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i.
Someone once said that God’s loneliest creation is the eye. Unaware of the other eye, it never holds what passes through it; it cannot hold what passes through it. Not even the full moon that forever orbits around the earth but never crashes.
A coin-shaped tear on the fabric of the night sky, it’s eternally apart from the sun, its own shadow born in another land, and thus also lonely in its own right. Even if the sun touches it with its sunlight-shaped fingertips, it lets them go and offers them to the footprint-carved sand.
Tonight, as the Brazilian air traces the grooves on your face, all of God’s loneliest creations gather below the balcony of your hotel room, and your heart is their guest of honor.
It beats with each spike of the volleyball, palms rejecting its leathered pleads to linger on their skin a little longer, yet they never let it touch the ground, pushing it far away from what it aches for. The players isolate this ball, quilted from humanity’s cruelty, as if it’s a crime to walk where you're being pulled. So they apologize during serves, permitting the volleyball to listen to their heartbeats.
One of them always lifts the ball up to his lips before serving, and if he moves to the spot where moonlight falls the most, his hair turns into the color of tangerine.
It’s the fruit Shoyo would always sneak into the library and peel for you. You’d move your face away from the table, to keep the stain and scent on your fingertips and chin alone.
On one of those days, while peeling the fifth tangerine, as sunset-orange rays cut across the crook of his hands, Shoyo told you about Brazil.
“I’d stay there for two years,” he said, a sphere of citrus unraveling within his hands. “Then I’ll play indoors again.” He placed the tangerine over a folded napkin and pushed it next to your pencil case. “Do you want any souvenirs?”
A citrus kernel exploded in your mouth, you said in the back of your mind, Just come back here.
His whole plan seemed as if it were scribbled on a magnetic drawing board: erased as easily as it was written. But he centered the rest of his high school days around it, that its absurdity lost against the slim chance of Shoyo playing beach volleyball outside your hotel room tonight.
The first step in proving any theorem is to gather facts. The winds are harsher the closer you walk to where he is, slashing your cheeks as if punishing you for trespassing. If the copper-haired man, whose chin is half-sunk on the sand, is Shoyo, what does it cost to enter his life again, what does it cost to let him enter yours?
Your soles find relief on the steps across the sand court, as your eyes follow the man following the ball, your chin on your knees, until the spectators in front of you shout, “Ninja Shoyo!”
“Ninja Shoyo,” you repeat in hushed tones. “Ninja Shoyo, Ninja Shoyo,” you keep parroting as if the next utterance of it would roll off your tongue better than the last. It never does. These words are not for you to keep.
Ninja Shoyo rises with his feet as fast as he had fallen, running and jumping for the last score of the game. Everyone around the court cheers. He gives his partner a high five and shakes his opponents’ hands, and walks closer to where you are.
You drop your head until all that’s in front of you are your toes. They hold your gaze as Ninja Shoyo’s voice fades into Shoyo’s, fades into a chuckle, fades into a gust of wind. Two years weigh down his voice, two years you’d never know about. It’s barely similar to the voice that shouted farewell across the quadrangle, the last time you heard him say goodbye.
You were eighteen. Spring had melted most of winter, and the cherry blossom trees started to wake up from their slumber. A diploma in one hand and a letter of raw emotions in another, you were a wall away from drowning Shoyo with things you’d never said.
But it was his smile that did it. It was his smile that shredded the envelope, crumpled it to a ball of things no one else would know about, and threw it to a bin, to where it belonged, because your tear-soaked letter would merely slash a papercut across his smile.
His voice searched for you, but you stayed behind the wall, and let his voice fade into a memory.
ii.
Despite being the replica of the human eye, the camera catches what passes through it, and has the luxury to let them go by choice. It breaks down smiles and trees and clouds, and transforms them into bytes, storing them in a plastic square the size of a thumbnail, rendering them fragile. So humans duplicate them and keep them in an ever-expanding web of foreign memories, thus never lonely, thus making space for the finite storage they have in their hands.
Today, on your first sunrise in Brazil, your phone, cracked along the screen, immortalizes the moment the sun rises from the ocean. The water is denim blue against the pinkish green horizon, the clouds are brushstrokes of dirt-orange and white. The eye can revisit this later, on days when it craves company, on days when it longs for something familiar to pass through it again.
A knock on the door, you put on your sunglasses and pocket your phone.
“We’ll eat on our way there,” says Ma upon opening the door, handing you what resembles a rectangular empanada. Pa’s back faces you. “Bring everything you need.”
A white wrapping paper sticks to the toast-brown crust, grease radiating on the wax and stealing its color. Between your teeth is shredded chicken and cheese. From your mouth escapes steam, as a yellow cab circles the hotel’s rotonda, dusk-blue striping its body until it touches the red-stained white plate.
