Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Forgive me, for all that I have done, but mostly for what I did not.”

– Francis Abernathy, The Secret History

“I’m sorry,” says Rintarou.

It is spring, again. The wind passes between them and attempts to thread daisy chains in Rintarou’s hair. The twisted tree adjacent to their apartment is beginning to regain colour. Violet splinters above.

Osamu blinks at Rintarou's words and soaks it in.

There is a distance between them where a singular iris sprouts from a crack in the pavement, whimsy, amongst a forest of weeds. Osamu maintains his foot behind the cracked concrete. He admires it—that half-finished garden.

He would say it. He says it in all the ways he knows how. Osamu sighs. There’s no need to apologise.

But—habits die hard. Learning to love well is hard. It’s easier to say I’m sorry than I love you to the ones you love.

Osamu kicks on the leaves that cough around them. He stamps his teeth together and sifts his jaw. His entire life has always been quiet and anticlimactic: he supposes that he should have expected this.

It is bitter, but the sweetness of spring sticks to his fingers and all he can focus on is how white the air is. How it feels like the ghost of winter still lingers between his ribs. Death is a lick away, and Osamu bites on it with milk-sliced teeth. “Yeah.”

Atsumu and Osamu Miya turn seven on a dreary day of 2002 when autumn is at its prime at the mouth of October.

The day after follows the tradition of driving up to Kyoto to visit the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine for traditions sake.

They throw their coats on.

Since the only promise tradition can make is the past, when they buckle in the back of their family grey car, they travel down familiar roads, toward and later familiar hazy mountains that look like clouds that look like mountains.

All this blinks from a dawn-soaked morning into a bleary afternoon, the sun high, high, high.

It's understandable that children tend to not comply to tradition or resent it a little bit. Litany is built on memories, experiences, and routine; three things in which children do not acquire at their impressionable age.

Seven-year-old Atsumu adamantly argues that tradition is dumb and blind. This broad statement is said with great pungency towards the annual tradition where they hike the same mountain they conquered when they were five, when they were four, when they were three. When they will be fifteen. When they will.

It makes them question whether they even conquered it at all—with the hanging knowledge they are bound to do it all again the next year.

Because he is still a kid, Osamu, although far less expressive than Atsumu, can agree to many extents.

And no matter what they barter, Ma won’t listen. Stubbornness, or maybe diligence, is hereditary. Grams’ philosophy, and therefore Ma's, is that these visits are a mere 2-3 hours out of the 365 days they spend rotating around the sun to pay respects for their lives. A miniscule speck of dirt in the mountain. A tiny life in the world. An intangible network of connections.

So, they will hike up and through the thousands of vermillion tunnels that seem to float once their heads are a little closer to the clouds than sea level.

The question is—why?

That is a good question that seven-year-old Osamu doesn’t know. But he thinks he will begin to understand when he’s older.

It’s a story of tradition, but here is the story anyway.

They hike the mountain of cedar-laden greenery that provide relief from the sun. Aged rocks with gradients of moss, a wet sort of breeze meeting them once they step through the final torii gate.

They pay their respects. They bow a lot and clap in prayer because that’s what they’ve learnt. Empty dreams wander Osamu’s head whenever he catches sight of the weathered down fox statues.

And after they admire the view from the summit and time is chasing the sun down, they descend through the ribs of vermilion again. By the time they’re squished in the car, wisps of their hair have plastered astray on their foreheads and rest demands to be indulged.

Then they return home and when the sun sets early, it offers them a promise: 525,600 minutes from now, they will do this again.

They will hike through and up the spine of torii gates, sweat-soaked, delirious, and arrive to the sacred Mount Inarii. And then they will race to the summit, pray to the gods, descend through the intervals of red, and they will sleep on the car ride all the way home.  

Because a promise is a process, the sun will rise and set a million times more beyond the borders of their youth, in many different lives, in many different worlds. When the dusk sets in Brazil, dawn will rebirth through the skyline of Japan with a spill of squeezed oranges and stretching clouds. And again, and again, and again. 

Trust the sun. It comes, it goes.

For a promise to happen, you must let go.

See, seven doesn’t feel so much different from six.

This epiphany in particular crosses Osamu’s consciousness when he’s waiting for Atsumu who is fumbling over his bunny ear knotting his laces at the door, tongue poked out for maximum concentration.

Birthdays often feel like on a coat without trying it on prior to the purchase. Sometimes it is too large. Sometimes it is just right.

For Osamu, the coat has never been right.

The sleeves bag over his arms like velvet drapes and hangs from his waist like a wizards cloak. It swallows him whole and wears him instead.

However, a coat is a coat. Osamu can never pinpoint when he began to feel like he was six, nor when he outgrew being five. But he did—eventually. So he slips on this coat. He lays his trust in time.

“C’mon, yer takin’ so long,” Osamu grouses.

The engine of Ma’s car growls in the distance in a cloud of plumes seems to support his complaint.

Atsumu sucks his tongue around his two front teeth as he lowly hums a song they had heard from the radio a day ago. “Yeah, yeah,” he murmurs with a sloppy lisp.

He rises, knocks his feet against the floors, and with half tied laces, follows Osamu outside the door.

Autumn cracks and crumbs and rattles the earth right down to its bones.

Rintarou and Osamu are three months into this illusion they’ve encouraged hard enough to sprout assumptions but soft enough to not permit it a name.

Between them, they foster a garden that does not know what it is, of overgrown roots and wild weeds; but it’s beautiful and liveable, so that’s enough, isn’t it?  

They stand over concrete and watch if the seed they planted will ever take bloom with full knowledge that it will not. The wisteria twist in the winter winds, and sigh in the summer. They chuckle more than they laugh. They wonder how much longer they can convince everyone that what they have is what it is not because it’s just funny.

It is 8am, Sunday.

Through the misty lieu of another sleepless night, Osamu rises with ash-mussed hair. He inspects the blinds rather half-hearted or any use of heart at all, and after some contemplation, he peers through the cracks. A beat, or hundred. “Hey, Rin.”

A sleep-cleaved grunt, muffled. “What.”

“The sky is constipated tonight.”

“What?” There’s a gentle rustle of sheets.

“There’s no stars in the sky.”

A pained chuckle that trips and trips and trips. “Oh my god.”

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Change is transformative: where one thing moves into another, where it differs from its previous form whether completely or partly.

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“I don’t wanna be ya anymore.”

Thirteen years old, Osamu announces this as he holds out a bag of hair dye like how a hunter does it when he grotesquely hangs a fresh caught meat in display to his family, triumphant.

It’s strange the way he worded it though. I don’t wanna be ya anymore. As if he was ever Atsumu in the first place. Gross.

But there is a slither of ugly green in there. Not large enough for attentive care, but not okay enough that his words are soft edged. What Osamu was meant to say was, I don’t wanna be mistaken for being ya. But perhaps the two mean more the same than he thinks.

All the stars and planets in Atsumu’s eyes orbit around the large canvas before him. He’s perched over an easel, one foot edged on his seat and against his thigh while the other dangles like a vine.

“Well, yeah, neither,” is all Atsumu dismisses Osamu with his tongue poked out in tunnel vision concentration. Sound of thick acrylic licks and lolls the room like a lollipop.

So, with hair supplies purchased with the scraps of his pocket money and a pair of school scissors, Osamu enters the bathroom and defies history.

A boy, scissors, a mirror, a reckoning.

“Samu,” Atsumu gasps. “What the hell!”

Osamu fumbles with his plain cotton shirt and frowns. “I told ya. I don’t wanna be ya.”

“What do ya even mean. Ya are ya.” Atsumu has already deserted from the space between his desk and starting for Osamu cowered beneath the doorframe. “What the hell did—“

His hair looks terrible. It’s choppy, patchy, and Osamu knows damn well that Ma will—well. He doesn’t want to indulge in that thought before reality concretes and he’s experiencing it in real life.

“Lemme cut it for ya,” Atsumu licks his lips.

“Absolutely not, ya scrub,” Osamu scowls, but it comes out squeaky, more kin to a squeal.

Atsumu flies to his desk and raids through the nooks and crannies, making his mess into even more of a mess.

Alarmed, Osamu lunges for Atsumu and clasps a firm hand on his shoulder. He flings him back. “I am not lettin’ ya touch my hair!”

“Yer so lucky Ma is out right now,” Atsumu growls back as he shoves Osamu’s hand off his shoulder. Ow. What he doesn’t know is that’s the exact reason why Osamu did it in the first place, but the tempered words are quick to get stuck in his columned throat.

Osamu’s bottom lip hook beneath his front teeth. Contemplation and the second thought of many second thoughts run through his veins. They fill weight in his chest. They all go water. He parts his lips and inhales deep. “Oh my god.” He finally brings himself to sliver a hand through his hair, and feels the patches of thick and thin spots in mortification. “My hair.”  

The tender glow of the morning sun rises from the East and the sky is tangerine. Tangerine is the colour of discoloured cuticles, or the faded mandarins that sit on their fruit bowl. It is also the colour of Miya Atsumu’s new hair.

“What the hell? Didn’t ma just tell us off!”

Osamu seethes this in a venomous whisper when Atsumu spends an hour or so in the bathroom and comes out with piss coloured hair.

Atsumu rolls his eyes. “Look, Ma will get mad with me anyway."

It's as simple as that. As simple as a snip. 

(An hour later, mum does, as predicted, ignite in ire. All their grandmother contributes in the situation is chuckle behind her hand.)

When Osamu is in his first year of university, 137 kilometres east from home, he meets a beautiful boy inside a coffeehouse tucked in the nestles of Kyoto.

The boy has coal coloured hair, eyes framed with what appears to be skillfully applied eyeliner, and a naturally gorgeous face that at first compensates for his dismissive, calloused attitude. His name is Suna. Osamu learns this after he spills their coffee order over them.

Up to now, Osamu does not recall their initial conversation or how it happened or why he was there in the first place.

However, what he remembers is this: the smell of soft serve skies, the ugly dark brown that taints it, and somewhere in his blur of memories is that name—Suna (note: first name unknown) in the form of reckless edges and thick with sharpie-bold.  

Everything after that is a trail of flowers that follows downstream and mottles out to the estuary, where the mangroves mourn a requiem that only comes out as silence, and everything goes from there.

It’s 9:01PM and Osamu tends to get overly sentimental thinking about all of this.

