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When they meet again, the clouds gather, and it begins to rain.
In realization, Kiyoomi tilts his head to the sky and closes the jar one second too late. The clouds are heavy, the sky pale grey; the rain falls lightly, but it will go on for days. Kiyoomi looks at the earth he had collected, darkening speck by speck as raindrops fall into the jar. Finally he closes it and screws the lid tight.
Wakatoshi leans in. “I’m sorry.”
In the coldness of the rain, the heat of him comes too close, and the words die in Kiyoomi’s throat: I will just have to come back. The earth, then, will carry the history of this rain as well. But the syllables dissipate into the thin curtain of water, and instead what comes out of Kiyoomi’s mouth is,
“My planet is nearby.”
We could find shelter.
Before Wakatoshi was Wakatoshi, he was Ushijima, and before that he was a stranger, and Kiyoomi had just decided to take the clothesline into the house since it was just him anyway, he could line dry the laundry indoors so it doesn’t catch the dust. His planet is a small one, and the air is perpetually dry; dust motes suspend themselves in the air, and at night in the moonlight they are almost mistaken for stars, specks of light afloat, slowly spinning.
Kiyoomi’s house is big enough for one person to live in, and not much more. The walls huddle in on themselves and snuggle the window, by which the desk sits; the wooden shelf fills two walls to the brim, thin tiers lined with glass jars: empty or filled with earth, with stardust, with light. Huge books sit on the desk, with neat handwriting—catalogues, and stories. If Kiyoomi’s handwriting wobbles slightly from lack of writing after a long journey, no one needs to notice.
The planet sits at the edge of the universe. Travelers don’t pass by; civilization doesn’t come. In the silence, Kiyoomi puts down the pen and thinks to make himself a cup of tea. Thinks to pack again for tomorrow’s journey, fourteen galaxies away. He rolls his shoulders; the ache and the stiffness never quite fade, and he has learned to live with it, and doesn’t quite notice.
They meet, sometimes, in the crossing of their paths. Wakatoshi, outwards beyond the abyss; Kiyoomi, inwards to the beginning. Kiyoomi has learned to sense him, though he still misses, sometimes, and turns to face an empty plain. Wakatoshi cannot be summoned, the way a story can be called forth in his palm as light flows across his fingers. If he isn’t here, he isn’t; when he is, he simply is.
Kiyoomi feels a thrum down his spine. This planet is a small one, and he is one step closer to Wakatoshi than he has ever been. Does Wakatoshi count it? His shoulders seem broader, as sure of his path as he always is.
“Have you reached the edge of the universe?” Kiyoomi asks.
Wakatoshi smiles at this. The hem of his cape is streaked with dirt, colors fading from wear, and the folds of his shirt are slightly ruffled, his boots clogged with mud—traces of a long journey. Yet his hands are clean and neat, and Kiyoomi wonders, briefly, what they had touched: the map, the mast of a ship, the streak of stars reflected in a river; a touch through the current as the water soaks the earth, as it becomes part of the planet, a history Kiyoomi collects into his hands and retells.
“No,” Wakatoshi says. “Not yet.”
Chroniclers, Kiyoomi finds, are rare. People cannot stand the long traverses across the universe, the records to be ceaselessly written; they cannot stand looking into the vast expanse of void as they stand alone on a planet forgotten by the rest. Journeys are abandoned, and stories are left unfinished, but they do not disappear. Still stars are reborn from the center of chaos, and planets form, and moons orbit; still mountains rise and oceans gush and volcanoes crack open the surface of the earth, still roses bloom and houses find their places nestled next to an oak grove, in a poppy field, on a dusty planet where a clothesline later follow. Still stories glow quietly at their corners in the universe, like notes suspended in the air, waiting to be sung.
Kiyoomi pours the earth out from a jar. At the desk, by the open window, moonlight streams in; the dust grows luminescent under the silver light.
Kiyoomi coaxes the light forward.
He is used to standing on a tiny planet and gazing into the abyss; he is used to being alone. When he returns home, the house is dark and the windows unlit; it is a place to rest, and not much more.