The meat’s scent clings to the cab’s seats. “Cachoeira de Lágrimas,” Pa says, buckling his seatbelt in the passenger seat. Ma sits to your right, elbows pushing on her waist.
A gear switches and the street reveals itself: the road, gray with distanced white bars; the sidewalk, an asphalt carpet for trees with foliage so lush you cannot see the sky; and a part of a wall, colored with a mural of a sitting barefoot man, holding a sign that says, WELCOME TO REAL BRAZIL, an empty plate next to his feet. You crumple the wrapping paper, its creases poking your palm.
The car stops in front of the mouth of a forest. “Thanks,” says Ma. Your feet out of the car, you slam the door, air wrinkling on the cab’s roof as it drives away. Pa exhales, swiping the back of his neck with a towel.
Ma goes to a group of men crowding a silver food stand, a cranberry-red parasol sheltering the woman frying teardrop-shaped croquettes the size of a palm. Words leave Ma’s mouth, and the men, in reply, turn their heads to a spot lost behind their bodies.
From the blaze of black and brown hair comes out a head of garnet-orange. “I’m Shoyo!” he says, a sparkle of white between his lips. “I’ll be your tour guide for today!”
There are times, times that are so rare, so dubious, that humans call them something to marvel at, something that pierces the beliefs they have held since birth. They call them miracles. It’s the name they give to the one percent that science cannot grasp, because unfamiliarity elicits fear, and to name a fear is to tame it.
Shoyo’s eyes, syrup-tinged under this sun, soaking in your face, is a miracle.
Before Pa can say, “You’re Japanese?” you lower your head, your shoes the shade of rotten mandarin. The crumpled paper shrinks in your hand. Shoyo leads the way as you follow his shadow, your parents a wall between your feet and his sandals. You store the wrapping paper in your pocket.
From the entrance, a concrete staircase leads up to a no-rail, no-roof stone bridge crossing a river three meters below, moss fading along its edges. At the end of the bridge rests a rusted wheel from a war tank, your shadows passing through clay-red dots on the metal as you enter the forest, uphill.
Shoyo asks, “Why are you visiting Rio?”
“It’s our wedding anniversary,” Ma says. “And”—she half-twists her neck, pointing her chin towards you, saying your name—“will be looking for jobs soon.”
“At least we hope so,” says Pa, the first set of words he has spoken ever since you landed yesterday. He adds, wordless and floating in the air, You’ve overextended your gap year. Grow up already.
•••••
Cachoeira de Lágrimas, or the Waterfall of Tears, is a two-tiered cascade pouring into a river, according to the travel website Ma had sent you. The upper level towers at six meters, while the lower level stands at fifteen meters, where water pools into a steady lake as wide as thirty meters.
“My boss said that this forest was once a sea serpent,” Shoyo says, picking up a candy wrapper and dropping it into a nearby bin. You throw your garbage, too. “The serpent’s name was Labismena. She swam for a thousand years to find someone to be with forever, until she reached this river.”
The sun, splintered through the leaves, presses the roots and grass with blades of sunlight, the soil at the tip of your shoes caking. Shoyo continues, “There was a palace around here at that time where a princess named Dionysia lived. She was born with a weak heart, so she was never allowed to go out and play with children her age.
“Until Labismena heard her cries from under the river and called out to her.” Shoyo, still walking, turns around to face you and your parents, forming a hole with his hands and placing it around his lips. “Dionysia! Dionysia! Join to me, Dionysia! Let mine voice be thy guide!”
The first smile you make in Brazil is in front of Shoyo, because of Shoyo.
His focus back on the loamy path, he tells the rest of the story, your feet matching the foot he’s stepping with.
After meeting Labismena one morning, Dionysia would sneak out of the palace every single day to see her. Dionysia would walk on the riverside while Labismena would swim the waters, the distance between them growing air-thin. This was their promise and prayer, that they would rendezvous at the same time, same place, that meeting with such frequency ensured each other’s wish for their souls to never walk alone again.
“In thy sixteenth year,” Labismena said, “I shall build a ship for thou, so thou may sail the waters with me.”
But healers could not see a bright future for Dionysia, because it did not exist. It could not exist. Not with the body she was born in. (The axiom of the null set, which governs the concept of nothingness, of the existence of nonexistence, was proven by her body’s dysfunction.) So the day she turned sixteen, the morning had taken the night, and with it, Dionysia.
Labismena, with the promised ship struggling to steady itself on her scaly back, swam the longest, but safest, route to their meeting spot. She waited minutes, hours, days, but Dionysia never came. She called for her, cried for her, but the weeks blossomed into years. The ship disintegrated from decades of storms, her body declined into soil, and her eyes withered until there were only sockets, sockets where her tears flowed like a waterfall, endlessly.