When the moon cuts the paper sky, memories of memories of remembering amplifies in the winters that saturate his untreated quarter-life crisis. A familiar isolation knits flowers in the cavities in his body. Osamu looks inward and finds a tangle of daisies and ivy-like vines he doesn’t recall ever being there before. Have they been here all this long?

But that tends to happen.

It’s 9:01PM and Osamu figures that he should go to sleep.

Atsumu and Osamu, never Osamu and Atsumu. Seldom the other way around, but what does that matter?

The order of their names isn’t built upon a bias hierarchy or measured by who left the womb a minute before the other. It is purely determined by no more than syntax and alphabetical order.

And although Osamu never leaned on something as whimsical as a prophecy foretold by a name—the mundanity of the way two words (Atsumu-and-Osamu) is stacked is peculiarly resonating, in a way.

Atsumu (tallow back and indignation clamped under cuticles) and Osamu (foundation of the rot, the other half of a thing – this Miya twins thing).

But of course, the present is no receptacle for memories. Whether it is a Miya twin thing or not; if the other falters out of axis, then it is the result of their individual respects.

The next time Osamu sees Suna is during a June morning where tsuyu stipples slow like empty snow—then with a mighty exhale—pelts down to Earth.

The light rain patters against the canopy of Osamu’s purple umbrella as he walks across the shimmering streets of Kyoto. If he looks correctly, the sky is birthing plums. He hurries inside.

When Osamu enters the coffeehouse, he is enveloped by the same familiar warmth that had welcomed him months back in his first day of Kyoto, alone, in search for candid human interaction.

If this were the plot line of a coming-of-age story, he would have strewn the habit of visiting the coffeehouse since then. But this is real life. Daily morning coffees steepen expenses. He is broke. What more should be said?

The curtains of his periphery captures the wispy sight of a boy Osamu feels like he’s met before. A person who followed him from dreams he doesn’t remember.

Osamu observes the misty figure.

The person has coal-coloured hair, and Osamu wonders if it’s because they’re tired; where fire burnt out long ago. If there was ever a fire to begin with. Their back is faced away, a hand propped atop the table around their coffee mug and softly cuts a shape from the showcase window like fabric.

Osamu folds paper cranes in his mind when a name surfaces with everything in it, tainted with bitter beans and clumsy embarrassment. Sharpie bold—Suna.

It’s a realisation that comes falling down far lighter than rain, or maybe, rain falling from the heavens only to return to water, a million of other raindrops. But it is influential all the same. A subtle shift of consciousness is a shift, nonetheless.

Osamu loiters beside the counter, and wonders if Suna had noticed him walk in. But as he watches them listlessly scroll through their phone and sip on their glass of coffee, it’s obvious that they have not.

Osamu takes a step forward, then another. Paper cranes take flight and flutter in flocks. The rain drops. Another dream falls. “Suna.”

Suna tilts his head from his phone screen and up at Osamu, the realisation easing in like roiling waves like some deer in the headlights. His fingers instinctively shift a tiny bit tighter around his disposable cup. “You.”

“Yeah…me.” Osamu scratches the back of his head. He notices that Suna smells like bitter grains of coffee beans and a raspberry night. “Hi.”

Suna pops a berry, face subtly sour. “What is it?”

“I’m Miya,” he sputters. “Osamu.”

What Osamu will remember is this: he is standing here before a beautiful boy, almost like a figment with shape, nearly transparent. That his heart eases, for once, inside the curve of his ribs, as the droplets of rain soaked streets outside. He latches onto this ever fleeting dream.

“Let me make it up to you.” Osamu starts, stops, then provides context when Rintarou is frugal and rightfully sceptic enough to say nothing. “For what happened.”

A challenge. Rintarou curves his brows with questions, noncommittal. “Yeah? How so?”   

Osamu beckons him with a faint prod of his head and hides the rot behind his lips with a grin—never a smile. “Let’s go.”

Osamu is seven-years-old when art begins to take obnoxious room in his life like the weeds that have swallowed the daises in their backyard garden. Art tramples all over his carpet with dirty boots dressed in some obnoxious, flamboyant costume because art is like that.

Every story begins somewhere, and here, it begins with the buckle of a belt: him and his brother in the rear of their grey car, driving up and down the Hyogo asphalt. The morning dew evident in the breath of the freshly cut atmosphere of a hesitant moment before 9am. 

It’s the holidays, which means Ma or Grams would thrust them into some new activity. It began when they were five and ushered into a football program. It never stopped since. Football, volleyball, music, drama. Now art. The horizon stretches.

And perhaps this is the Miya twin’s thing—to stretch and pull their horizons together. To test out the edge of the world and fall—together.

Here: a bleak art studio of paint splotched wooden desks, lined to carve a hole in the middle where the teacher roams around. A pale strip of sunlight wanes through the silver windows and shines. It barely brightens the blank A3 paper that lays before Osamu as he stares at it. Mind absent, he shifts his attention to the discoloured table beneath. The sunlight fills in the room like an empty space. Here: history begins.

The art teacher, greying hair and fray hairline, instructs the simple task of improvised painting. Her name is Ms. Akari. She goes on a thirty minute introductory about the history and fundamentals of art—that art is honest, and anyone could be an artist. Most of this passion talk flies over Osamu’s head.

Ms Akari says to draw and paint what you know because you always know more than you think. She doesn’t tell them that the trees are orange in winter or lush green in the summer. Nor does she rule the fact that the sun is yellow or orange or red.

She instead tells them this: the canvas is your world, and your world exists on its own from this world. Rules are limitless and the only rules are your own. It is your heart’s desire. Please follow it.

Taking this advice upon his shoulders, in this violet hour, Osamu paints a dream he cannot quite recall.

In their lunch break, Osamu opts to sit outside of the building where are planked patio provides leisure elevation above the wild garden that blooms bellow. He sits on the last stair of the patio, his shoe covered toes that teases the blades of grass that point up. Atsumu settles beside him.

Above, the clouds that pass-by look low and real enough to reach out—and simply reach out and touch.

“Ms Akari mentioned that if you get to a specific level, you get to paint the world how you see it in the way you want to see it,” says Atsumu, out of the blue.

Osamu chews on his omelette egg roll, then looks up at Atsumu, cheeks round. “Huh?”

Atsumu tips his chin up, perks his head, fey.  “That’s pretty cool. Don’t cha think?”

At the periphery of Osamu’s brandy-coloured field sprawling in the horizon of the world in his canvas, he notices two things:

1. He is half a world and many hues away from his brother.
2. That his brother is in Kyoto, soaked in the wash of winter. A whirlpool of blue. Just blue.

In contrast to Osamu’s canvas of the rice paddies they pass on the drive to Kyoto, Atsumu’s is redundant blue upon blue. All thick and thin. All and everything in between.

Through the diluted layers, Osamu can still decipher the shaky pencil lines. These pencil lines form geometrical boxes, elongated, and squashed, to imitate the buildings of downtown Kyoto where they would sometimes grab dinner or late lunch before returning home after their hike.

It is a messy painting. The composition is wonky and sway to the left as though it were permanently influenced by a stubborn wind. The buildings have absolutely no colour, other than for the soapy blue that varnishes the vast expanse of the entire A3.

And suddenly, Osamu is looking over a cliff, into the dark, almost blue if he squints. Atsumu plunges in, alone, with nothing more than a hefty heart and fingers spread for the tailwind of passion.

This is normal. What is their dynamic if not the constant chase after the other?

But now, the question calcifies between Osamu’s ribs and fingers: whether to follow, or not?

Painter of the day goes to Miya Osamu.

“Oh,” falls from Osamu’s small tongue upon reaction, and that’s what irritates Atsumu even more.

Turns out, there is painter of the day awards, and Osamu certainly did not expect his ineptitude to be praised upon with such robust regard. Hell, he cannot even decipher the differences of the reds he chose – burgundy, crimson, pink? – they are all just red.

That day between the ride home and the weird art studio, Atsumu sulks like the seven-year-old boy he is. He seizes his chest with rancour and puffs his shoulders with crossed arms like a soldier bulking up for battle.

Though it has been established as a precedent ever since they were younger than young: Osamu is the naturally talented twin.

But it is still bitter, even if it is the expected—like the pit of a peach, or the stem of a mushy apple. You anticipate it to be there when you bite into a hunk of sweetness; then it is there, and you still frown because it’s bitter.

So, Atsumu learns to suck on it and spit it out. Spit it all out, with all the sweetness and bitterness of a fallen peach. 

Through the measurement of the seasons, they continue to attend art classes, and Osamu does not protest in going. He maintains. Atsumu improves.

The consensus has always been wherever he goes, Atsumu he tags along, too.

So why would it not apply to the latter?

Nineteen years old seems to be the year of many new things. He learns a lot of things at nineteen.

For Osamu, one of those things seem to be visiting a museum with a boy he had just met five days after spilling his scorching coffee on said boy’s shirt.

He learns Suna’s full name after meeting him again underneath the coffee house. Rintarou Suna. Rin-ta-rou Su-na.

This time, it’s Rintarou's idea that they visit a museum since Osamu had not a clue where to go next after confidently leading them out of the coffeehouse.

Rintarou insisted on Kyoto National Museum, compelled to proceed with such effort with the knowledge of a photography exhibition. It seemed to tether the embedded frown on their lips a little upward, like a smudge on a painting, or the merest smile on the Mona Lisa.

“Ya like photography?” Osamu questions after Rintarou’s keen comment on the exhibition. They’re heading for the nearest bus stop.

A whirlwind that’s been fumbling to tie Rintarou’s hair into braids for the past minute gracefully falls into serenity. He shrugs. “I mean…I study it, so yeah.”

It takes them 1 minute shy of 40 to get to their red delineated location.

A large water fountain gurgles sadly in the middle of the courtyard—reaching for the sky before it fails and fails and fails. Then it glumly tries again. It must look extra depressing because of the overcast, Osamu theorises, and wonders if Rintarou is thinking about that too.

The clouds begin to gather like sheep above when they walk back in time through the doors of the salmon bricked Meiji Kotokan.

The photography exhibition is exactly what Osamu’s imagination chalked it up to be. Art, history, and art.  

Museums are, if not, a taxidermy of preserved storytelling at its finest. And maybe that is why Osamu is drawn when he walks down the hallway unmarred by time, by intimate memories. If Osamu learnt more than one thing in his duration of being an art student, it is that a museums mission is to tell an old story as though it bared new in hopes that it would change. And when it doesn’t, they keep telling it anyway, vice or virtue.

