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Mahiro’s life goes by like the hands of the clock: steady, predictable, constant and more times than not, painstakingly slow.
He’s at the point where his daily routines meld into one another, blurring the lines between the previous day and the next and it’s as if he is reliving the same day over and over: putting on his school uniform which he had two identical sets of, taking the same train to and from his school at the same stations at the same times, and crawling to the same bed at night at the same, dead hour.
It has always been like this since his older brother passed away.
Mahiro tries to tuck those thoughts at the back of his mind as he brushes his teeth at the sink. He practices what his counselor taught him. Count 10 things he wants to do today. By now it’s a practiced motion; the first five are already a staple of his daily routine. The remaining five, however, is still up in the air.
He splashes his face with water and dries his face with his towel. As he does, he spots his piling laundry in its hamper in the corner of the bathroom. Maybe he should do the laundry today. That will leave him four things left to do.
Mahiro changes into his school uniform, tightening his tie and straightening out the lapels of his school blazer. When he goes to grab his bag from his room, he spots his borrowed copy of Forrest Gump from the school library on his desk. He just finished it last night, so maybe he will return it today. Three things left, he thinks to himself as he tucks the book into his bag and heads down to the kitchen.
The house, as usual, is deadly quiet. The only sounds are coming from outside; street traffic, birds, the occasional bicycle zipping down the pavement. The dish rack is empty and Mahiro guesses that his father, yet again, has foregone breakfast and headed straight to the office. He sets his bag on a chair and puts on an apron. He opens the fridge and starts grabbing ingredients. He’s clinging on a fresh tomato and an opened bag of sausages when he opens the egg carton and takes the last egg from it. He should really go and buy more eggs from the supermarket. Two things left.
Mahiro quickly whips up his own breakfast and he sits at the dining table by himself as he bites into his toast. He scrolls through his phone as he does and a notification flashes on his screen: a reminder that he has his counselor’s appointment later today.
So that makes it one left to go.
Mahiro stares at his phone calendar, and something about the date throws him off. He looks at it for a second and then he realizes.
It’s his brother’s one month death anniversary.
The memories start to come back. Memories of seeing Chihiro for the last time in his casket, memories of the loud rain quelling the barely concealed whispers between his relatives as they shoot him pointed glimpses, memories of going to bed that very night, eyes sore and wet from tears.
Mahiro tries to wolf down the remains of his breakfast as if it can make him at least make him forget the funeral. As he chews on his food, he pushes back more and more memories of that day, but the dreading realization that Chihiro is gone still lingers, that he’s nothing more than ash and resting not in his own bedroom but at a gravestone with his name on it.
His gravestone. Suddenly Mahiro remembers that he hasn’t been to the gravestone since it was erected, and he begins to worry that the offerings he left might have been taken by animals or vagrants.
Then I’ll do that today, he thinks to himself, as he finishes his food and cleans up after himself, before leaving his house and stepping out.
The sound of a train rushing past on its tracks blare loud and echoing as Mahiro skids to a halt on the platform, out of breath as he bends over and plants his hands on his knees.
He’s missed his train, but he doesn’t know why he bothered trying to catch it. His next stop is his appointment at his counselor’s, and he has more than enough time. But then again, he may be trying to make up for it for his particular poor planning for the day, since he did feel quite silly taking his groceries from his supermarket trip to the graveyard with him.
Mahiro looks up at the board and there’s about five minutes until the next train arrives. He hoists his bag more securely up his shoulder, looking around for an empty seat. There’s a beeping sound as the train from the opposite direction shuts its doors and departs, a wave of passengers filing for the exit. Mahiro spots a two-seater bench, but as he approaches it, he spots something fall out from one of the leaving passengers. The passenger, a man dressed in a suit with his head bowed to his phone, doesn’t seem to notice and neither does the other passengers, so Mahiro takes it upon himself to pick up the item. Sure enough, it’s a wallet, and he chases after the man.
“Excuse me!” Mahiro calls out. “Excuse me, you dropped this!”
His voice catches the attention of some of the passengers, but the man in the suit only stops in his tracks when he calls out again. The man is just a few steps up on the staircase when he turns around, and Mahiro runs up to him at the foot of the stairs, holding out the wallet towards him.
“This is yours, right?” Mahiro asks.
The man looks surprised for a moment. He stands still for a few seconds, almost to the point where Mahiro starts to feel awkward in his position. Then, as if the realization strikes him, the man quickly looks through his pockets, affirming Mahiro’s words.