“That’s a very sad tale,” Ma says, reaching up for Shoyo’s hand, pulling her up to a higher ground. Pa follows, his own hands his anchor. Shoyo then extends his arm, asking for your hand, mouthing, You’ll be okay with me, I promise.
Palm in palm, your fingers blanket his wrist, and his on yours. In one pull your faces are a kiss away.
You let go of him. You let him go.
One sun is enough.
“But the waterfall is really beautiful,” he says. “I promise.”
Cachoeira de Lágrimas, a bedrock of promises.
Cachoeira de Lágrimas, a cradle of loneliness.
Cachoeira de Lágrimas, a home of lonely promises.
These are the facts. To be beautiful, then, is to be an epicenter of ruin. This conclusion manifests in the way the river, close to your shoes, hits the rocks, the water splitting into beads at the point of contact, smothering the rock in cloud-white foam. A heaven on earth grounded on destruction.
“We have to cross this first,” Shoyo shouts amidst the current. “Then we’ll reach a cliff diving spot. It’ll be faster if we go in pairs and carry the other person.” He turns to you. “Would that be fine?”
“Anything to make this easier.” Pa grunts, sealing Ma’s legs on his waist, Ma’s arms circling his neck. “After you.”
“I’ll be careful,” says Shoyo, to you.
He doesn’t give you his hand. You give yours first. He takes them and crosses your wrists in front of his chest, lifting your legs until your feet leave the ground, until there are only clothes between his and your skin. You peel your chest off his back. His heart pulses in its own rhythm; sharing yours will disrupt it like a ripple on a calm lake.
“Long time no see,” he says in a volume that minimizes the further it goes past your ears, the current drowning his words before they reach your parents. “After graduation you just”—he leaps diagonally to a boulder—“disappeared.”
At his every hop your nails brush the strips of his tank top. “I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Sleeping.”
The first laugh you hear in Brazil is from Shoyo. “What else have you been up to? Do you still take pictures?” You push your chest a little closer, letting your fingers crawl from his tank top to his skin.
“Sometimes,” you say. He hoists you as he takes another leap. “I can’t believe you actually flew here.”
“Me too,” he says, glancing at your parents for a second. “I can’t believe I’m carrying you on my back. In Brazil! Of all places.”
At this distance, his back is bigger than it was in high school, the back that was a fingertip away but could not be touched. What did it take for him to flourish, to be beautiful? What are you willing to ruin in yourself to arrive at beauty?
“So,” he huffs after skipping, “what kind of work will you do?”
•••••
One night, the night after your homeroom teacher had arranged a parent-teacher meeting, which was also three months after you’d submitted an untouched career plan form, there were only two plates on the dinner table. Yours and Ma’s.
You owned one of the five smartphones in the entire graduating class, and, by extension, held possession of voice recordings, voices mothered by strangers, and photos, for the school yearbook, which included Shoyo’s.
“I’ll still fly to Brazil,” he had answered to Mai, a student conducting interviews for the yearbook.
“Looks like you’ve got your future planned out!” Mai said.
A couple of questions later and his eyes are on yours, through your camera, smiling the smile he reserved for sports interviews. For a brief few months, Shoyo went home with you, even if he only came in fragments preserved in your phone.
But the night your family came back from the parent-teacher meeting, a crack grew on its screen, like the first branch of a young wisteria tree breaking at the peak of spring. Even after Pa shouted and threw the baskets of fruits to the wall, the first thing you did was to see if Shoyo was still inside, unbruised.
“We work double shifts for you!” Pa screamed. “All you have to do is finish high school! Then work!” Ma chased after the rolling plums and peaches on the floor. “Two things! Is that too hard?”
•••••
“I don’t know,” you say to Shoyo. One hop and the water current crashes behind you. “I don’t really know.”
“I didn’t know I’d play volleyball either,” he says, taking one last leap before reaching the end of the river. “I thought about it, but I’m only here ‘cause I took a different route back home.”
You slide off his back, your nose inching away from the crook of his neck, his hands running down your legs before letting go, the ghost trail he left behind two degrees warmer.
After five breaths, Pa hops to the boulder next to the one Shoyo jumped on, before landing on the ground.
“I made a detour,” Shoyo says. “Maybe you need to do that too.”
•••••
The line between life and death is defined by choices. Choices that glide you closer to either of the two, like the slider you adjust to search for the clearest radio frequency. Choices like the woman a few steps away from you wants to make, pushing in and pulling out a cigarette stick from a silver box, a row of neon-orange life jackets swaying like wind chimes above her—a man-made object that allows second chances, beaming over the very thing that kills them.
The woman pockets her cigarettes. Next to her is a sign stained with 9,00.
“Nine reais per jacket per day,” Shoyo says.