They wander through time with a single walk or two through the many hallways, defying the laws of the universe. High vaulted roofs, clean and dimmed, the pale lights illuminating the large buddhas that are on display.

Osamu observes the artefacts. From ancient to ancient. He finds the calico display of a painting he had seen, once, in one of his brothers many art-related textbooks. And he thinks of not the samurai or history of Japan, but of childhood. And childhood seems to be ancient, too, in the sense that it is something unattainable. How do you preserve a childhood, Ma?

He walks on and does not look back or forward for Rintarou.

And at one point, whether they were in pre-historic or the Edo Period or in the present, Rintarou finds him again, turns to Osamu, and says: “Miya. Thank you.”

In the present, Osamu’s hair is no longer of silver and alloy. He grew out of it once he decided to remark his separation with black hair dye in illusional intent of his natural hair colour. But Osamu also knows that loosening yourself from habits is like sundering yourself from your skin. So, Osamu reflectively replies; like the sheen of a metal tin, like the once-silver of his hair, “Is photography your passion?” He pauses inside a second and comes out meek when he adds their name, “Suna.”

Rintarou scoffs at that. He points his opaque eyes at the massive buddha statue, a few strays of hair falling on their face, and steps further in Osamu’s life with his shoes still on, hands tucked in his pockets, and a life-contradicting comment: “Who needs passion?”

When Osamu is eleven years old, he relearns how to take the first step.

Walking—he’s learnt ever since he wobbled and rose from all fours and congratulated for it. Walking away—he's learnt when he grew to understand that it's this world he must adjust to, and the world wouldn't even know or need to know of his existence in order to keep turning. 

Yet, with all this familiarity with walking, why on earth is he stagnant right now? 

Osamu has never understood how artists—and any artist—can make nothing into something. Sure, he has natural instinct for aesthetics. Sure, he has a smidge more skill than Atsumu to get him well off and started. Sure, he can fill in a blank page with a lotta colours.

But there is more beyond the perimeters of art than skill. He knows that now, but he doesn’t know what the word is or how to capture it within the framework of language. But say, if he were told to ‘pour his heart and soul’ into an assignment, all he would do is mechanically mimic the techniques he had been taught.

Heart and soul—the rudiments of life. In other words, Osamu is not willing to pour his life on an empty white canvas. If there is a fault in either Heart or Soul, there are bound to be fissures and earthquakes, a shift of tectonic plates.

The first step is always the hardest, is a commendable adage. Now, here is what eleven-month Osamu learnt after the first step: it doesn’t get easier. But when you become used to that prick in your feet, you gain momentum from there. At eleven years old, Osamu is relearning that.

All at once, to avoid the rubble beneath his shoes, Osamu’s feet make a start.

One step at a time. Underneath the doorframe to the direction of the kitchen. Avoid the cracks. Be careful, the world is shifting. Eyes down. No. Up. Up. The pulse in his hands like a peachy heart, a wave at the railway station or a figure disappearing as the sun dips all the blue out from the sky.

Soon, Osamu finds that he’s in the kitchen. The potent smell of ready-to-eat dinner and an undefined steam. The cut-out silhouette underneath the weakened lights, a magazine laid before her.

His grandmother looks up from her idle reading and the sound of slicing stops minutely. She seems to glow underneath the halo of the sunlight that begin to haze out, and it is somewhat calming. A smile like the petals of jasmine.

“Grams.” Osamu’s shoulders box up. His feet plant to the fibres of the carpet like the stem of an etiolated plant.

Her presence ever more like a lighthouse. Even from here, with shoulders slouched underneath the low hum of the kitchen lights where everything else is blurry in the shadows, she gleams. She ushers him to shore. “Samu?”

The first step of the journey is always the hardest. That is true. But eight years older, Osamu learns this, too:

To take a step back in order to find the correct path, even if you don’t know what it is, is as equally as difficult. Even if you don’t know if you’d ever find it. Or if it’s even there.

Sometimes, you can learn more about yourself by knowing what you are not.

So, he begins—

“I don’t think I like art as much as Tsumu does.”

—and takes a step back.

(Maybe that is a journey in of itself.)

Grams absorbs the discovery as easy as drinking a sip of barley tea. But questions are inevitable. Questions are inevitable if you care.

“Though, I wonder, Samu. What are you going to do now?”

The warm water foams in between Osamu’s palms and the slippery plates. His stomach is full and all he could think about is that the taste that Grams’ onigiri leaves the best taste on his tongue. He gives Grams question room to breathe. Then he answers, soft and firm as the soil after a tender drizzle of rain, “I don’t know.”

Osamu doesn’t pick up Grams response, because she doesn’t respond—at least verbally. Or maybe it’s because the water runs through his fingers too easily and it’s pleasant to have something that never stays in your hands to not break, or crumble. And he relishes in this oasis.

The tap is running, and the dishes are clean. They wait for Ma and Atsumu to come back, cooked stir fry prepared fresh on the stove.

The announcement doesn’t settle so easily for eleven-year-old Atsumu. That’s only to be expected. How would one react when they discover that the moon is the sun, and the sun is the moon? Or that the Earth is flat after all?

Besides. Nothing settles well with Atsumu, like the innateness of the unsatisfied tectonic plates.

They had allowed the sun set on packed fists and thrown art supplies until there were no more left to throw. Ma scolded them both.

Outside, the rain pours sheets and although they’re safely tucked inside – at times, if Osamu closes his eyes tight enough to extirpate his phosphenes (the little weird lights that fade like static after closing your eyes), he imagines himself in the middle of the rain, in the middle of nowhere, alone. He carefully unfolds a tiny thought.

“Ya know, Tsumu...” The words travel up Osamu’s throat upon their volition with clunky suitcases that leave skid marks. “I’m not really someone who puts stuff into the world.” Osamu threads reality between his fingers, gets a hang of it, and with a firm grip on reality, he says, “Ya are. I’m not.”

They say that when it rains, the world is resetting.

Atsumu exhales a steady sigh—like snowdrops that make themselves be seen after being alone and shivering for so long they scour the air, desperate for warmth—and turns his back to him. He faces the moon that shines on his wrist through the gaps of the blinds.

Even if he can’t see him within the adjusted dark, Osamu can feel the pinched pout on Atsumu’s face as if it were a ghost of his own.

The rain begins to tap a polyrhythm of a polyrhythm outside. If Osamu is listening correctly, the rain hesitates before each fall.

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Growing up: the amount of times an individual rotates around the sun, boyhood, pain, learning to hold childhood near your chest.

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March comes roaring in like a lion, and at nineteen, separation, Osamu learns, is a bottle of hair dye and a stuffed suitcase.  To be distinguished for who you are, rather than for what you are not.

“Oh my god, yer hair.”

They are thirteen and stupid again—or at least it feels like it from this vantage point. From this vantage point, he’s underneath their first and only room with a new haircut that he had moulded himself. It is a repeat, a defiance, but the fable holds not as much weight as it did.

In year 10 religious studies class, Osamu learns that repetition is a vital technique to concrete a story, because no human is a body of permanence. Humans live lives of learning and learning and learning and rebirthing and failing.

So, here is the story again, a story that you already know. There is no other version of this fable where a boy before a mirror cuts his hair. There is no other version of this fable of a half-formed thing trying to reshape itself into a little closer to a whole.

As though Atsumu’s predicted reaction were a display of permission, Osamu brings his hand up to his hair and gives it a feel for the hundredth time in the past hour. It has been long since he’s had his natural hair colour. He shrugs off Atsumu’s horrified, surprised, whatever, expression and dives back into his flurry of packing. “Yeah. My hair,” he repeats Atsumu’s words with a parched tongue.

“Oh my god, have Ma and Grams seen yet?”

“Stop saying ‘oh my god’.”

“Oh my god.”

“Ya suck.”

Atsumu digs trenches in his forehead and scratches them. “Why the sudden decision?”

Osamu gathers a pile of clothes towards him. He begins to assort. “Practical reasons. Don’t wanna kill my hair. It’d be difficult to maintain. Yadda, yadda.”

Atsumu frowns a pout. “What would ya do if I go back to havin’ natural coloured hair?”

“Ya would never,” Osamu scoffs as simple as B coming after A. A snicker begs to bare its fangs through his lips, and he allows it to make sound. “Yer’ve always been the golden child, ya douchebag.”

Atsumu curls his upper lip inward. The balmy air thickens on his cheeks. It’s different when it comes from other people. It’s different when it comes from himself because he is a good liar and personal gas lighter. So, Atsumu returns the question, “Then what are ya?”

What an odd question. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” Osamu murmurs.

Atsumu hums a chime from the back of his throat because of course Osamu would say that; the smartass. He’s never been all that for originality, yet he’s the only Osamu out there so it cancels out, Atsumu supposes.

The weather is mediocre. The smell of oil paints condense their room. The television from their living room sounds of something of some Korean Drama as Ma and Grams’ voices squeal in motion. The humdrum of Osamu’s new-but-not-so-new hair settles like the aftermath of a terrible monsoon.

Osamu gathers his many things and stuffs them into his little suitcase as a tender, and desperate question sticks like adhesive between the folds of his mind.

The question is this: How much life can one pack in a suitcase, before they leave behind the life that they have always known?  

"Promise you’ll stay in contact with us, yeah?"

Ma’s voice is a flower pressed with a loneliness he cannot read, deserted between the pages of a book. It’s always been there, he knows.

He recognises it when he catches her in some delicate time against the sky like a singular blade of grass standing tall—maybe proud, maybe happy. Not that Ma isn’t happy. You can be happy and lonely.

You can be happy and lonely but never realise that you are lonely.

He recalls an evening of chasing cars and teacup traffic lights that blur because of the recent remnants of tsuyu.

They were idle at the edge of the pavements, waiting for the traffic lights to go green when Ma breaks the silence. Eyes distant and glossed like milk she smiles, rue bled, “I always imagined they were dinosaurs.”

Perplexed, six year old Osamu raked his eyes from left to right, right to left, left to right.

There were no dinosaurs in sight. So, he asks with the benefit of a doubt, "What dinosaurs?"

"When I was in university, the first Jurassic Park movie was released," she explained, words like water. Osamu drowns in them. "I watched it in the cinemas, alone. I always imagined that these were dinosaurs."

But the scenery remained consistent: the dingy izakaya adjacent to the whirring gym, the train station, and the lined buses idly waiting for departure.

He directed his attention back to Ma in hope that he could find the answer there. But he was only met with the eyes of conditioned sorrow, as she distantly watched the cars (or dinosaurs) pass. 