“Ah, you’re right. Thank you,” the man replies, in an almost flustered manner. But he doesn’t immediately take the wallet. His hand is raised slightly, but it looks like he has no intention to move.
“It’s no big deal,” Mahiro replies in an effort to get this moment to pass. The man seems to have snapped out of it, as he takes the wallet from Mahiro, though Mahiro can sense his hesitation in his movements. He looks at Mahiro for a while, as if he wants to say something.
“You…” the man opens his mouth. There’s unease in his voice.
“Is something wrong?” Mahiro asks, starting to get concerned for the stranger. The man looks a bit lost for a moment, before he slowly shakes his head and gives Mahiro a wry smile.
“No, sorry about that,” the man quickly apologizes, slipping his wallet into the pocket of his pants. “It’s just that I thought you looked familiar, but we haven’t met before, right?”
Mahiro looks at the man from head to toe. He’s dressed like any other businessman, complete with a briefcase and a luxurious-looking paper bag in his hands. His dark hair is short, save for the slightly longer fringe hanging over the left side of his face.
“Don’t think so,” Mahiro says, offering a reassuring grin of his own. “Sorry if I kept your hopes up.”
“Not at all, there’s no need to apologize. After all, I should be thanking you for returning me my wallet,” the man reaches for the paper bag he’s holding, and holds it out towards Mahiro. “Here, take this as a show of my thanks.”
“What?” Mahiro looks at the bag. The straps are gold ribbons and a fancy logo is printed on the front of the bag. Even without knowing the foreign-looking words on it he already knows the bag itself is worth more than his one month’s worth of pocket money. “I can’t, that looks really expensive!”
“Don’t worry about it. It was a gift from a client, but I don’t really eat a lot of chocolate,” the man takes a step down to close a little distance between himself and Mahiro. He tilts his head, giving Mahiro an encouraging yet insistent look. His hair falls to the side and Mahiro catches a glimpse of red.
His eyes are different colors, Mahiro thinks. A noticeable gold on his left and a darker red on the right. It reminds him of cat’s eyes, mismatched yet enigmatic.
“Thank you,” Mahiro mumbles, taking the bag. He glances inside and there’s a very posh-looking box.
“Don’t mention it. You’re a good kid,” the man raises his hand in a wave. “I’ll have to get going now, enjoy your day.”
Mahiro waves his goodbye, watching the man disappear into the distance. The sound of his train arriving snaps him back into attention and he jogs back to the platform as the doors start to open. When he finds a comfortable seat, he opens up his phone and begins searching up the store name on the paper bag online.
Although Mahiro shows up a little earlier than usual to his appointment, his counselor doesn’t seem to mind, welcoming him into his office. Even though the place looks sterile by nature with its white walls and orderly furniture, Mahiro is already comfortable with the environment, and he slips into a casual conversation with his counselor. They talk about his schoolwork, his friends, the hobbies he’s been picking up recently. Mahiro talks to him about Forrest Gump and the counselor relates his own experience watching the movie when he was younger.
“I thought about my brother again today,” Mahiro admitted. “Or more like, his funeral.”
“How was it?” the counselor asks. “You did mention visiting your brother’s gravestone today. Was it in reaction to your memory of the funeral?”
“Maybe,” Mahiro says. “I’m okay now, though. It’s just…”
“Thinking about the funeral makes you upset, doesn’t it?”
Mahiro nods.
“What do you think is making you upset about it?” the counselor questions. “Is it because it reminds you of your brother’s death?”
“It does, but… I don’t think I get upset because of that,” Mahiro looks at his lap. “I do get sad when I think about my brother, but with the funeral, it’s different. And the thing is, I don’t know what is it about it that’s different.”
The counselor hums. “Do you think it has something to do with the gaps in your memory from that day?”
Mahiro is quiet. He tries to think. Think of the day of the funeral. There’s rain, there’s people. His brother’s casket is in the funeral hall and his picture is framed with carnations. But other than that, everything is mostly a haze.
“I guess so,” Mahiro says slowly.
“Do you want to try to remember?”
Mahiro ponders over this for a few moments, before he nods. Since bringing up the fact that he lost some of his memories from the day of the funeral with his counselor, he has been slowly trying to piece together the events of that day during their sessions. Mahiro chases the fragments in his mind relentlessly, afraid of forgetting. Forgetting what else he lost.