Ma chooses life and trades her pocket money for three life jackets, handing you one, a whiff of nicotine rising from the plastic as you bring it closer to your body. Pa, after affixing the life jacket on himself, links the ends of the buckle on Ma’s. A gentleness reserved for times when you send someone off before they journey closer to death.
Shoyo asks, “Who wants to go first?”
“We’ll go,” Ma says, dragging Pa towards the edge of the cliff, but Pa stays on his spot.
“What do you mean we ?”
“We as in us,” she says. “Come on, one jump and it’ll all be over.” As if to seal her promise, she smiles, and it’s this measure of assurance that moves Pa, her shoulder brushing halfway down his arm. “Ready?”
“Let’s get this over with,” he says, his sigh wobbling in the air.
Their hands, filled with nothing but each other, pull them up from the ground and guide their descent, powerless to change the outcome but enough to replace their screams with laughter.
Shoyo cheers them from your side and walks you closer to the edge. He unlatches and latches the waist buckle on your life jacket, tying a knot with its loose ends. “I’ll wait for you down there.”
Heartbeats stream up to your ears, an exploding geyser within the walls of your arteries. “Can’t you jump with me?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Below, your parents swim to the nearest boulder, their feet paddling, breaking the reflective sheet. Sunlight, stored in water beads, flies away like lit sparklers. They let go of each other so both can live in the end. So what is two minutes of separation to two years of absence?
“Okay,” you say. “You’ll be there when I jump?”
He nods, smiling, leaving an echo of his touch on your shoulder before going down the boulders. You take three steps back only to reclaim them forward, propelling you with enough force as you jump off the edge.
“Woo!” Shoyo shouts from the boulders, his arms waving in your periphery.
Midway between the water and the cliff, the lock snaps, shards of black plastic falling faster than you, the life jacket unraveling, a butterfly on its final flight.
“No no no no no Shoy—”
Water cuts your ears. The lake pulls your legs. The life jacket peels itself from your body. Your fingertips a breath away from the straps, your eyes close, until something wraps your arms and pulls you up, playing a tug-of-war with the lake, until the sun hits your face with Shoyo.
The line between life and death is defined by the hand that holds you.
His hair lake-drenched, his face crease-streaked, he asks, “Are you okay?”
“That–that thing–the latch”—you gulp for air, your arms a dead weight on his shoulders—“it–it opened.”
Ma’s voice echoes, her words lost in your waterlogged ears.
He grabs the halved jacket. “The lock broke. Everything broke,” he says, letting the pieces go and pulling you closer, only a little closer before your chest kisses his. “I’m sorry.” Your breaths braid themselves around the sunrays, his face a paper scored with a craft knife. Your pulse slows down.
“I made sure it was securely locked. I’m really—”
A laugh escapes from your lips, head tipping forward to his clavicle, hands locked at his nape.
“Wait–why are you–huh?”
“That was so scary,” you say, a smile growing on your face. “Really scary, Shoyo.”
The creases on his face eases. “Did you have fun?”
•••••
There are multiple degrees of Shoyo’s smile. The lowest is the first one, when you first met him, when he asked for help with his math homework. “No one else is free to teach me,” he said. “But Yachi said you’re good at it.” It went a smidge higher when you said, “Sure,” and even higher when he passed his exams.
It kept climbing when you agreed to teach Natsu math during summer break, his smile appearing on her face whenever you visited their house, Hinata staying in Tokyo for training camp.
The night after your first session with her, as the streetlamps flickered over a man walking with a tie around his head, Hinata talked to you over the phone.
“How was she?”
“So much better than you, Hinata.”
He scoffed. “Can’t you compliment her without dragging me down?” The sky was moonless but not starless, dots of time capsules that were, most likely, cold corpses. Did Hinata see them that way, too? Or would he think they were proof that life once existed?
“Hey,” he said. “Natsu is Hinata, too. Just call me Shoyo.”
The first time you said it in person, his smile went up by ten degrees, and ascended more on your first New Year’s together. Shoyo stood next to you in front of the temple bell, praying for his family and teammates.
“And the person beside me,” he finished. His smile went down a degree lower, the subtracted degree painted on your face.
•••••
“I did,” you say. “I had fun.”
Your hands around his neck, Shoyo swims to the boulders, joining your parents as they dry their clothes. He lifts you first until you sit down. He rises from the water, wringing the hem of his tank top, his midsection a shade lighter than the rest of his body. You scratch the surface and tame your eyes.
“Are you alright?” Ma asks, placing a hand on your shoulder.
You nod. “Shoyo was there for me. I’m okay.”
“If you say so,” she says. “I’m going to jump again with Pa. Would you be okay on your own?”
“Ma,” you sigh, “I’m good.”
“I’ll stay here,” Shoyo says. “Have some time for yourselves.”