He did not understand what Ma meant, but he nodded regardless, with the trust that he will understand when he is older. Nineteen years old and going off to university in a different town, he still doesn’t understand.

In retrospect, hearing Ma talk about her university years is like hearing one talk about their childhood. Fond, frequently recurring, and full of longing. Sometimes, if he dares himself to think of his roots, he thinks Ma’s childhood only began in university.

"Of course, Ma." He reaches out a hand. He tries. "Of course."

There is always the anticipated uncomfortableness in saying goodbye to the things we thought we would never leave behind. And it is here.

It is here in the cautious movements a muscle stiffer than before. It is present in the ivy-like wall that crawls up and over Osamu’s chest, in and through the empty spaces in his chest. It is here, here, here—

He looks over to his grandmother, who he had surpassed in height ever since he was ten years old and never grew back since.

She hands him a bento box, petal smile. "Take care, Samu."

A drowned man, saved by a lifeboat, returning to the sea. "Thank you, Grams."

The first time Osamu has ever felt seen in art, is through an article he found while he was web browsing on the family computer. He does not recall the overall topic, but it was a blog post in some forum. This is the excerpt:

"Twins are, if not, two holes that make each other the best they can be – individuals related to each other that rhyme. A pillow and a blanket. A mast and a boat. A land and the sea. Or perhaps, they are more akin to a polyrhythmic – where two simultaneous rhythms within a measure create a sounder sound, a more complex and harmonious rhythm that would not be possible with a singular rhythm.

After all, in some sentiment of encouragement for the ficklest times, in order to be the most complete whole, is to become the best whole of the half you believe you are.

So why should that not apply to twins?"

Although art technically does not have eyes, the words are eyes in of itself. It is a reflective window that tints opaque when interpreted incorrectly. He rereads the excerpt from time to time, after he had frantically scribbled it on paper and folded it for safe keeping. And he does wonder: why should it not apply to Atsumu and him?

There is a boy nineteen years too young before a window, and he is looking out to his little pocket of the world. He takes a breath and shuts the blinds.

Osamu doesn’t really consider his view from his floor of the apartment all that attractive. It is the sight of the rubbish area beside his apartment, a perfect opening for late-night gangly brawls or weird sketchy exchanges.

Osamu unpacks the bulk of his clothes and tosses them on his singular futon for later.

Yes, these are the things he packed from home—his personal belongings, essentials, and notebooks—but they don’t have the bluebells that grow in season around this time along their bush lined garden.

When Osamu picks up his toiletry bag he’s had since he was fifteen, he thinks of the Hyogo sun—and of the damp hydrangeas that thrive when the weather is having a bad day (a sadistic plant, really, for all its beauty). Where therefore, all of Japan is having a bad day due to how fickle humans are when it comes to the weather.

And although Ma is the master of packing the most unconventional things in suitcase akin to sardine cans, Osamu wonders: How can you pack an entire lifetime into a suitcase, Ma?

With fewer coins in his pockets than the thoughts in his head other than to get through the damn day in one piece and even fewer scraps of food in his fridge, Osamu opens the door—his footsteps hollow as it pads questions for the hall it walks in.

The building never answers back.

When Osamu steps out of the apartment, grounded coffee beans and cinnamon lingers upon his tongue. He veers left.

The soiled scent of petrichor disperses across the miasmic atmosphere.

Him and Rintarou are underneath the shelter of the museum beside a chiselled plinth with no umbrella, because they’re both idiots who don’t have the foresight to check the weather forecast.

Osamu is by Rintarou’s side, with an emotion below shocked and an emotion above impassive as he realises how bad the rain is. (Just as early as exiting the final exhibition of contemporary Japanese paintings, they begun to hear the rain thrum vacantly above and around them. They had not anticipated that it’s this bad.)

The water fountain from earlier still longingly reaches for the sky. But the sky melts on it now, all over it in silver sheets, yet it continues to reach for something up there then fails then tries then crashes like monsoon rain. Osamu wonders what more it wants. A bud of pathos plucks knots in his stomach.

“Oh shit.” The words roll off easily. He helplessly looks around, eyes urgently swatting side to side.

Rintarou slips into periphery with an all-too relaxed face, all-too like rain. “Here.” They push open an umbrella into bloom and hang the canopy over their heads. The hood casts a purple light, illuminated by the rain.

Osamu eyes Rintarou, sceptic. “Where’dya get that from?”

"Do you wanna get sick tomorrow walking back or not?” Rintarou asks, completely curving the question. He tilts his head towards the cascading veil of white droplets that splat against the asphalt disappearing underneath a conveyer belt of water. "It's raining."

“Dude, you stole that,” Osamu says. It’s barely a scold, more of a feeble tug at senses.

Rintarou flicks him a lackadaisical look, challenging a non-committal really?

This prompts Osamu to look out to the weather again; the ferocious thunder of the incoming shower narrowing his plethora of answers. By now, the streets are filling up with streams. Osamu sighs. "Okay. Fine. Whatever. The bus stop ain’t faraway.”

Rintarou remains reticent and lithely spins the purple bloomed umbrella in their fingers. Words away, they hang it over their head and step into the rain. They wait for Osamu.

Osamu's mind conjures streams and running rivers. A subtle frown weeds his face.

He considers Rintarou’s rain dropped words like law. He squints out as though he’s searching between the rain for a clearer state of mind, and with fail, he returns to Rintarou. He breathes, lighter than usual. It must be because of the weather. It wipes everything and anything with it as it is always slanted.

Or maybe it’s because Osamu is just never looking straight enough; head always tilted a little to the left, a little to the right. But here, right now, he takes a foot forward, punctuated with weight like a promise more than an agreement.

Osamu follows Rintarou into the rain.

Somewhere along the numb walk to the bus stop, the bridge of Osamu’s nose calls for his attention—not really itchy, just fuzzy—so he raises three fingers and rubs the bridge of his considerably wet nose.

Rintarou grips tighter on the handle of the umbrella, his features pinching as he avoids the rain. They relocate a furtive glance towards Osamu, nose dipped low. “Is your nose itchy or something?” Rintarou asks, tone unreadable.

Osamu furrows his brows and jerks his head to Rintarou, but with their bodies so near, Osamu’s able to decipher the individual glitters of rain on Rintarou’s eyelashes, and the violet that marks beneath his eyes.

He jerks his head toward the blurry path again, cringing, nose scrunching. He slithers three fingers to rub it, swift. “No?” He manages to reply and returns his gaze to Rintarou again, but this time, precautions of their distance. “No. Why?”

“I dunno. You’re like, always doing y’know, this—“ Rintarou brushes three fingers over his nose with a scrunch “—I mean you just did it. Like a cat or something.”

“Oh.” Osamu raises his eyes to the sliced sky that he can see beneath the large hood of the shitty stolen umbrella that’s begging to fly like some Mary Poppins bullshit.

Despite the open space around them, it’s so stifling to be shoulder to shoulder and stagger in the street to avoid the direction of the winds, with another person beneath the pouring rain. “I do that,” says Osamu.

Rintarou doesn’t answer back.

A watercolour bus stop reveals itself in the distance. They swim towards it, and it feels like an infinity of an infinity.

“Kyoto is a city that melts,” comments Rintarou as they watch something as transparent as water soak their city in a sea that came and went.

The buses air conditioner is tepid. It’s packed with sharp blazers and the viscid scent of cigarette opposes the earthy lavender. Does rain smell like lavender? What would rain ice cream taste like?

Osamu looks out and on, to the city that melts.

They don’t exchange words for the rest of the bus ride. 

When they get off the bus, time loosens around them like unravelled yarn. The rain takes everything with it. Osamu doesn’t bother to pay any attention to the time. What he does recognise is this: the lamp post, that power line that slices across the scenery (now barely visible beneath the blur of the downpour), the buildings. The bi-split alleyway that wounds to the same place. The tree that marks the corner of the block.

Home.

“What the hell? Do you live around here?” Osamu sputters.

The tips of Rintaoru’s lips twitch upward in return to formulate a somewhat smile. “And you have shit spatial awareness.”

Osamu thinks this is all stupid. He feels like Atsumu, in some way – speaking before thinking, and reacting before processing. It’s the rain. It must be the effect of the rain. Rain makes the mundane much more difficult, and because the mundane is difficult, everything is difficult. All Osamu can do is brace a sour face and hope that the dewy wind washes it out.

In and through the alleyway, they usher underneath the all-too familiar shadows, wet streaks of hair plastered to their foreheads because of their sweat and the rain. Rintarou dips the umbrella and like a wilting flower—folds it and presses the tip on the darkened concrete once they slip beneath shelter.

Like a crashing of a meteor, or Archimedes yelling eureka! when he discovered the concept of density, Osamu jerks his attention to Rintarou. His eyes wide and announces his late revelation with wet fangs, “We live in the same accommodation.” His eyes pinball side to side and refocuses on Rintarou, narrow. “What the hell, dude?”

“Like I said,” Rintarou drawls with a shit-eating vacant grin. “You have shit spatial awareness, man.”

“But—what—huh?”

A caustic flick on the forehead pries a shrill hiss from Osamu. If he were a cat, he probably would have been blessed with impressive reflex and mark a scratch. He presses a hand over his forehead in aid. “What the hell was that for?” He whispers that lacks heat. The flick of the finger had diminished it already, like a rope of wind harsh enough to knock out a fire in one breath.

Rintarou only snorts at Osamu’s laughable expression, even if it looks like Osamu’s about to double back with a packed punch that will harm them ten-fold. But Osamu isn’t that guy. He isn’t – though Rintarou thinks it’s too early to judge that.

“As I said,” they begin to badger, “shit spatial awareness.”

The rain continues to fall, unyielding, only for them to eventually return to heaven and die a death that keeps repeating until they learn to live.

Rintarou produces a lethargic and stupidly charming smile. Osamu wants to smack it right off. “Fourth floor. Room two,” he says in a levelled voice that buries beneath the slaps of rain.  

Osamu barely catches it as Rintarou’s elusive words get swept with the billowing wind.

And of course, seconds suspend into one like a rubber band that stretches and stretches and collapses. Before Osamu can gather and barrel a response, Rintarou, just like the wind, enters the apartment, and for some reason, Osamu remains stagnant.

Instead of going after Rintarou, he instead turns around and looks, aimless, nowhere.