“We start the day early in the morning,” Mahiro recounts slowly. “I didn’t eat my breakfast because I had no appetite. I just sat around the funeral hall until my relatives arrive. A few of my relatives talked to me for a while, but otherwise I kept mostly to myself. I was alone the whole day. I even ate by myself during lunch. Then, it started raining heavily in the afternoon. My father had to talk to me, and he said something about my brother. I got mad and… and then I got into a panic attack. I ran off and I think someone found me and brought me back to my house. And then I just stayed at home and slept the rest of the day away.”
His counselor nods as he looks at his clipboard. “That’s more or less how you recounted it from our last session. You still don’t seem to remember what happened during and right after your panic attack.”
Mahiro shakes his head. “I still can’t remember it.”
“Well, don’t push yourself too hard to remember. It’s not unheard of in cases similar to yours,” the counselor explains, looking up at Mahiro. “But, I just thought of something. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“So far, you mentioned that you were alone the whole day during the funeral,” the counselor points out. “Not including the few times your relatives spoke to you briefly or when your father interacted with you. But during your panic attack, were you by yourself?”
Mahiro tries to recall that moment. He knows that it was a stressful experience, but even as his whirlwind feelings of anxiety, sadness and despair are as clear as day, he can’t even remember where he escaped to or how he ended up back in his room.
“I… still can’t remember,” Mahiro answers honestly. The counselor taps his pen against his clipboard.
“That’s alright,” the counselor offers him a reassuring look. “Like I said, it’s not unheard of, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Some things just slip from our minds like that, it’s just the way it is. But we can continue working on this together, if you want.”
Mahiro smiles. “Yeah, that sounds good. I appreciate it.”
It’s still night time when Mahiro wakes up.
His vision is wrapped in darkness as he gazes up the ceiling. The transition from his slumber to his waking state is so unnatural and sudden that it takes him a few moments to grasp that he’s awake.
Mahiro sits up, letting his blanket pool at his lap. He gropes around his nightstand for his phone and winces at his screen when he turns it on. It’s slightly past 2am. He sighs as he shuts his phone off. He thought he was well past the phase of having near-sleepless nights, but he guesses that tonight just wanted to change that. Which is a shame, because he’s genuinely exhausted from the day’s events.
Mahiro pushes his blanket off, slipping out of bed and contemplating on going to the kitchen to get some water. Or a hot drink to help him sleep. As his eyes trail towards his closed door, he spots his school bag placed against the wall, right next to the expensive paper bag he got as a gift.
Ah, right, Mahiro rubs the back of his head as he realizes that he forgot to leave it in the kitchen together with the groceries. He gets up and picks up the bag. He researched the store earlier that day when he was on the way to his appointment, and apparently the store is well-known in the business district for their decadent, hand-made chocolates. He doubts he can get back to sleep anytime soon, so he might as well see whether the store lives up to its reputation.
He takes out the box carefully from the bag and carries it back to bed. He sits down, placing the box on his lap before untying the ribbon around it. Unwrapping the box is like unwrapping a gift and it feels quite novel to Mahiro. He lifts up the lid and uses his phone’s light to figure out what’s in the box.
A tray of individually foil-wrapped chocolates stares back and him, and Mahiro decides to just go in blind and pick out any piece without reading up on the flavors for the fun of it. He chooses a piece wrapped in red foil, putting his phone back down on the mattress to unwrap the chocolate. He pops the confection into his mouth, and he tastes the rich, sweet flavor of milk chocolate.
It’s good, definitely better than the chocolates from the supermarket and convenience store, though he’s not sure whether that it’s helped by the fact that he’s eating it in bed. There’s something funny about eating chocolates in bed to him, and he feels like a child sneaking in candy, having a secret treat while keeping a close eye on their bedroom door in fear that their parents might walk in any time.
While Mahiro might not have that childhood memory, he knows that it’s not the first time he’s had chocolate in bed.
But when? he wonders. The chocolate in his mouth melts over his tongue and its taste clings onto the back of his throat.
When did he eat chocolate in bed? Or rather, when was the last time he did that? The more he thinks about it, the more the feeling of déjà vu starts to creep up on him.
He definitely ate chocolate in bed before. But not only that, he definitely did that during a sleepless night like this. When he was alone, by himself, tired out from the day.
Just like on the night of Chihiro’s funeral.
The memory returns to Mahiro, hitting him like a baseball bat. He catches a sliver of that night, waking up in his bed from a long nap, exhausted from crying and from the funeral. Uncomfortably curled up on his side because there was something in the pocket of his suit jacket.
He remembers. He remembers getting up and taking out a piece of foil-wrapped chocolate from his pocket, half-melted and warped between his fingers.
Mahiro brings his hand to his mouth. His tongue glides over his lips and he recalls the taste of the cheap chocolate he ate that day on his bed, a superficially sweet flavor tinged with the biting taste of tears.