“Really? That’s great!” She turns to Pa. After a sigh he nods, getting up with Ma and circling back to the cliff’s edge.
Shoyo sits next to you.
“Isn’t looking after them part of your job?”
“I think it’s safer to spot them down here,” he says. “Shouldn’t you go with them? They’re family.”
“I almost drowned alive.”
Up on the cliff, Pa takes Ma’s hand, but lets it go after Ma jumps on her own. A flurry of swear words dive into the lake faster than she does.
“Until when will you stay here?”
“Next week, I think,” you say.
Ma rises from the water, flicking her fingers at him. Pa’s laugh doesn’t reach your ears.
“If you’re free on Tuesday,” he says, “can I treat you to dinner?”
Your neck twists. Shoyo drops his head, his thumbs scratching each other. His shadow stretches along the hills of boulders behind him, the type of gloom that soothes burns. Pa shouts that he’ll jump, just wait.
“Why?”
“Just wanted to catch up,” he says. “And I missed you.”
The wind swipes your bodies, his hair reaching out to the one that touched it. His eyes, the color of the wood bench you used to sit on with him, holds the sun that shimmers above you. If the cost of reentering each other’s lives is equal to the cost of welcoming an invited stranger to your house, then consequence is an afterthought.
After five back-and-forths, Pa takes the plunge.
“Okay.” You bump his foot with yours. “Tuesday.”
iii.
Tuesdays are for fire. 火, the first kanji for the second day of the workweek, is the fire bottled in fireflies. They burn mustard yellow against the dusk-violet horizon, gold dots forming a star map on the mountain’s stone-gray downslope to your right.
One of them flies to another fire, to the tips of Shoyo’s hair, his bike wheels spinning forward. You pedal after him, the Atlantic Ocean bruise-colored from insistently crashing at the foot of the mountain.
Shoyo had rented the bike for you. At the hotel lobby, its green and yellow handlebars were tilted, its stand criss-crossing with the one on his red bike.
“So you stay here,” he said. He jutted his chin to the beach volleyball court. “I play there sometimes.”
You cleared your throat. “You promised dinner,” you said. “Not this.”
“We’ll go there with this,” he said. “Do your parents know where you’re going?”
You nodded. “But they don’t know I’m with you.”
Balancing yourself on the seat, he places the helmet on you, buckling it up, adjusting until you wince. “Sorry,” he said. “I almost lost you last time.”
You stop at a traffic light, pressing on the brakes a second later than Shoyo, the road a modern-day Red Sea. When was the last time you left for the same place together, the last time you stopped in the same corner, together?
The last time you rode your bikes together was a week before graduation, and the first time you rode your bikes together was a quiet Wednesday—a realization of its first kanji, 水, the water reflected on a calm sky—so quiet that the most interesting thing that had happened was learning you lived a few blocks away from each other.
“Since when?” Hinata asked.
“Since I was born.” You shook your head, kicking the bike stand as your leg went over the other side. “Why are you so shocked that I live there?”
“No one else goes my route.” He sat on his bike, clutching the brakes three times. “Why have we never crossed paths before?”
“I don’t know.” You began to pedal, Hinata pacing himself, hovering beside you. “I don’t usually go home this late, though. Our club finished later than it should have.”
On the way home stood a small hill, its ends bookended by bus stops and telephone booths. Wood benches scattered across the hill, chocolate-brown rectangles rooted like chopped tree trunks. With summer brimming with melted popsicles and cracked watermelons, cosmos had bloomed all over the hill, red and pink and white and yellow petals fluttering like confetti against the backdrop of the night.
You hit the brakes. Hinata almost flew away from the sudden stop.
“What is it?”
“I always stop by here,” you said, as if conveying a law of nature to him. The wind brushed the clouds away from the moon. “Sorry, I acted out of reflex. Sorry.” You spun a pedal until your foot stopped it. “Sorry. Let’s go.”
“No no no, wait.”
“What?”
“We can rest here for a while,” he said. “Don’t break your routine for me.”
“What about you?”
“It’s fine. Coach said I should rest sometimes.”
In the weeks that followed, whenever your schedule matched his, street lamps and trees would find two Karasuno High students pushing their bikes uphill, chasing after the moon as it rose.
That autumn, the weather plucked the leaves off the magnolia trees until winter arrived, barren branches raking the gray skies, yearning for what it had lost in the absence of flowers unfolding on its surface. The confetti of cosmos wilted, all of its heat gone with autumn. On one of the benches, his and your hands passed a cup of miso soup, an entire thermos of it steaming at your feet.
“Did you make this?”
You nodded, hoping the little movement would create friction, create heat.
“It’s tasty.” Shoyo handed over the cup for another serving.
“Do you think I can pass this down to my kids?”
