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Orange beams wash over the stacked, wrinkled spines of Oikawa Tooru’s Spanish 101 books, spilling across his wooden desk and pouring down to his white zaisu chair where he would sit for hours as he watched recorded volleyball matches until sunrise. They have the same shade of apricot that overlooked Aoba Johsai as he mulled over formations and combination plays with Coach Irihata, and the same shade of saturated tangerine that he rarely had the privilege of sunbathing in while his peers traded cram school for pachinko parlors.
His hands glow brighter under the afternoon sun as he picks up one of the books, flicking off every dust that never settled on its covers. They’re not too big, but they’re also too thick to fit into the remaining space between his clothes. So he puts them back. Night classes for a second language will become a part of his routine once he settles on the other side of the globe, and there will be a lot more books he can buy at a much better quality.
Turning on his heels, his futon is neatly folded at the corner and curls itself beside his wooden closet. He walks over to the cabinet and checks for anything that would fill the extra room in his luggage. A deflated stack of clothes reaches out for him, a familiar set of fabric he grew up with in the past eighteen years. Some of them are too small for him now, a few quite stretched out from years of frequent trips to the washing machine. They will grow weary as the screws of his dresser gather rust from the extra air that will occupy the room in the absence of its owner.
Tooru glances at his open suitcase, staring long and hard at the multicolored garments. The other half of his clothes are in this bag, ready for take off, ready to grow old with him, its colors eager to peter out and bleed onto his skin once the sweltering heat of San Juan etches tan lines across his thighs and neck. His watered down sunburns will darken with every morning jog he sprints along the stretch of stirring hotels, the chefs preparing unlimited, five-star breakfast for patrons of slumbering casinos.
He decides that he doesn’t need to bring anything else, and that he can use the extra thin spot as insurance for any souvenirs he might collect between connecting flights. In the end, he has to follow airline regulations: if he doesn’t want the plane to leave him, he should only pack a select facet of his life and make space for new people, effectively making space for other people in the plane; if he doesn’t want his dreams to leave him, he has to leave a piece of him behind and fill the gaps with higher castles, taller than the diverse, centuries-old cathedrals on the west valley of Argentina.
A few steps to the side and he lands on his rolled-up futon. Pillows and duvets sleep on top of the mattress, its corners dotted with brown splotches, stains that were never removed even after countless detergent bottles and Mom’s hangnails. They are Tooru’s first supporters, his early fanatics, the only witnesses to the exact moment he declared his devotion for the game. They’re waiting to be unraveled after he eats dinner and brushes his teeth, waiting to be slept on, waiting to lull him to sleep, to keep him close for eight hours, for the last time.
★
Over the course of the past three years, the sky outside his makeshift home in Miyagi—situated within the confines of torn, nylon nets and scratched poles—would swim in a sea of midnight blue as he emptied all of the ball carts and his water bottles. Bulbs of stored, orange sunlight would hover over him, the volume of shoes squeaking against the waxed floor minimizing to only one pair, the bass of Iwa’s “I told you to go home already!” boosting around the room with less bodies to bounce off of.
But Tooru could not hear well over the hiss of air as he raised his arms, guiding the ball with his fingertips to another set of phantom palms, and especially not when his shoulders would cover his ears for barely a second and a half before realizing that Iwa had left him an hour and a half ago.
In isolation, all the LED lights would radiate on him, darkening his shadows sprawled along the white lines of the court, and he would often find himself pining for what his teammates had always taken for granted: how long had it been since his shadows were forged from the sun, since his shadows had eclipsed the sizzling asphalt of an expiring afternoon?
Still, Tooru liked to walk beneath a shimmer of constellations, and he found a different kind of bliss with the fact that he never had to guard his eyes from the biting blaze of dusk as the distance between him and Mom’s saba shioyaki thinned out.
The breeze would cool down his greasy hair, and it was during those times when color theory and the words of his high school teachers held more magnitude: orange complements blue, heat amplifies cold, starlight breathes life into the night; and that in solitude, you are never truly alone.