Osamu stares at the puddle that had formed in the dip of the entrance. It is teasing with a reflection but disorientating as the clouds continue to weep and muddle it up with pinpoint dots and spots.

He begins to entertain the dreadful idea that perhaps he is as stupid as his idiotic brother and remembers of a memory of a memory.

He’s been remembering a lot lately.

Romance has always been an enigmatic phenomenon to Osamu, on par with English syntax and the Greeks and Romans.

He learns this as young as eleven when a fleecy December proposes the idea that love perhaps stretches beyond the love he has for his family and the smell of rain and flowers, and rain flowers and flowers drenched in rain (and his comprehensive list of favourite things).

Miya Atsumu has a secret admirer. Obnoxious, self-centred Miya Atsumu who always swallows before he chews and never closes his mouth while he eats has a secret admirer.

Atsumu does not know this. Osamu does.

Here is a story that Osamu will never tell:

Friday math class, he sees timid, too-kind Hayashi Seiichi fold a beautiful white lotus with nothing but his delicate fingers and a large sheet of toilet paper from the boys bathroom. Outside, there is a sea of pearls frozen in the sky.

And because we all become curious with things that make beautiful things, Osamu’s attention orbits around Seiichi for the rest of the day—and soon, the rest of the week. 

One week later, Seiichi hovers over Atsumu's desk in contemplation. Atsumu is about to walk in through the door. Seiichi, in panic, lets go of the white lotus in a nearby bin.

Seiichi never gives Atsumu the white lotus.

For the rest of the year, he doesn’t even talk to Miya Atsumu apart from the mandatory class situations. And maybe the most bittersweet part about it is that Atsumu never noticed, never finds Seiichi’s name important enough to remember when Osamu briefly mentions him in a story of being lab partners with him. Seiichi no longer folds white lotuses in the back of math class, or history class, or literature class.

It’s as simple as that.

Osamu wonders if this is what love is; the inevitability of letting go.

Nine years later; beneath a violet splintered sky before an expanse of wild weeds, underneath the doorframe of his youth with his toes pointed for Kyoto, Osamu thinks he is close to understanding why Seiichi let go of love.

“Ahaha! That sounds so much like ya!”

“Oh, shut up, shitty Samu.”

Atsumu’s guffaw scrubs the air; shoulders shaking so violently he has to rest his paintbrush on the ledge of the easel. Otherwise, the thin wood would probably snap as he continues to squawk like an unhinged bird. Through nineteen-year-old Atsumu’s very six-year-old-like kind of laugh that would be encouraged by some exotic potty joke, there’s a curt sip of tea in the background, then an impassive, green voice, “I’d appreciate it if you shut up.”

Sakusa Kiyoomi, AKA Atsumu’s certainly combatable roommate, stands from the kitchen island with a steaming cup of tea in hand. It’s assumedly green tea, since when Osamu had raided the cooking supplies in their cupboard, it only contained two stocks of green tea. One opened, one still brand new. There is a carton of oat milk in the fridge, but Osamu knows well that it belongs to Atsumu. Besides, Kiyoomi doesn’t seem to be like the kind of man to pour milk in their tea.

This remark causes Osamu in turn to chuckle. Atsumu's laughter corrode into a testy silence, and a scowl manifests on his chapped lips. Then a pout and crossed arms. “That’s rude, Omi Omi.”

Kiyoomi’s stone-faced (though Osamu cannot pass up the miniscule twitch, and he believes it's the effect of the unconventional nickname) and makes his way around the island. “And you laugh like a kid who had just heard a potty joke.”

“Well, maybe that’s because the situation Tsumu had just experienced is so shit it’s laughable.”

“Oh my god...”

“Oh my god.”

Successful in risking a migraine, Kiyoomi massages the bridge of his nose, a hand on hip. He steadily inhales, and sharply exhales. He retreats to his room in withheld silence, pride along his perfect posture. His presence wanes.

Atsumu whips around to Osamu like the entire interaction with Kiyoomi never happened, but the mirthless snarl on Osamu's face is still evident.

“So, what’re ya gonna do with the poor dude ya totally made a fool out of yourself with?” Atsumu asks, half taunt, ears perked. “I mean, he told you his literal location.”

A frown concretes on Osamu’s face. He’s tugging for an idea and latches on the first loose thread. The smell of home. A white lotus flower. A possibility. “I dunno. Haven’t really thought ‘bout it yet,” he mumbles.

Osamu combs through his permutations. He wonders if Rintarou enjoys onigiri. He wonders where Hayashi Seiichi is now. And he recalls a little situation that happened to him as it happened to Seiichi—but not quite.

“Passion is destruction and destruction is pleasure.”

Kita Shinsuke, a boy two years older than Osamu, lectures him this as they water the wilting flowers on a dreary Thursday afternoon after school. Snow dusts his hair. It never left.

Osamu is sixteen, so he vaguely understands this, but merely perceives it as an attempt at being poetic. For some reason, as cheesy as making the monotonous day-to-day thought into something fraudulent like poetry, Shinsuke manages to pull it off well. It seems inscribed in his personality to just be a natural poet.

“Are you referring to my brother, Kita?” Osamu light heartedly asks because he is no poet. 

Shinsuke shrugs and brings three fingers to his nose to stroke it, quick. A habit. Maybe his nose is itchy all the time?

“You both share the same blood, after all.” He tips the watering can and a tiny rainfall upon command showers over the animated irises and dampen the soil.

“Whoa,” a voice exhales. “You two have been taking good care of this garden.”

Aran, hands marked with swatches of patchy paints, materialises from the corner of the building. When Osamu dignifies him complete attention with a nod, he notices that Aran’s forehead has thickened with rivulets of sweat. With this sudden awareness, Osamu suddenly becomes acutely aware of the humidity that feels like velvet on his skin. He itches the collar of his shirt and scrunches his nose. Summer is always brutal, and less kinder this time of year.

“They’re healthy,” Kita replies, pleased. A smile does not make way on their lips, but their levelled tone says it all.

With a chipped fibreglass mind, Osamu absentmindedly continues to water the flowers after that with a frown inspired by Kita’s words. Passion is destruction and destruction is pleasure. But he soon comes to realise that perhaps those words hold some truth.

It is true that it must be understood that these four words – passion, destruction, pleasure, genuine – are synonyms of each other. In some shade or another that Osamu doesn’t bother to know the name to, but Atsumu totally would. 

And everything genuine blooms from a sense of necessity. We tremble whenever we are presented with genuine acts. Anything that is genuine; we grow uncomfortable around it.

Sometimes, the world is wide enough for Osamu to think of rain marred flowers in result of the most recent downpour, and a boy of silver hair like he experienced his first snowfall since birth, and the winters from then have never dust off since.

When the concept of infinity is warm in his palms, Osamu wonders if the boy ever thinks of him, too.

Well, he is certainly more of a man than he is a boy by definition and by judgement. But by habit, Osamu is still sixteen and admiring boys that are too good for him. By habit, Osamu still feels the compel to raise his fingers—always the three middle ones—to itch his nose, like dusting off snow. By habit, Shinsuke is omnipresent in his life not in a fond way, romantic way, but an essential way. A growing up way. An impromptu fuzz along the bridge of the nose and a remedy of three middle fingers for it, kind of way.

In some dream closer to a fire, Osamu dreams of a field of rice paddies and the crack of dawn like an egg yolk. A bobbing curve of straw within a field of Van Gogh-like rice paddies. The existence of winter within a summer. 

Then, in the gaps of his fingers, he counts away the months and seasons. Rinse. Repeat. Again.

Do you remember?

May trickles by slower than honey, but quicker than the bees that lob from petal to petal. Things bloom. Things stay the same—like the kid in him that tells him to move. Like the pretty rain that makes a begging motion to go up as it collides with the ground.

In the rite of spring, life touches what death cannot touch and there is some sort of mundane beauty in that.

A door creaks. A glimpse of an eerie, unexplored cavern leaks before Osamu. Level four, room two. He took the stairs to get here to prolong the dread, to comb through his thoughts and to iron out any possible creases. The thoughts stream in again, and then the sinking of regret that takes his lungs afloat with its muchness jammed against his Adams apple.

Suna Rintarou stands a few inches taller than him, dressed in a spotted jumper that has picked up dirt, and oily hair, peeking from the creak of the abyss. He opens it a little wider, five centimetres brighter.

“You,” they sibilate, but this time, there is a lack of contentiousness. It’s familiarity.

Osamu almost smiles at the notable tone change, but he is still a little unease, fiddling with his fingers. So, he replies succinctly, “Yeah. Me.”

Rintarou props one of his hands on the slope of his waist and mould some definition on his draped, cat print pyjama pants. “So, what you’ve found me.”

Needles prick on the back of Osamu’s neck. He hastily reveals the packed onigiri. “Do ya have dinner?”

By the time the light spills and frosts over the city, Osamu learns a little about Rintarou; patiently, word by word, over steams of smoke and home-cooked onigiri.

Before they even speak, Osamu collects the nooks and crannies of the apartment—all the same design and bathroom and right to the very same placement of floored planks and everything as his.

Of course, there are the frequent distortions. Where his futon is placed, Rintarou’s chair is instead. Where his couch is, Rintarou’s futon is laid out. Rintarou does not have a couch, so Rintarou’s futon serves with a double purpose.

Words, stories, and details connect in the cracks of bricks and concrete like rainwater that trickles in and comfort the moss. Between them, they initiate an agreement: I tell you about me, and you tell me about you. It’s easier when it comes to strangers and begin again. Don’t we all want to start anew?

This is an abridged list of what Osamu learns about Rintarou:

• They attend an art university. It isn’t the same as his brother.
• They’re the grappling-on-a-thread kind of artist—a photographer, a profession that attempts to define time. They moved to Kyoto a week before Osamu.
• Tragically, Rintarou is the kind of person to have fashion as the top, his personal world issues ranked above the cleanliness of their room or whether they complete their nail polish.

“Tell me about you.” The room has dimmed, and Saturn guides the night. Rintarou’s hunched over his splayed fingers, the other aiming it for a steady stroke of black nail polish.

Osamu pads through the corridors in his mind and leaves distinct footprints amongst the dust. He thinks of the whimsical strings of green that sprung from the cracks atop of Mount Inari. How the mud swamped their backyard during terrible storms; how it sloshed beneath his shoes when the storm subsided, but the wind still unyielding beneath winters peachy sunsets. His first snowfall, the sleepy afternoons, his first memories. He wants to see how far he can go.