“Yeah! Why not?” He slurped his soup, the time you had carved in the still hours of the morning trailing down his throat. “Do you always think that far ahead?”
“No,” you said. “Not always. It’s just”—you puffed out the cold from your body—“haven’t you ever dreamt of having one?” A bird landed on a snow-dipped branch, a curtain of white specks raining beneath its feet.
Shoyo trapped the cup within his hands, steam gauzing his low-degree smile.
The traffic light turns green, the green of Brazil’s flag, and in a snap you’re back in Rio, back, again, beside Shoyo, his smile a degree higher.
After ten more pedals, you park your bikes on the bike rack across a restaurant, unlatching the helmet off. Shoyo pushes the door open, stopping at the front desk. He speaks in a language not meant for his tongue, yet the words fall out of his mouth as if they were once rooted in him.
The person behind the counter nods, pointing him to a server.
“Let’s go,” Shoyo says. You follow him following the server to an escalator, leading you to a room with glass windows so clear the Atlantic Ocean becomes its wall, so clear the hardwood floor is the ocean’s shore.
On the table, Shoyo sits across from you. “I already called in last night, so we just have to wait for ten minutes.”
You nod, glugging the service water, throat air-dried then thirst-quenched, your body reclaiming parts of it that you’ve ruined.
“What time do you have to go back?”
You shrug. “Anytime. Why?”
“Can we go to my place later?” he says, hands lost under the table. “I have something to give you.”
An old couple behind Shoyo, their heads of white hair distanced apart exactly the width of Shoyo’s neck, looks at each other, a half of a smile smeared on each of their faces.
“Okay,” you say.
Shoyo’s order has materialized into snow crabs, its shells dusted in red-orange powder, corns on the cob and quail eggs swimming in sunset-red oil underneath the meat. Steam from the food splits you apart from Shoyo, his hair an overwashed orange sweater. You break the smoke screen.
Before you can wear the plastic gloves he stops you.
“Just scoop out the eggs and the corn so they don’t get too soaked,” he says.
“But I want to eat crabs, too.”
“I’ll peel them. Don’t worry.”
He pulls the claw first and sets it aside, then takes the merus. He puts the extra meat in your plate first, before breaking apart the leg until your plate is full with meat and his with shells, one plate the proof of the axiom of the null set and the other its contradiction, sauce streaks the only reward for what his hands proved in seconds.
“What about you?”
“Later,” he says, busying himself with the claw, stuffing your plate with more meat until a mound forms. “It’s gonna get cold. Come on. Eat.”
Like the afternoon, before he went to the gym, sunset bleeding through the windows, the world dipped in marmalade, he told you not to bring lunch the next day. Next day, at Karasuno’s rooftop, two shadows on the ground parallel to each other, their only connection the shadow of birds watching on the chain-link fence, your hands were empty except for what Shoyo had filled them with.
“Eat this,” he said. “Please,” as if an afterthought. “I tried.” He hid his hands behind his back. “And it’s the least burned.”
“But why?”
The birds jumped so they could fly, reverting your intersecting shadows to parallel, as if a point of contact never existed except in your minute-old memory. Until Shoyo stepped closer and reconstructed the attachment that the sun did not allow.
“For always teaching me and Natsu,” he said. “And it’s exams week. You forget to eat during exams week.”
That day on the rooftop was a Friday, whose first kanji, 金, is the gold in kumquat, one of the few citrus fruits that can be consumed whole, skin and flesh, blood and bone never separated even in destruction. It was a day of offerings, of sacrifices. The day you reserved your whole for a fraction of his, scraping his lunchbox clean only to part from it, to return it.
“Thank you,” you said. “I loved this,” you offered, because to give is to receive.
•••••
The absolute truth is a set of words spelling out an immutable truth. Like the truth that there are no square circles. That adding an odd number to an even number will always result in an odd number. That the sum of all angles in a triangle is one-hundred and eighty degrees. That he was named after the sun. That fire burns. That he has worked as a part-time tour guide at Cachoeira de Lágrimas. That water drowns. That his fingers left tangerine-laced fingerprints on your notebooks. That gold blinds.
The truth is Shoyo lives in a two-bedroom apartment. The truth is the person he’s sharing this place with, Pedro, is in his own room, asleep. The truth is you’re sitting at their dining table pushed to the wall, a coffee maker to your left, Shoyo, on the other side of the table, crouched in front of the open fridge.
He slams it close and sets a slice of cake on the table. Toast-brown on the outside and bread-brown on the inside, shreds of white piling on top like fallen snow on top of the cosmos hill.
The truth is you forgot.
“I’m sorry,” you say, your hands over your face. “It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”
“You remembered!”
“I’m so sorry.” You keep hiding but he takes your hands, ceiling light spilling over your eyes, his hands guiding you to hold the plate and the fork.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” he says. “I saved the first slice for you. Go on, eat.”