Because it was also during those times, those small, abundant moments when only the night air would walk beside him and the flicker of street lamps long overdue for repair would piggyback on his uniform, that he would entertain a singular thought that clung onto his sports bag and gym shoes and knee pads and patches of Salonpas—the abstract, immeasurable concept of how long his future stretched out before him, like the horizon that extended beyond the windows of his classroom; and how ungraspable it was like the endless ellipsis scrawled next to the value of pi.
More questions about post graduation plans came to him in whispers during lunch breaks while he waited in a queue of fellow third years in the cafeteria and in front of vending machines, until those same whispers found their way into paper and transcribed themselves onto the dreaded Career Plan Form.
“Professional Athlete” were the first two words he dirtied his white paper with after reading a slew of Argentina travel guides, and the first two words that he erased after getting stabbed with two losses in two different tournaments—the final two chances for a ticket to Nationals thrown away, splitting his whole identity into two.
Instantly, the whispers doubled and grew exponentially, evolving into an alien creature that coerced him to write down “Astrophysicist” in hopes of proving that there is an alternate universe where he got what he sacrificed his knees and sleep for.
But Blanco’s words instantly hushed the murmurs and quashed the printed letters, offering Tooru a sketch of a predefined future doodled in pencil: an opportunity to migrate to another country, and if all went well, a spot in the national team as their starting setter. Everything seemed arbitrary at the time but it still held more weight and more flesh than his brittle “Professional Athlete” and the creases and smudged scribbles on his form.
All he had to do was pick up his permanent marker and draw over the stencil, pick up the sewing kit and patch his two halves back together, because Oikawa Tooru never did things in halves.
And so he gave love another chance.
★
Off the ground, off the loamy soil which Tooru would strike with his run-down blue-lined athletic shoes with Takeru and his elementary volleyball students on Mondays, his plane swims in a black gaseous ocean as it casts shadows over Matsushima Islands and offers flecks of marquee lights to fishermen huddling around a campfire.
He is less than forty-five hours closer to the thirty-two rays reigning over the Land Born of the Sun, and more than two hours farther from the Land of the Rising Sun.
In his window seat, Tooru feasts on beef Hamburg steak paired with sticky jasmine rice, topped with green peas and creamy scrambled eggs. He has half a mind to pull out the jar of shichimi togarashi his sister snuck inside his hand carry, earning him unsolicited sneers from airport security, but opts to reserve it for his home-cooked meals.
Washing the lifeless food away with sparkling water, he looks over dots of archaic monuments and restored temples, golden grids of man-made sun rays illuminating pathways for night shift workers, and peaks and valleys of his hometown engraved in his memory as deep as his knowledge of the best day and time to purchase milk bread from an obscure bakery Mattsun introduced him to.
(“Early mornings collect crowds but early afternoons collect dust inside vitrines,” Mattsun said over a bowl of ramen after practice one autumn twilight, Iwa already on his second portion while Makki poured copious amounts of red chili peppers on Kyouken’s bowl. “The sweet spot is when you can no longer see the moon but you can still feel the cool air from the previous night,” he slurped.)
He has flown over this tangible rendition of Tohoku’s map every year during class field trips to Okinawa—paid for by Dad’s double shifts and month-long business trips—and can scrawl a derogatory rendering of this region with the control of a five-year-old holding a Sharpie. But without Makki on his right side drawing phallic structures over the Pacific Ocean, every island of Japan coagulates into a joint grave marker for his prepubescent and adolescent ghosts.
In a few years’ time, his sporadic return visits to these tombstones would be composed of offerings in the form of laurels and trophies, and of prayers asking to right his axis whenever he retreats in a bathroom to glare at his image that no mirror can accurately reflect.
The aircraft surfs through a mucky gossamer of clouds, ascending higher and higher to where bundles of plasma burn with ambitions like his: they temporarily store dreamers’ hopes as they resign for the day, showering it back to them at the crack of dawn like a bucket of cold water.
And when this country’s slumber breaks, she will wake with one less dreamer to fan her palm leaves at, cooling down the bodies of other dreamers who are sweating their hearts out under the late March heat, as the stars that has held on to the lost native’s dreams glimmer over fragments of his identity that he could not fit in his suitcase.