“Alright, then,” Osamu begins. A smile crosses his face like a cloud that lingers on a summers day.  “A lot of them include my stupid brother Tsumu. But anyway…”

Time crawls on and around. The wisteria that litters over the apartment balcony flourish, the wind passing through like a thousand harps. They share each other’s numbers. They share memories. 

They watch the weeds grow.

Somewhere in between tsuyu’s formidable muggy atmosphere and the brutal blur of summer, Osamu meets a boy his age named Keiji Akaashi. He is a photographer that Jirou, Osamu’s manager, paid to do the food photoshoot and editing for the new seasonal menu.

Keiji has soft hands that almost look like water when moving underneath the numb lights. The glasses that frame his eyes make him resemble a literature teacher, and let alone, he has an eloquent way of words in the little words that he uses.  

Perhaps it is admiration when Osamu notices these things. It probably is. The feelings that bloom between Osamu’s lungs and stomach reminds him of being sixteen and goggling over how Kita Shinsuke watered the flowers every Thursday evening. Not exactly fickle or desperate. Just innocent admiration and possibilities. Perhaps, a productive idleness.

A few washed dishes into the hour, Osamu soon discovers, too, that Keiji attends the same university as his twin. An artist.

“Do ya know a Miya Atsumu?” Osamu asks as Keiji readjusts the lights. He already has a hunch that Keiji wouldn’t know. It’s not like being a university student equivocates to extensive knowledge of the vicinity and everything that is in it.

But Keiji pauses. He ponders and mentally files through his Rolodex of memories. He gives the stupid question a genuine thought. Before, “No, I haven’t,” he settles. He shutters a couple of photos of the chicken udon. 

Yeah. “Ah. That was a stupid question,” Osamu apologises.

“Don’t be sorry for curiosity,” Keiji says with a particular kindness. He readjusts himself, spine straightened, then questions with a more prominent tone, “What age may your brother be?”

“He’s my twin. So, same age,” Osamu responds. He realises he never really answered the question, so he corrects himself, “Nineteen.”

“Oh, I see.”

Silence lapses and for a moment, then the next moment everything is tense. Osamu’s ears throb with blood flow. This is the silence that begs to be filled.

“You should try the food here sometime,” Osamu offers, openly eyeing the udon that Keiji pushes aside.

His comment sticks out like a hangnail and drizzles the air a little like saw dust. But he means it. Aren’t the rawest things a little bit mottled and unpolished?

Keiji adjusts the lights that reflect his glasses. If the light shines bright enough for long enough, an imperceptible smile would be visible on his face. But Osamu doesn’t need to see it. Keiji doesn’t need to see the tentative clarity on Osamu’s, either. Eyes unseeing, Keiji responds, “I appreciate the offer, Miya.”

It takes the season of summer for Osamu to navigate the anomaly of Suna Rintarou. But there is a fault in that statement—an arrogance if you will. When you know someone, you never really know everything about them, do you? That takes time, a lifetime and eternity. How do you wholly know someone if you don’t even know yourself?

But for all its worth, here is a bite-sized list of what Osamu is confident enough to say that he knows and will remember about Rintarou:

• They enjoy rhythm games (including their extensive lore, as he chip-by-chip begins to talk about after many, many lazy afternoons).
• They are a connoisseur of bizarre food combinations (example: tomato sauce and ice drops).
• They are a museum of memories.

It’s 10PM and Osamu defines his night with university papers inching dangerously closer to their deadline and a box of ice cream mochi from the local konbini that pinkie promises him with shitty bowel movements in the morning.

A series of knocks rap at the door that send Osamu up and scrambling from his desk.

When he widens the crack, Rintarou stands a couple of centimetres taller than him, and is somewhat sombre. Violet exists underneath his lethargic eyes. “Hey.”

Osamu blinks and an odd silence wanes between them for seconds too long, before, “Hi.”

“Are you doing anything at the moment?”

“No.” Lie, but it doesn’t matter.

“Oh. Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.” University can wait.

“Never mind. Do you want to go out? Like, a walk?”

Osamu reaches for a jacket. “Sure.”

Jupiter embeds itself snuggly in the heavens and Osamu is trying to not think about what he is trying to not think about.

They walk the wounded pavements of the park as they seek refuge in the pockets of their clothes as they follow each streetlamp, standing in and out of its pale glow like it were an individual stage light.

“Mum and dad just called,” Rintarou begins. His voice is coated with the numbing effects of a cough drop. Two steps forward, one step back. They linger beneath the diluted light where particles fall kindly on their shoulders. “Nothing happened.”

Something did happen. Why else would he be here? But Osamu only emits a sound from the back of his throat and dies his pursed lips. He lunges a step to stand adjacent to Rintarou. “Alright.”

A sigh and a ruddy pink leeches across Rintarou’s face. A breezy sigh wavers through, where above; the universe bare like a baby still waiting for its mother to hug it tight. “Do you dream often?” they then ask, more intimate than the infinite between them.

It’s a question with enough room – maybe too much room – for Osamu to indulge in a long, but not lonely silence. It’s a question that deserves contemplation and exploration.

Osamu searches for a reasonable answer from the sky, to steal from it and say something commendable. But the blackened expanse only responds in waves of polluted clouds. I miss me, he almost wants to say, but instead, he responds with a shrug of a shoulder: “Sometimes. But they’re often fleeting. You?”

Rintarou only says something incomprehensible in reply because he is a dense guy, but there is some sentimentality there because he was the one who asked the question of dreams in the first place. And home is always an intimate topic. You can never talk about dreams without sharing your bones.

They continue walking down the park beneath the trees, shoes scraping across the gravel. Nature fills in the silence where words cannot.

Osamu doesn’t really know whether Rintarou the kind of guy to dream, and he is aware that it would be arrogant for him to guess.

Above and around them, ink spills and douses out the fire. The stars wink, unsure, and hide like children in a round of hide and seek behind the clouds.

Oh. Hello. Are you lost?

Yeah...I am.

Why?

I think I’m going somewhere...I’m not really sure though.

So, like a train station?

Huh?

Train stations are liminal spaces. You’re nearly there—but not quite yet. Right?

(Right now: Wisps of clouds swirl around him as a twitch stimulates beside his ankle. He looks down, and finds a calico rabbit stroking its face on his calf.

It is strange that he finds bliss within this uncertainty.)

I suppose, yeah. He smiles, soft, with few teeth. I’m getting there, though. Just need to find the right train.

The duvet smells like the lavender and lilacs of a fresh load of laundry. The sun that rises and sets and rises and sets, rises again and seeps through the blinds and onto their wrists. This is how Osamu will remember them.

“Well, we’re both bored of life, aren’t we?” Osamu reasons, because he is a rotten boy.

He reasons, because there is a gorgeous boy with a shitty but magnetic personality in front of him and a good fashion sense, and he wants to find a reason for his boy to stay.

And besides—although it is not said but it is implied—Osamu reasons because he wants this. It’s fun, silly, and they are nineteen, already sick of this year because it is July, and everyone’s failures and contrite shortcomings always reappear by July like the sun that clears out the overhanging gloom of the winter that was and deliberately forgotten. At certain hours, however, a longing blue still seems to stain on the walls.

Rintarou scowls at him, lips cinched. His fingers nit-pick on the soft sheets as though there were lint. “What kind of reason is that?”

Osamu laughs and flicks a couple strands of hair from his eyes, boyish. “Come on. It’d be fun. To pretend, y’know? Make a fool out of everyone who assumed?”

A frown irons across Rintarou’s cracked lips like dried icing. “We’re too old to fake date. What purpose do we even need for it? Valentine’s is long gone. All the sales aren’t until next year.”

“Then we don’t need a reason.” Morning glory slurs Osamu’s words. “For shits and giggles. Let the people assume. To assume is to make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.”

An unsure chuckle bubbles out of Rintarou. That is weird is written all over his face. “What?”

“Assume. Ass. U. Me.” He points a lazy finger that connects an invisible string between him and Rintarou.

“Dude.” Rintarou throws his head back with a gravely ahh. “You’re worse than my dad. I will positively not date you with those shitty puns.”

A smile lingers on Osamu’s lips like the moon he believed always followed him when he was younger.

A few seconds of quiet, then Rintarou narrows in on Osamu with a deciphering look like he is studying a foreign text. Then a cool violet grin colours his lips. “Well, if I knew any better, you just want a reason to be with me.”

“And does it matter to you?” Osamu questions. 

“I think for shits and giggles, it would be interesting. New town, new boyfriend,” Rintarou lists off a brandish list. The blanket adjusts atop their bodies. “How suspicious is that?”

Osamu tilts his head and gains a different perspective of Rintarou. “Let the people assume.”

Rintarou smiles. “Let the people assume.”

They hide underneath the weighted blankets of Rintarou’s futon like little children from the rest of the world. A garden gate forms, creaky but it’s enough.

It’s morning and the world rouses in its full wake. The birds tweet inside the trees, unaware of the weight they apply on each branch of shaken leaves, and the streets below whirr to life.

Osamu wonders if this is what love feels like. He wonders about the lotus flowers that he cannot seem to find in this garden, but decides that it is beautiful, liveable, all the same with the soft soil beneath his feet. He wonders if this is love, but the thought of anything more than this does not cross his mind.

With morning dew, Miya Osamu steps into the blue.

This is how he will remember this dream.

In many ways, everything changes for Osamu. Nothing has, either. It changes in the way that the universe he lives in has died a thousand times fold and goes on to live anyway. It changes in the way that when summer comes, it is not the summer from his youth. It changes in the way that he is nineteen, no longer eighteen, no longer seventeen. No longer seven.

He looks up. The tranquil sky suspends. His toes curl themselves into the soot beneath.

It doesn’t take too long for Rintarou to meet the unconventional anomaly of Miya Atsumu when the universe seems to overlap them as easily as the first fold of origami paper.

It would be foolish if Osamu had not ruled out that they would meet eventually. That’s just what is bound to happen when you’ve spent 9 months before your life begins; breathing and sharing a womb with another person. That's just what is bound to happen when you've been sharing food from your mother's ambilocal cord before you even knew what food is.  

But because the world continues to prove that the world works in strange ways, Atsumu stands at the entrance of Osamu’s apartment, hand halfway in his pocket, shoes still on. Sharing the first breath with someone in the same womb tends to have its built-in behaviour. That includes boundless boundaries.

“Hey.”