Scoffing, you stab the cake, bringing a forkful of it close to your lips. “You made sure to save the first slice, huh?”
“‘Cause the first slice is for the person you love the most.”
The cake stops at your lips.
“At least that’s what Heitor told me.”
Your eyes hold each other.
How do you prove the existence of absolute truth? How much of your time, life, does it cost? How many papers do you need to stain and crumple and throw until you get to the last page and draw a square at the end, quod erat demonstratum, all of these facts and equations laid out to be demonstrated, for the proof to be complete?
How do you know if a story is complete?
An explosion. You flinch.
“I guess they’re excited for the festival,” he says.
The truth is there’s a window next to the fridge, streaks of red phosphorescence blooming like a flower in the night, receding like a waterfall. Another firework shoots up, a blue lily unraveling, the sky a garden of flowers that never survives the earth.
“My room has a good view. Want to see?”
And the truth is, in his room full of manga and health and sports books, his old varsity jacket hangs on a coat rack, fireworks coloring in the stitched white letters. A crow still rooted on the ground despite its changing feathers. You stand next to him at the window. A gold lotus bigger than the sun sparkles briefly over the mountain ridges, over the Atlantic Ocean.
In between short bursts of silence, Shoyo chooses to speak.
“I couldn’t contact you after graduation,” he says. “And before we trekked Lágrimas, you were avoiding me.”
“I wasn’t avoiding you,” you lie. A white chrysanthemum flashes in the sky, its petals trailing like the leaves of a coconut tree. “I’m just bad at long distance relationships,” you say, veiling the lie with the truth. “Everyone’s busy doing their own thing and I don’t want to be a bother. Especially to you.”
“Do you think I won’t make time for you?”
Another white chrysanthemum, but a second glance renders its contours like a gardenia.
“Shoyo,” you say, your pulse following the rhythm of the fireworks. To prove the existence of absolute truth, you start by questioning it. “Do you like me?”
Outside, fire touches the water, a blaze of gold sparkling in its wake. Shoyo puts his thumb over your lips, fingers on one side of your face. “Can I?”
The first kiss you taste in Brazil, in this life, is from Shoyo. It tastes like the flowers in the sky, the cosmos in summer, the spot on the cup’s rim where his and your lips had been, the peeled snow crabs, the first lunch he cooked for you, the first slice of his birthday cake, the first tangerine you shared.
It tastes like the shredded letter, abandoned in the place where you left Shoyo, found whole again.
At the slightest contact of your tongues, you shiver.
“Can I do more?”
“Please,” you whisper, “please take more.”
Here, you offer, guiding his hands to parts of yourself that had blossomed in his absence. Here lies everything that is yours.
The truth is it’s Tuesday. There’s a flower of fire in the sky. Fire between your mouths. Fire in his hair, your hands, palms, fingers. Skin. Fire on his fingers running up your skin. Running down your legs, the way they did when you crossed the river. Fire rekindling. Everything he touches drowns in fire. Becomes fire. A cauterization of grief-streaked wounds. And it’s this scorching revisiting of scars, this becoming, that pushes you to push him away.
“No?”
You fist his chest but there is only fabric in your hands. “You didn’t answer my question.”
The first step in proving any theorem is to gather facts.
Fire on your cupped cheeks, the highest degree of his smile on his face, he says, “I love you.”
To put out fire, instinct tells you to throw water at it. So you start crying. Take off the ash remains from your face and gather them, his hands, between your palms.
“But Shoyo,” you say, caging his fingers until there are only arms, tears dripping down his wrists, glimmering purple, then yellow. “You don’t want to have kids, right?”
This is the fact. And the fact is, that winter night on the hill of flower corpses, miso soup within his hands, he answered you: “I’ll never be selfless enough to be a father.”
His smile wanes to the lowest degree, lower than the first smile stored in your memory. Then it rises, barely a degree.
“That’s still far away,” he says. He breaks away from your hand-prison, trapping your hands instead, an escaped convict cradling the very place that condemned it to sleep without a mattress. “Maybe I’ll change my mind, who knows?”
“Don’t,” you say. “Don’t do that for me.”
“But I love you.”
“I love you, too.” The fastest way to relieve someone from choking is to crush their body. “But don’t bargain with your life just to keep me.”
火. 水. 金. A waterfall of burning ochre on his face. Your face, in his eyes, tear-stained. All four eyes in this room holding what the heart cannot, even if only briefly, because to keep love, this love, is to keep breaking. Because to keep beauty, his beauty, is to keep it from ruin.
iv.
The axiom of separation assumes that if someone can logically state a set of conditions, then there is a group that satisfies those conditions. If someone can say that a person must be a human, has graduated from Karasuno, and is happy—assuming that all of these, when molded together, are in line with the rules of logic—then there is a group that satisfies those conditions.