But Tooru’s taproots remain anchored; from his core, adventitious roots develop and branch out to greener pastures.
★
The mattress in his apartment does not fold nor does it spread out on the floor. A bed frame cradles it, like a crib that guards an infant while his parents clutch on every bit of sleep they can get; at the same time, the metal bed rails provide an open under bed storage.
It’s an idea that has never germinated in every household back home, and Tooru welcomes this foreign concept, doing what the Romans would do, and uses this newfound space in his newfound home to put away his suitcase in, which he will empty once his flesh and bones have recovered from three connected and disjoint flights.
The single window in his bedroom captures a desaturated snapshot of faraway hole-in-the-wall restaurants, bike rental shops, and souvenir stores, every building superimposed over a backdrop of a starless black sky that fades into an early morning blue. Newspaper runners ring their bells, throwing away hundreds of rolled up words about politicians and celebrities, as well as the Argentine Primera División and the Argentine Volleyball Federation.
Tooru needs nothing more than three years to claim an inch of space on the newspaper and reserve it for Tooru Oikawa —the boy who was told to soar but cut off his own wings and had to learn how to swim on his own, reaching the rivers and crossing them with a white knee pad on his right leg and black on the other.
His analog wrist watch from his grandfather reads five, and the digital clock on his bedside table blinks the same five but in a.m. They tell identical times and yet they speak in distinct tongues. They are the same but never truly equal, ticking similar numbers but beating for distant suns.
Analog and digital seem fitting: two timekeepers born out of different generations with a time and spatial difference of twelve hours and ten thousand miles, a clear disparity of each other like his knee pads but simultaneously complementary to one another like orange and blue. Both are valid and correct but only one is truly home, and only one would truly welcome him home.
Laying himself on the bed, the mattress dips along with his bag of bones after being thirty thousand feet high among layers of atmosphere that would cut his ears. The flight was the closest he had been to the constellations he had only ever read in science books, and the farthest he had been from beaches and shrines he had always spent his summers in.
Now he’s back on the ground, back on the loamy soil he can march on with his run-down blue-lined athletic shoes, where his adventitious roots can anchor themselves and spread out endlessly. And they are starting to propagate here, on this bed that is too soft for his liking, too soft to be even real. He’s too jetlagged to believe this is even real, but he’s here, Tooru Oikawa is here, so fuck you and your pride Ushiwaka .
The early morning blue evolves into a yellow dawn, slowly crawling up and claiming the starless black sky, clearing out a canvas for the same sun that has been waking Tooru up for the past eighteen years in a room eighteen thousand kilometers away. He waits for the sunbeams to shine in from the west but it pours in from the east instead. His new home faces north, no longer pointing south, his whole life recalibrating and following his north star—the Sun of May.
★
Twilight sneaks in behind the kaleidoscopic winks of gambling houses, revving up their engines for adrenaline and pleasure chasers before they roll off their day clothes and walk in with ties and sequins. They litter Mendoza Street as parents call out for their kids who are shouting “pido flor” and “real envido” under the palm trees of Plaza El Veinticinco de Mayo, call them for a warm plate of matambre arrollado, call them back home before they bump into flushed, overworked corporate slaves.
Two more minutes of walking and Tooru stifles a laugh: the distance between a casino and a cathedral is a mere two hundred meters. Vices and virtues have always been grouped separately in different patches of land back in his hometown, but perhaps this city design fairly represents the melting pot of interests that is San Juan.
It’s something he has to get used to, like walking three nights a week to Colegio de San Juan Bosco for his Spanish evening classes after a half day of afternoon drills. Blanco told him he did not need the certification course, but it would be nice to shove the branded parchment paper on a few people’s faces back home.
Making a left turn on Rivadia Street, young bald cypress trees dapple street lamps that light up roadside eateries and fast food chains, lining up either side of the street, the shadows of its leaves swaying on the asphalt. Sundry establishments alternate between quaint and modern exteriors, like the quilted stuffed bear he had sewn for Arts and Crafts in middle school and eventually gave to his puppy love on white day.