The light flows up and threads through Kiyoomi’s fingers. It pools at his palm, an icy glow; Kiyoomi turns his hand and reads, slowly, how the ocean formed on the planet, how the currents collected and gushed into pulling tides, how the waters moved beneath the land and shifted, pushed, pulsed. How the planet came into being, millennia ago. How it has come to be what it is now.
He writes, his handwriting slightly wobbly and then slowly smoothing out. It always does, Kiyoomi knows.
It isn’t until they walk up to the house that Kiyoomi sees it with newfound clarity: how the thin wooden fences stand crooked, how the low roof needs fresh paint, how the walls are bare and faded, colors washed away in the long sun and the dust. He feels heat rising at the back of his neck. But it is as it is; he would not have the place he lives appear before Wakatoshi otherwise.
Kiyoomi hangs the lantern on the thin arch of the fence. The light glows warmly; the windows are dark as they walk up to the house, as they always are. Kiyoomi opens the door. Ducks in, and leaves the door ajar. He does not ask Wakatoshi to come in; he lets the open door speak the invitation.
Behind him, Wakatoshi ducks and steps into the house.
“I feel that I am chasing something,” Ushijima once said.
They were sitting in the middle of a desert. The red sand smoothed itself out in plains and dunes, rising and dipping at the horizon; the sky was dark, scattered with stars.
“The edge of the universe?”
“No,” Ushijima said. “A memory.” He turned to Kiyoomi. “Tell me about the histories you record.”
Kiyoomi blinked. He thought of light reaching for his fingers; thought of stories, like notes unsung.
“They are something you carry,” Kiyoomi said.
Ushijima considered this. He turned to look at the stars; even in the quiet his gaze did not waver. The fabric at his shoulders had caught dust, faint streaks of red hidden in the folds. Kiyoomi’s hand pricked with the urge to smooth them out. He clamped it down.
Ushijima turned to him.
He said, “Will you carry my history?”
At the beginning of the story, a boy sits on a planet and waits for his father to come back. The sun sets again and again and the thick roots of the trees stretch upwards into the sky; when they knit over the last sunset, the boy stands. He remembers his father’s silhouette: broad shoulders, a gentle smile as he turns and leaves for the abyss. He’d brought back so many tales from the unknown, of stars, of newborn nebulae, of constellations flaring one final time before dimming into eternal darkness. Of people who tamed light between their fingers.
So that’s where the boy will go, too.
Searching, amidst the darkness and the light.
The house is as small as Kiyoomi remembers. Standing, Wakatoshi’s and his shoulders almost touch. The shelves fill the walls to the brimful; the furniture seems to cluster, even though the pile of clothes lie neatly over the back of the chair and the bed is cleanly done. The color of the shelves has washed away under the sun, smoothed over by dust.
Kiyoomi takes off his soaked coat and, folding it over the clothesline, reaches for Wakatoshi’s. Wakatoshi blinks, and then he understands; he shrugs off his coat and hands it to Kiyoomi. The fabric is thick and wet, heavy. Kiyoomi hangs it onto the clothesline beside his coat and tries not to notice the scant distance in between, the closeness. He fails utterly when he turns and faces Wakatoshi in nothing but a linen shirt. Belatedly, he realizes he has never seen Wakatoshi without his coat before.
“Tea?” Kiyoomi asks, desperate for an excuse to turn away.
“Thank you,” Wakatoshi says, a moment later, puzzled.
Kiyoomi sets the kettle on the stove. The water evaporates from their coats, and the air grows humid; Kiyoomi turns, waiting for the water to boil, and finds Wakatoshi looking at the glass jars on the shelf. He notices Kiyoomi’s gaze and straightens.
“The house is warm,” he says, by way of compliment. Kiyoomi places the pen back onto the thick book of chronicles, just for something to do.
“It’s small.”
“It’s well-kept.”
Kiyoomi shrugs. Wakatoshi turns back to the shelves. Outside, the moon rises above the horizon; the glass jars glow dimly in the dusk, liquid light the color of jasmines, of tea leaves, of frozen seas. Bottles of earth, luminous under the faint moonlight.
“These are the stories,” Kiyoomi says, to answer a question unasked. Wakatoshi looks at him.
“This is what you carry.”