“Hey..." Atsumu stands stagnant beside the entrance of the apartment. He's one foot in a shoe and one foot out, staring silly at the sight of Rintarou who is certainly not his brother.

Osamu’s tongue pokes the inside of his cheek, and out of courtesy, gestures to Rintarou. It’s weird to see two different universes collide, isn’t it? Perhaps this is what the dinosaurs felt like to see a meteor burn down to the world they’ve always known as it is. “Suna.” He draws a bridge of sticks and mud between Rintarou and Atsumu. “Tsumu, my idiot brother.”

Rintarou steps on the bridge. The mud defines the sole and ridges of their shoe. Two steps forward, one step back. “We have extra onigiri. Wanna share?”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah, alright.” Atsumu kicks his left shoe off and steps over the bridge. “Alright.”

They call it weeds, for something that is sown out of place and not intentionally sown. Weeds sprout and grow wildly in the most unnecessary places (think: brittle pine green along and between dry concrete, the dandelion you gently killed upon the sacrifice of a wish) and eat up the entire sidewalk. They are persistent and defiant and make agriculturalists with bachelor’s degrees weep.

Weeds, Osamu believes, share many qualities with rumours and assumptions.

Once Rintarou slips out of range with the claim that they have some over-due assignments to complete, Atsumu tackles the situation in his Atsumu-esque ways. “Wait, are you two, like, a thing?”

“Thing is an ambiguous word,” Osamu mutters, irritated. His shoulders are hunched as though the littler Atsumu sees him, the less he is in this conversation.

Weeds always begin with a leak. A seedling. An embryo, a fostered nothing that blooms into a thing, and then finally – something.

Atsumu groans. “No! I mean, ugh. I mean you and Sun! The dude you spilt coffee on.”

“Suna,” Osamu wearily distinguishes the spool of his sentences, “Suna, ya idiot.”

Atsumu wafts his hand like there is invisible smoke around them and scoffs. “Minor details!”

“Well,” Osamu levelly murmurs, “we’re friends.” The word friend on his tongue feels like the first snowflake of your life that melts upon your tongue. Like a memory that merges into the present, of another life. 

“Friends, friends?” Atsumu always cuts no bullshit, except there is no bullshit to cut here. They aren’t ‘a thing’.

Cypresses surround him, and Osamu is treading across that sidewalk, surprised how rapidly weeds grow.

But what he is coming to understand now that weeds can be pretty. So unnecessarily pretty.

Osamu sits on the nearest bench, just to watch the weeds grow.

“Yeah, sure. Fine.” He stretches across his couch and stare at the chipped paint on the roof, dull stars in his eyes, but stars, nonetheless. “We’re a thing.”

The milky glow of the TV before them is so diluted, it makes it feel like they’re underwater—submerged. Osamu holds his breath for as long as he can. He counts as many stars as possible his eyes remember in his lifetime. The weeds take full bloom. Somewhere out there, a tree is planted on a grave. 

Autumn burns the edges of September with ribbons of coy winds that dress themselves in clusters of leaves and waltz. It permits press-lipped letters people have kept underneath their cotton pillows for a year of the Autumn that had passed and forgotten, with the hope that we enter the next a little more whole.

There’s an ugly plaster of riverbeds of orange outside of the restaurant, damp and sultry from the most recent drizzle. The scent of the leaves stick to the soles of Keiji Akaashi’s shoes as September ushers him inside with the smell of pine cones and raindrops that seem more akin to glass shards.

Keiji runs a hand through his hair that have flattened on his head like a combed dome as Osamu emerges from the kitchen with the expectation that he’s a person who didn’t process the wooden CLOSED sign platted upfront. A swallow of air inflates Keiji’s chest with a quiver of his chapped lips.

Clarity ripples in Osamu’s eyes when he discerns that it’s just Keiji. The words that have already begun brewing unwind like thread at his tongue and pool on the vamps of his shoes. There’s a momentary silence.

“Akaashi.” Osamu spindles the words around his tongue again. “Ya alright?”

The moonlight tone of his voice graces Keiji with crestfallen stars. He blinks them away, nonplussed, as he dawns with a patchy realisation. “The restaurant is closed.”

“It is.” Osamu looks at the rest of the staff, who are drowned out by the tinkles of glass that bump into glass and the tap that rains a rain that never stops until command. Concern cleaves a sunset-maroon on his face when he returns his attention on Keiji to repeat the question, “Are ya alright?”

Rain clouds gather on Keiji’s face with regret. “Oh no,” his feet start for the door, “excuse me. Deepest apologies—”

“Did ya wanna try the food here?” Osamu interjects, legs mirroring Keiji’s. He inhales the weighted air from the tops of his lungs. “Jirou wouldn’t mind. My manager. Ya did their menu—he really likes how ya edited—he’d let ya go. He owes ya. He’d be more than happy.”

The air is mellow. Stars begin to disperse around Keiji’s porcelain face. Twice as many stars blink and unblink outside the gleaming windows. A distant clock, maybe from the office upstairs, ticks and ticks and ticks. The wind rises.

“Okay.”

“My boyfriend went home,” Keiji explains over a sensible serving of nanohana no karashiae that rests on a bed of flowers—a cream plate of floral patterns that rim the border. It is fact, and the lullaby lull of his voice says everything that does not need to be said—like a dream you cannot squeeze into language but remember all the same. 

Keiji stares at his hands and turns them around as though it were a phantom limb. “His sister isn’t well.”

It isn’t a plea for sympathy. Neither is it permission for pity. Tragedy strikes and the world simply keeps going—in a blink. This is a constant rudiment of the universe. Keiji knows this. But he is  here talking about it because to tell another person your story, is to make it feel real.

“Are they alright?” Osamu asks, face unmarred. He has never met Keiji’s boyfriend. He has never met his boyfriends sister. But the words run jade because humans are made to care.  

Table talk or lovers talk. They share company without much commitment, and in a way, Osamu understands to a degree that this is the mechanics of the world. Things come & things go. That will never change.

Keiji seems to relish in the tiny miracle that this fissured Autumn will soon wither away, and the winter will come to lay it down—snowdrop by snowdrop, blue by blue. He takes a deep breath, and nods. Slow steady breath. “Yeah.”

"Tell me a story."

Rintarou muses this when they are leisurely ignoring time, and the honeycomb glow of the sun softens the edges of the night that was.

There’s a moth beside Rintarou’s window sill, one that has been lying there, wings folded shut, for the past week. The morning light like fireflies fluttering around its dust-blanket wings, as though it were prepared to take it away. Osamu looks away. 

They’ve been sharing stories since twilight laid silent upon the mounds of mountains. 

“What story?” Osamu asks, nose tilt up. He begins to count the keys in his head. How many doors he can open?  

A low thrum of a chuckle. It’s the most beautiful thing Osamu has heard. “Tell me why you do that thing with your nose.”

“Oh that.” Osamu does that thing to his nose, again, maybe because winter is coming. Maybe because he can. Maybe because Rintarou is a force of nature. “Kita—my senior—always used to do it. I suppose diligent Thursday evening flower planting does that to ya.”

To: Atsumu

From: Osamu

[5:23am]: im going to the shrine

In lack of better wording, tradition is a pain in the ass.

As soon as birds fly free from their nest, they have complete right to shake off their past and start anew. But what people don’t understand is that sometimes, starting anew is hard. Forgetting is hard. Remembering is hard. Growing a grassy field over concrete isn’t as easy as it sounds.

With tradition, it grows in someone like any other habit. Although the habit doesn’t really make sense, and although one spends a lifetime rinsing and repeating this habit, it carves out a room in one’s body with the omnipresent need for it to be filled—just because it feels right.

Atsumu and Osamu are twenty years old, and the mountain of their childhood continues to loom quite large. The world grows smaller each passing day, but at the foot of Mt Inari, it seems mountains will never, ever, become too small despite everything that comes with age. Nature tends to do that—remind us how timeless the world is, and that we’re just living in it for a speck of time.

“Well—” Atsumu grunts, as he bends down to tighten his shoe lace because he likes being a little dramatic, “—let’s go.”

Osamu kicks his feet against the ground. A couple of pebbles react volatilely in a spitting motion. His teeth hook around his bottom lip, eyes up and through the shadows of claustrophobic vermilion. “Yeah.”

By the time they complete the hike and their prayers, the evening grows old. The sun sets on their crossroads.

The entire trip from Mount Inari to the train station, they don’t discuss why they still do this. They don’t need to. If they were to ruminate or complain, it would simply be far too unnecessary. The closest poetic exchange between them is when Atsumu says, I cleared my schedule for this. Can’t believe ya chose the most inconvenient day for me! And all Osamu does is teeter, tough.

They have twenty years together to speak for itself. They have forever.

“Do you like the flowers?” asks Rintarou.

It's objectively an odd question. They’re wearing a long skirt—not flowers. Flowers have stems and are buried deep in damp soil. Flowers wither. Skirts are the wind that have finally gained a face and frame. They last for much longer.

Rintarou’s arms dangle to their sides, hands carefully hovered over the floral skirt as though they didn’t trust it. They tilt their feet up and down.

Tsuyu has long gone, two months to be exact, but the remains of those dreamy capricious raindrops trickle between the ugly crevices of Osamu’s tongue. He gulps it down and an aimless wind wedges the gap between his chest and lungs. “Ya look nice, Rin.”

In response, Rintarou whimsically smiles, sad, and pinches the side of the long skirt that lengths stretch to their ankles. They pin it to his waist and tilts over to inspects its vanity, as though Osamu’s words had influenced his perception of himself. As though everything had changed from this angle, as if the concept of prettiness can apply to them.

“Thanks. I’m glad.” Rintarou echoes Osamu’s words: “They are nice.” And they smile, blue.  

“Your hair is getting longer.”

It’s an innocent and mindless observation Rintarou makes when they’re on opposite ends of their futon, legs stacked atop each other. They have returned to their pyjamas and the sky-blue skirt is tucked away where no one can find it. Their voice is weighted with fatigue but makes as much impact on Osamu that he crumbles.

In confirmation, Osamu raises a hand and plucks his hair that had framed his periphery. They’re right. Osamu doesn’t say anything, only a hum to let Rintarou know he’s heard them.

But later that night at 2AM, when he had retreated to his apartment and the moon is all but a bad omen; he takes a pair of scissors over a bone-white sink, before a speckled mirror, and reshapes water. Cut.

It’s the final flesh of Autumn before it’s just lovely bones, and nineteen-year-old Osamu walks down a park, alone.