Why did he eat chocolate on his bed that night? No, how did he even get that chocolate? The suit he wore that day was brand new, purchased by his father specifically for that occasion. He couldn’t have gotten it from home, so that meant someone gave it to him.
But who? Some of his relatives spoke to him, but none of them gave him chocolate. If he wasn’t holding it when he was in the funeral hall, and he only had it when he was back at home…
Someone gave it to me during my panic attack.
Mahiro chases that one hint of a memory in his mind like he’s grasping at straws. His fingers run over the chocolates in the tray on his lap, as if the shape of each would help him remember what it felt like to hold that chocolate from that day when he received it.
The chocolate got out of shape when he slept on it. When he received it, it was still in its original form, and he remembers that because someone placed that chocolate right on his palm, right when he was about to leave the funeral location.
The chocolate was a gift. A gift from the person who brought him back to his relatives after his panic attack. Mahiro remembers putting it in his pocket while in the car on the way home, because he needed two hands to keep ahold of the borrowed jacket on his shoulders.
Borrowed jacket?
An epiphany hits Mahiro and he drops the tray of chocolates on the floor as he leaps to his feet and runs out of the door. He doesn’t think twice when he barges into his father’s room, relieved that his father is away staying at his office apartment for the week. Mahiro flips on the light switch and yanks open the closet, rifling through all the suit jackets neatly hung up. It doesn’t take long to find the odd one out, a jacket a big bigger than the others, the sleeves that bit longer and wider.
Mahiro pulls out the jacket from its hanger and he already can tell by the feel of its material that it’s not his father’s. He pulls the jacket across his shoulders and it feels familiar, even more familiar than his own that he wore on the day of the funeral. He wore this jacket all the way back home, only taking it out when he went to take a shower. He must have mixed it up for his father’s when doing the laundry.
Mahiro touches the sleeves of the jacket and he remembers. The jacket was dry while his clothes were sopping wet, and his clothes were wet in the first place because after shouting at his father and collapsing into a mess of tears and gasps, he ran out of the funeral hall in the pouring rain, only stopping when he thought he was far enough that when he cried out for his brother, only the skies would hear him.
‘But during your panic attack, were you by yourself?’ The words of Mahiro’s counselor flash back in his head.
No, I wasn’t.
Someone lent Mahiro the jacket and gave him the chocolate. He sits on the floor as he tries to remember something, anything, about the person that was there, be it their face, their voice, their touch.
The jacket was dry because the person was dry. The person was carrying an umbrella. And they were carrying an umbrella towards the funeral hall and found Mahiro because they just arrived for the funeral.
It’s someone outside the family, Mahiro thinks to himself, and there’s an affirmation behind his thoughts. He knows this for a fact, and just when he thinks he doesn’t know why, he remembers.
‘It’s okay, I’m here. I’m here.’
A man’s voice. Someone holding his shoulders.
‘It’s alright. I won’t leave Chihiro’s little brother alone. Look at me, okay?’
Mahiro raises his head. He remembers a pair of hands cupping his face, warmth radiating onto his cheeks as thumbs brush away his tears. And when he looks up to the person for the first time, he sees spots of color among the dreary gray of downpour.
A pair of heterochronic eyes, like a cat’s. A noticeable gold on the left and a darker red on the right.
Just like the man from today who gave him the paper bag of chocolates.
Something wet hits the top of Mahiro’s hand and he realizes that there are tears running down his cheeks. There’s an emotion he can’t describe filling in the gaps of where his misplaced memories of the day of Chihiro’s funeral are, and the same emotion stains his recollections of the day.
He lost something and gained it back, all at once, and when he realizes it, it has already slipped past his reach. His tongue licks his drying lips and catches a smear of chocolate at the corner of his mouth. The taste is sweet and salty, just like the chocolate from that night.
On Chihiro’s second-month death anniversary, Mahiro leaves the house carrying a bag with a folded-up suit jacket inside. He clears his afternoon for the day, and when the school dismissal bell rings, he’s the first to leave the compound.
The sound of the train rattling along the tracks is loud and the wind it kicks up as it departs the station is fast and biting. Mahiro sits at a bench at the platform of the station nearest to the graveyard where his brother’s gravestone is.
Mahiro doesn’t need to count 10 things he wants to do for the day to distract him anymore. But, just for today, he makes up one thing he hopes to accomplish. The digital clock on the display board flips to another minute and the next train coming from the opposite direction is slated to arrive in five minutes.
And he waits.