The longer he walks along the streets, the more leafless the cypress trees get, leaving more space for his shadow to stretch on to. it moves ahead of him, reaching out for the short flight of stairs on the college’s façade . A year of relying on online resources and Spanish 101 books behind his back, Tooru finds his way to his classroom, and has only asked for help once, from a stranger, when he could not find the elevator.
A smattering of students create a melody with their bags and pencil cases, a series of ambient sounds echoing off the walls and the vacant seats and the awkward air around a group of strangers. Tooru walks around the horseshoe seating arrangement and sits on a chair facing the board, his desk near the window, hooking his bag on the side of the table. Except there’s no hook, and his bag—loaded with drenched towels and undergarments and his personal volleyball—thuds against the acrylic floor, twisting every neck in the room to his direction.
Strangers’ stares are not alien to Oikawa Tooru—it comes with playing Prefecturals every year—but these eyes peer at him under the lens of pure curiosity. Not once has he been looked at in this way: everyone in his life, including himself, has always had a preconceived notion, a bias, of him hanging another medal in the living room wall.
Not once has he been looked at outside of jump serves and setter dumps.
Tooru picks up his bag and places it underneath the table. He props up his chin and rests his heart easy with the view beyond the windows. Even in another land, the horizon outside of the classroom minimizes and stretches out into the unknown, mirroring the fathomless idea of tomorrow.
But the door opens and the teacher comes in, beaming “Buenas noches,” and all at once, his future morphs into history.
★
Teeming sunlight in the kitchen, Tooru makes his first attempt at cooking choripan: he slices a chorizo, places each half over a piece of bread, and tops it with diced garlic and tomato before putting them together like a sandwich. The first bite is cozy but the image of Aoba Castle does not flash before his eyes, even when the greasiness and saltiness is comparable to the charred chashu offered at Iwa’s favorite ramen place.
Perhaps it’s the bread downplaying the flavor, or the tomato adding a tartness he never tasted in Mom’s saba shioyaki, but it doesn’t taste like home. And yet it warms his empty stomach, blanketing him, welcoming him back to a place he’s never been to before. He reaches for the cupboard and takes out his smuggled shichimi togarashi, opening the lid halfway through only to close it again.
Tooru decides to keep the jar untouched for as long as mold does not infect his unit—he will never find the same spice mix again. The fruits and vegetable store along Rioja Street overflows with bell peppers, and only a three minute walk from the fitness center in front of his building separates him from spicing up his meals.
A couple more bites and Tooru ties the shoelaces of his favorite pair of running shoes, his sister’s quarterly savings breathing new life every year to the rubber pair. He wiggles his toes for space and frowns when they curl instead. His feet are swelling together with the bedrock of his castles in Trinidad, but there is only so much a disposable receptacle can contain.
So Tooru insists. He runs along Tucuman Street, along sleeping shops and abandoned commercial spaces, every cypress tree’s leaves shriveling as he moves forward, his shadow trailing behind, both time and space catching their breaths as Tooru pierces through every dimension faster than light. Adrenaline bubbles in his chest as the moon hides from the world, leaving traces of the prior night dispersed in the cool air, hurling him back to yesterday night’s volleyball drills.
Seasoned athletes dashed ahead of him, stabbing his ears with accents and speech patterns and rolls of tongues he had never heard of even with his after-dark classes and countless hours of watching classic Spanish soap operas. The blood and sweat he had cried out in huge buckets during six years of continual loss was discarded in an instant—Tooru waded through unfamiliar waters and found himself a minnow in a shiver of sharks, sniping at him, “Argentina doesn’t dream about you, ni ñ o. Argentina will not mourn when you leave.”
Under his favorite constellations, under his north star, the world screamed at him, its refusal now lacing the morning air he breathes in as he runs from and to home, but Tooru Oikawa covers his ears because this is what Oikawa Tooru has always wanted. He will shout with his own voice, calling out to himself, and Tooru will be his own world in a universe full of extinguished, forgotten stars.
Oikawa will reach high tides and Tooru will go through the waves.