“Yes,” Kiyoomi says. Something rises up the back of his throat, and he asks, “Would you like to see?”
Wakatoshi turns, surprised. Kiyoomi walks over. Reaches for a bottle—a small one, swirling with liquid silver light, specks of dust shimmering—uncorks it.
Then, hand out-stretched, he reaches for Wakatoshi’s hand.
Wakatoshi does not hesitate. He lets Kiyoomi take his hands, lets him guide them close, palms up; Kiyoomi’s throat catches at the warmth of his skin, the broadness of his palms. Slowly, carefully, Kiyoomi pours the light into Wakatoshi’s hands.
A pool of light like a small ocean.
Wakatoshi’s face is basked in silver, basked in wonder. The light reaches for his fingertips, flows across the nooks between his fingers; like a song finally sung in the air, the rhythm which beats alongside the heart even when the language is foreign. Wakatoshi looks up at Kiyoomi, wondrous.
“I never knew you could hold moonlight in your hands.”
Cupping the back of Wakatoshi’s hands, Kiyoomi could only find the words on his tongue a while later.
“I didn’t, either.”
Later, they find that the bed is too small for two, but they can just avoid falling off if they squeeze close. Kiyoomi has never been one for closeness, but this he wants. This, he will take. The universe is so vast an expanse of void, but some things travel faster than light—like touch, like memory. If eternities are built of instants then Kiyoomi wants nothing more than this: the warmth of Wakatoshi’s hands, right here against his skin.
In the dark, they map out each other’s bodies. The kettle had long boiled and now sits quietly on the stove, warm; the air is humid. Wakatoshi holds him by his shoulder blades as though Kiyoomi is moonlight, and Kiyoomi wants to breathe slowly, quietly, an exhale like the hum of a whale in the deep sea.
“I want to tell you my name,” he murmurs.
Wakatoshi’s hands still at this. Then they trace Kiyoomi’s back, warm and firm and steady, and Kiyoomi wants to shiver.
“What is your name?”
“Kiyoomi.”
Wakatoshi murmurs it. Sakusa Kiyoomi. Every syllable reverberates quietly in the dark, in the small space between them; echoes in the house, the thin nooks of the rafters, the tiny corner in the juncture of the roof. Wakatoshi speaks it again; still he is holding Kiyoomi, and Kiyoomi is carried in the warmth of his hands. He speaks it like a new star he sees beyond the edge of the universe, as though it is beautiful. Like he will carry it with him, wherever he goes.
The first time they met was unexpected.
But no, it was not so much unexpected as it was like truth: in the beginning there was darkness, and then there was light. Kiyoomi was walking around a volcano, and from behind emerged a silhouette. Kiyoomi paused in his steps. He had heard of travelers before, only he’d never seen any. None come this close to the edge of the universe.
“If you are looking for direction,” he said, raising his voice, “you’re looking the wrong way.”
The stranger turned. His shoulders were broad; in the split moment before he turned, it was as though he wore the universe like a cape behind his back, thousands of stars shining in the dark cloth of the abyss. He held Kiyoomi’s gaze, unwavering but not unkind.
“Thank you,” he said. “But I’m looking the right way.”
Kiyoomi noticed, only now, that though his clothes were worn and dirtied from trek, his hands were clean: broad, calloused, and taken care of.
“You are not a traveler,” Kiyoomi said.
“No,” the stranger answered. “Neither are you.”
A thrum went down Kiyoomi’s back. What was this feeling? He had been submerged in silence for so long. What was this song humming in his bones?
“Maybe you will find me again,” Kiyoomi said.
The stranger tilted his head. There was a hint of a smile on his face.
“Maybe I will.”
When they meet again, Kiyoomi doesn’t see him right away. Instead he sees, first, the lamp, hanging on the thin arch of the fence—a warm glow in the husky blue of dusk. Then the little house slowly comes into view, emerging from behind the horizon, coming from the night into the edge of light: the low roof, the windows lit golden. Behind the glass he can see the edge of the stove, on which a kettle sits, waiting to boil.
Slowly, Kiyoomi smiles.
If his feet take him up the path quicker than before, some roads are to be traveled faster, like those that lead home.