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Somehow feelings grow stronger once the sun goes down, just as you’re trying to fall asleep. It’s never the happy, good feelings either, it’s always the regret, the hollowness, the sting in your heart, all the bad ones you push away during the sunlit day.
Kanan found this out a long time ago.
Every time she pulled the covers over herself at night, she’d toss and turn for hours just feeling, despite being exhausted and ready to pass out just before the lights in her room went out. Tonight was no different. Staring at the moon through her open bedroom window, Kanan feels the cold wind outside creep in, freezing her emotions and turning them into painfully heavy bricks that threaten to pull her down under the floorboards. Letting out a defeated sigh, she pulls on a jacket and sneaks out of the diving shop she calls her home.
Not quite sure of her intended destination, Kanan wanders the streets of Awashima (not that there’s many) and ends up on the sandy beaches as she often does. If she looked back right now she’d see Mari’s hotel, lit up with guests that haven’t quite found it in them to go to sleep yet. Maybe they were feeling just as much as Kanan was right now, but she supposes that she’ll never know, they’ll all be out of here and replaced by new tourists anyway. Well, all of them except for Mari. Glancing over the top floor of the Ohara hotel, she notices that Mari’s light was still on, whether because she was still awake and working or because she’d accidentally fallen asleep with her light on she can’t really tell. Kanan often wondered if pushing her to leave was the right decision and wishes that she could go back in time to remake that choice of hers, and she wonders if Mari has actually forgiven her for making decisions for her, for breaking their friend group, for every wrong choice she’s made that haunts her every time she stays stagnant for just long enough for her mind to wander.
The moon shimmering on the rippling surface of the ocean is beautiful, enchanting even, to Kanan, hence why she almost always ends up here during her sleepless nights. Something about the ocean just seemed to lure her in, which is great when you’re taking customers out to dive, but not so great when you’re hanging out on the beach with your friends and they catch you mindlessly stepping in deeper and deeper. It probably took Dia and Mari almost 10 minutes to talk her out of her trance that time and they’d never taken their eyes off of her for longer than three minutes when they went to the beach since that. This time though, there’s no Dia or Mari, the only thing breaking her from her haze was the uncomfortable feeling of wet jeans sticking to her thighs. Looking back towards the shore, she’d realized that she’d made it waist-deep out into the sea and turned back with a sigh. One day, she was going to walk into that ocean and she won’t be able to turn back and she’s not quite sure whether that thought was terrifying or calming, but she sure does think about it a lot. Hopefully, that day doesn’t come anytime soon though, she’s not sure what Chika and You would do without their older sister figure, hasn’t spent enough time together with Mari and Dia yet and then there’s the rest of Aqours as well, just thinking about leaving them behind makes her heart sink. Kanan sits on the cool sand and watches the stars as she waits for her jeans to dry, recalling every constellation she can still remember from that little circle chart they used as kids.
Once she deemed her jeans dry enough to be worn in public, she makes her way back home, ignoring the urge to crash Mari’s place at 3 am. Giving herself the quietest rinse off in the shower she was capable of as to not wake her grandfather (who’d surely give her a lecture the next morning if she woke him), she throws her pyjamas back on and tucks herself back into bed, finally exhausted and able to relax enough to fall asleep, even if it’s only for a little a few short hours because she knows that she’ll be okay by the time the sun rises again, and what better way to speed up the arrival of dawn than to close your eyes and let your dreams steal you away to their land?