Whether the group is non-empty is another story; what matters is the group is there. It exists. A group of happy Karasuno alumni exists. Waiting for its separated parts to come home in one piece. A reconstruction through faith—a concept formed outside the laws of mathematics.
“That’s the only thing I remember from everything you taught me,” Shoyo says, his words dissipating in the air, joining the half-lit moon. He sits next to you on the beach, his and your feet half-sunk on the sand. Faraway a conical mountain covers a fraction of the night sky.
“I can feel it, you know.” He grabs a fistful of sand and lets it go back to the ground. “I can feel myself becoming part of that group.”
In the distance, a group of men attach a string of party flags from one pole to another, each wire crossing one another, the main intersection hovering over a stack of woods. The wind passes. Only the flags move. The men, after folding the chairs and the ladders, wave goodbye to one another, dispersing like the embers of the unlit bonfire.
Goodbye , you think, tonight being your last night in Rio.
“Next time we meet,” he says, “I hope you’re a part of it, too.”
“Don’t put a deadline on my happiness.”
“But you never get anything done without a deadline.”
A wave crests then reduces to a wall of foam, thinning to a sheet of froth on the shore until it disappears under the ocean, until it’s reincarnated into a new wave that, like in its past life, yearns for the shore. Insistent on its leaving and coming and leaving and coming, moving back to move forward, like a repeatedly backspaced letter.
“Thank you,” you say. “I loved this,” you accept, reclaiming your whole.
“This?”
“This,” you repeat. “Meeting you again.”
Shoyo’s laugh relaxes into the softest exhale your ears have ever had the privilege to listen to. He extends his legs, rooting his hands on the sand behind his back.
“Me too.”
•••••
A birdcage hangs from the ceiling, refashioned to trap a small chandelier, flickering like a firefly, plastic mandarins and vines creeping on its bars. Two other cages dangle on its side, illuminating the entrance of the airport’s coffee shop.
You’re sitting at a table, near the bicycle attached to the brown brick wall, just a few meters away from the entrance, Ma and Pa across from you. Outside, where the blade of light doesn’t reach the floor, an ocean of travelers sweeps to the left, or right, the wheels of their suitcases churning the air.
It’s like a perpetual motion machine: people hop on the plane only for new ones to trickle into the airport. Constantly reduced, constantly restored. A performance art of infinity. All of them pass through your eyes, grazing the tunnels to your mind. Everything in the coffee shop—the birdcage, the firefly chandelier, the bicycle—passes through your eyes.
If the eye is always touched by everything that passes through it, even for just a blink, is it truly lonely?
“What are you getting?” says Ma. You point at the coconut cake. It’s the one that looks most like the one Shoyo kept for you. Ma calls for the waiter, reciting your order, her vanilla caramel sundae, and Pa’s fries. Right when the waiter leaves, you overtake the silence that soon follows.
“I want to study math in Tokyo.”
You hold their gazes, your eyes staying longer on Pa’s. You don’t flinch.
“I don’t know yet what I’ll do after that. Maybe I’ll teach or work somewhere else. I don’t know, but I’m sure of what I want.”
Because it’s the shortest Manhattan distance from this airport to where Shoyo is headed, because you made a time-sealed promise with the tour guide for the bedrock of promises. If you’ve met Shoyo again after two years, what stops probability from coinciding your paths again in a much shorter time?
The waiter comes back with two plates and a bowl then leaves. Pa splits his fries, one side near to his belly, the other nearer to your knuckles.
“Get one if you want,” he says, and starts dipping his fries on Ma’s sundae, a splatter of caramel on top of the cream like liquid fireworks.
Maybe going back to school is also a kind of moving forward. Maybe moving forward is all Pa asks of you.
On the first bite of your coconut cake, you’re hurled back to the night of his birthday. You take a second bite, then another, until there is only the toast-brown crust and the shreds of coconut, only the shell of what it once was.
“I forgot to ask,” Ma says, tapping the back of your hand. “That tour guide in the waterfall, you know, the one with orange hair?”
“Shoyo?”
“Yeah, him,” she says. “Shoyo. You seemed close. Do you know each other?”
“You’re only asking now?” Pa says.
“Why didn’t you ask? I’m getting slow in the memory department.”
“I am, too, though.” He dips another fry into the cream and puts it in his mouth.
A call for a flight resounds outside the coffee shop. Carts and luggages swathe the entrance. You picture Shoyo on the day of his flight, the one you didn’t go to, and superimpose this not-memory over the people currently boarding the plane. Even like this, even in a what-if, his hair still stands out, still burns your fingers that once held them.
You explore your memories for the highest degree of Shoyo’s smile and put it on your face.
“We know each other now.”