foreign to him?
He exited the store emptyhanded and self-conscious and resolved to ask Armin about the books he liked. He despised the fact he had never taken the time to do so, regardless of whether it was a fault of his own or a byproduct of their present reality—existence marked by suffering and few peaceful interludes.
It was dusk now, the sun having set and given way to bluish twilight, and the street was sparsely populated, and the air, now bitterly frigid, seeped through his clothes and settled on his skin. He was not ready to return to HQ and instead found himself wishing for an endless solitude. As he walked down the street, one so different from that which was there earlier in the day, he forced himself to just feel—feel the way his footsteps, uneven on the cobblestone, felt in his ankles, his knees. To feel the weight of his arms by his sides, the way they dragged his shoulders towards the earth. To feel the way the night air numbed his fingertips and spread throughout his form.
Was this numbness anything like death’s aftermath?
Surely not. Living numbness was like silence, for silence was simply wordless sound, the world’s ceaseless and gasping breath, absence rather than nothingness. Death was an abject void. Nothing any living being could conceive.
When the time came for him to disappear, as much as he convinced himself he would rescind control willingly, he knew he would resist. Something in his nature, something deep and uncontrollable, so verily feared death—as it was in the nature of a priest to venerate his God, or the nature of time to continue unremittingly and remorselessly, this fear was intrinsic and implacable. And one day, when he was to finally meet Death, she there to take him as she had so many others he knew and loved, he would be unashamedly afraid, and he would finally know himself fully.
His thinking was interrupted by song—one hazy and incoherent, an amalgamation of lyric and wordless vocalization, yet so deliriously familiar. Echoing off stone, through the streets, a ghostly resonance. Memories returned in swells—the warmth of the kitchen on a summer’s day, the rumbling laugh of his father, the taste of tea and soup and fresh-baked bread, his bedroom, pitch in the night, moonlight on walls, the smell of clean laundry, sun caught in his mother’s hair. His knees collapsed beneath him; his hand, outreached to support his weight. He gasped and blinked away tears and did nothing to fight against the paralysis that has overtaken him. The tune, ephemeral and carried by a winter zephyr, was pervasive, without origin, and settled over the street like some aural mantle. It ended suddenly, cut off by a voice before him.
“Are you all right?”
He did not answer, could not answer. The silence, muffled. He finally looked up and saw you, though he did not recognize your face. You repeated your question, concerned, forceful, and laid a hand on his shoulder. Through fabric, he felt your warmth; he could not stop the tears or his trembling inhalations. Your touch was so gentle, within it, compassion so plethoric. As if he were a friend, a lover.
You sat him in the street and sank down beside him. Shoulder-to-shoulder. The hand that wiped at his face did little to stop his tears.
“It is okay to cry, you know.”
He shook his head in denial and sobbed again, and you simply and calmly restated your sentiments—an aphorism in which he was meant to find comfort. The night, now marked by his quiet cries, seemed desolate; moon and sky entire occluded by clouds. The street on which he sat was painted in undulating shadows, casted by a sole streetlamp illuminated by an orange and curling flame. Your arm, draped over his shoulder, made him cry more—when was it last he was held like this? He turned and buried his face in your shirt and breathed in your scent, one of oak and tea and personhood, and relished in the sincerity of your embrace. To offer him comfort was not your bounden duty—you simply rested with him and offered your arms out of compassion. You hugged his form tighter as if you too craved the contact.
You quietly reassured him, of what you did not know, but he nonetheless absorbed your words. He felt known by you, a stranger who immediately unmasked him—a type of intimacy which could only be shared between those who did not know each other. So rare and unlike the closeness of friends. You were at once warm and familiar and homely, and new and exciting and alien. You were not his friend and did not feel like his friend, yet neither was required of you. You, to him, in this moment, were something entirely different.
He wondered what you thought of him. A pitiable child? One who only knew inconceivable loss and sorrow? You would not be incorrect to assume either.
He had stopped crying long ago yet you still held him. And he, you.
He pulled away and looked at your face and absorbed none of it before he leaned forward to kiss you. A chaste contact, testing. He flushed, and warmness crept into his chest as you stared at him, eyes wide, unmoving. A misstep driven by yearning you within him engendered. He turned away as you leaned forward to meet his lips again, so your nose bumped his cheek, and you then engaged in an unwieldy dance to reorient your bodies to kiss. Your laugh, awkward and choked and fragile.
Then he was kissing you, and it neither amorous nor lustful. And though he did not know what to do, the kiss itself static and somewhat unnatural, it was comfortable, placid, effortless—effortless like swimming with a current or laughing with a friend or returning, just before nightfall, to the warm embrace of a quiet home. To him, you were intrinsic.
Your hands on his face, gentle and warm and familiar, wiping away tears.
The lamplight burned low when you finally pulled away from him.
“Find me, again.”
Your touch, a gentle graze of his browbone. And with it, you kissed him one last time and smiled and stood and walked away and were engulfed in a dense and inky blackness the light did not penetrate.
He rested his chin in his palm. Imagining it was your hand, your touch.
He did not move from his seated position on the street, and he stayed long after the lamp burned out, and the clouds in the sky cleared to reveal the domed firmament rife with stars, and the night’s death bore the dawn light, and he thought of you. And as he walked back to HQ, stumbling as if inebriated, he still thought of you. And when his friends demanded, voices frantic and concerned, where he had been all night, he responded that he had needed to be alone, and only he knew that his apparent solitude was feigned and untrue, as it was suffused by your presence, both tangible and incorporeal, like the way the night is both a darkness and an ambiance.
That day he asked Armin about books and sat closer to his friends and allowed Mikasa to touch him and tend to him. And though he could not return to the town the next night or week or month, your final words, spoken only for him, remained in his heart, a stranger’s implicit promise, the addendum: “And I’ll find you, too.”