At one point during his timeless walk, the crisp leaves that clothe the frail trees gain movement above him from a current. Osamu thinks they would blow right off as they rub against each other with the sounds of a dying fire.

He pauses in his ruminative stroll, hands deep in his jumper pocket, and tips his attention upward to the smoky sky, to the near-dead tree branches like skeletal fingers.

And miraculously, like all things in this world—they don’t. The leaves persist to exist and cling, desperate, to the little life they have left.

November races past and smudges into December. In an unplaceable time in the middle of the winter that lapse in front of their eyes like a dream within a dream, Rintarou texts Osamu from their childhood. Or at least, the remnants of it from Aichi prefecture, as they made an effort to visit home for their younger sisters birthday, Suna Naomi. This take in the ten-day duration of New Year’s break. 

Osamu is relishing in his final thirty minutes before chaos, a synonym for Friday evening work shift, when a furious seizure of vibrations erupt against his thigh. He procures his phone.

To: Osamu

From: Rintarou

[5:30pm]: at my childhood playground

[5:30pm]: [file attached]

Rin is banners atop of the impromptu messages, and Osamu finds that a file is attached.

The file attached contains a photo of a bleak, pallid playground that has obviously lost its initial child wonder like many other desolated playgrounds stationed around Japan. It looks nothing different from what Osamu remembers from the last time he sighted his old childhood playground.

(Strange how battered and empty they look. The patches of silver on the monkey bars. The white that begins to fade on the jungle gyms. It seems the playground itself has grown up, but simply cannot go anywhere. But Osamu’s just pondering at this point.)

Osamu’s large thumbs start to clack on the tiny buttons. that looks miserable metal slides are my enemies, he replies because it is.

wdym it’s a fortress, Rintarou is swift to respond. Then, r u free to call rn?

Standing very still in the staff room with nothing more than the lights outside of the kitchen, Osamu gives it no second thought. He responds, yeah.

Upon command, his phone vibrates within his palm with a weak ring tone. Osamu presses his phone against his ear, palms perspiring upon the warmth.

The faint static that hums in his ear comes to life. “Hey,” Rintarou’s voice sounds.

“Hey.” Osamu counts to three, as though he were testing if this were a daydream. He inhales a breath and tightens his fingers around his phone. He will never get used to phone calls. “How’re ya?”

“Good, good,” Rintarou automatically responds, voice a little distorted. “You?”

“Friday work shift soon,” Osamu light-heartedly says with a small smile.  

Time sways as though cradling a baby, or the patient moon that influences the tide that ebbs and flows. Osamu counts to four. He looks around and schools his eyes on the shadows that past beneath the palette of light from beneath the door crack.

As though anticipated, Osamu then says, softer, “tell me about aichi.”

If childhood is a person, maybe the person who you feel like a kid with the most is childhood, if you look at it at the correct angles. Sixteen, twelve, eight – you never stop being those ages. All the ages you have lived, you therefore live with all the ages in there, somewhere. Sometimes, you just need to relearn how to be a child again. Children, after all, are masters at hide and seek.

Winter is here, and the world freezes. It isn’t spectacular whenever Osamu walks among the dusty pavements, and being in the snow never compares to childhood, when he was willing to dump himself on last nights shivering snowfall and clear shapes of snow angels. The clouds are stagnant. The animals hibernate. A snowflake flutters down on the blue light window, followed by another.

Osamu's phone sounds and resounds. 

“Alright.”

Osamu’s in Kyoto: his grown-up city, and Rintarou’s, too.

They exchange stories like they always do in the fleeting time span of thirty minutes. In other words, they exchange a part of themselves in hopes they receive a part of the other. To exchange their story, stories, childhood, is another way of saying, I only met you now, and fate delayed our meeting a little later. But why not start now? So here is me. Here is the forever that I have always known.

At the end of his work shift, Osamu exits the back alleyway with a hammering heart and a giddy, boyish grin. He hugs childhood near his heart. It never quite leaves. You never quite forget. 

(Do you want to spend the next with me?)

Kyoto comes down with a horrendous frost that makes home between Osamu’s ribs because everywhere else had shunned it out. While it is there, debris and dandruff-like, they blur all winters into one.  

The restaurant persists, hospitable as ever. It navigates through the dreary season and the death of the year, and as there are some things that remain consistent, so is the mop in Osamu’s hand. Disinfectant is a more recognisable smell than the food that cooks and grills all day long.

“Why are you still working here?” Jirou asks between the shift back and forth, back and forth rub of his palms underneath the open faucet. The gush of the tap sounds far too natural that it drowns out everything with it—the fierce city traffic, the drone of Jirou’s voice, the world.

Osamu blinks. His fingers fist around the mop, as though to prove even more that he is here, present, and not some ghost, or some dead thing. “Huh?”

Characteristically passive, Jirou applies a sloppy squeeze of soap. “The staff is most likely going to remain the same as it is.” A generous pause as he lathers the slime of lurid green in his hands. “Why are you here?”

Questions and answers break in waves. “Because this is what I have.” Osamu’s eyes flit to the mop in his blanched hand, like it would provide him with a firmer answer. It doesn’t, so he lists out the obvious, and more down-to-earth answer. “Because I need a job and I’m broke.”

Painfully elusive, Jirou merely responds with a clipped, repressed chuckle—more to himself, like it was just a question for amusement. He slams the faucet shut. The water shuts up like it has a jaw.

Osamu doesn’t know how to answer that.

    Why are you here, Osamu?

                  Where will you

                                       land?

Because Atsumu is an unreliable, un-curated force of nature, and because he is therefore not the safest person to ask for advice to a contentiously fragile topic, Osamu tempers his lack of social contacts. He narrows into one person.

“Yer a literature major. What’re yer thoughts on passion?”

Keiji is sitting underneath the counter lights at 5:55PM, five minutes shy from closing. Osamu is tending to the marred floors, the smell of disinfectant perfuming the entire restaurant. The restaurant is empty other than them, and Jirou and the rest of the minimal staff tidying up in the kitchen with the obnoxious sound of metal clinging and the water going once down the drain.

Between them exists a carcass of silence.

“That’s a casual question,” Keiji says sarcastic, playful, a canine less from biting.

Osamu attempts to hide the flustered blush that dusts his cheeks, like pulling a rug over a puddle of puke. “My boyfriend once made a comment about how passion is useless. My brother has a personality that rides on passion. I’m conflicted,” he admits, a little too honest. He stares at the warm tea he has just made. “And I started thinking, again.”

Keiji hums with consideration. “That is a predicament,” he says, and after some more thinking, he responds with such a Keiji-like answer. Lukewarm. “I think people can just do things because they want to.”

A laugh rustles out of Osamu’s throat like dead leaves rising with the wind. One last time, they seem to say. “For some reason, I knew you’d say that,” he gently muses.

“How about you, Miya,” Keiji tilts his head. He shifts his focus. “What are your thoughts about passion?”

Like cotton ball have been stuffed in his ears, Osamu stares out to the window and consoles in nature.

“I think,” he begins after a long second, and looks down at the mop in his hand. The tips of his lips twitch upward like a brushstroke had tickled them. He frowns first because all of this sounds so Atsumu-like.

I think this is passion. The completeness of his thought ebb out like the tide on his tongue, so he keeps it there. It’ll come back. For now, he musters a small smile. “I don’t know.”

Whatever Keiji answers never completely registers in Osamu’s mind.

“I mean, it isn’t much.” Rintarou smiles. The corners of his lips wilt. “Do you like it?”

They managed to win a second-place spot for a small community photography competition. Today is the exhibition. He asks this question, even though he won the entire judging committee. Suppose none of that really matters.

The winning photo is of purple flowers of all shades that meet the same fate as everyone else beneath the rain – carelessly stamped and petals ran over on the wet asphalt. It looks, to Osamu, like a dream that tripped.

It’s hydrangeas that Rintarou captured into frame. Osamu can distinguish them easily since he watered them often with Shinsuke in high school. How the vibrancy of their lilacs and purples saturate underneath the hundred water droplets that cling to its surface.

Hydrangeas are sadistic flowers as they thrive the most when the world is crying. Though maybe it is the strongest flower out there, too, as it survives through adversity.

Do you like it? The way Rintarou asks this question is faux sentimentality. It’s a game. Almost hesitant, Osamu plays.

“It’s great,” Osamu draws a balanced breath that seeps sharp beneath his teeth.

“No,” Rintarou prosaically admits. “It sucks. I used my old camera.” Their eyes are far when they observe the photo, like this reality fabricates around them and knits a thick blanket. Despite the cryptic comment, a small smile lingers on his lips like the low moon in the morning. “Whoever judged this has low standards.”

Art is an attempt to make the idea of capturing the infinity accessible. It takes a bunch of concepts, and a blank sheet and tells you, “Alright. This is all you need to capture the infinity in your head.” Photography in particular is a medium where anything tangible can be captured within a snap. The evolution of humanity in one click of a bottom to produce strategically angled pixels.

Osamu is no expert in physics, but he did pass his physics topic test in year 11, so that must be accounted for something. Here is his proposition: Newton may denote that an unmovable object must stay at rest or move when met with force. But when he stands beside Rintarou, everything is quiet, and his words always run thin as though it were no more than air.

“But” Rintarou tilts his head, and his words are drifting. “It is pretty, I guess.”

There are many things Osamu finds difficult to understand. Whether the apple really did fall upon Newton’s head, or if hydrangeas are the most sadistic or strongest flower in the world.

Right now, Osamu is standing beside a boy he has known for more than half a year by now. The strings in his body are tangled, and he’s doing his best to position them so his blood flows smooth. But his cheeks are an ugly ruddy hue, limbs stagnant due to viscid veins, and he knows next to nothing if the question of ‘describe Rintarou to me?’ ever arises for some strange reason.

Osamu knows next to nothing on how to navigate them. So, he concentrates on this display that wanes underneath the fluorescent light, in this dark room, as though it were a map or a guide. If he is perceptive enough; the stamped hydrangea would rise back to life; the rain droplets would return to heaven; and the smile on Rintarou’s face would make more sense.

But nothing changes. Rintarou is no map, and neither are the beautiful things that they create. What Osamu finds instead is another milky way that he cannot frame, another near transparency that’s almost subaqueous green. Can you see me?

Osamu looks away, and he’s beginning to understand to not understand.

“Do you like the flowers?” Osamu says, attempting to slip himself in Rintarou’s shoes, because he is built upon the axioms of his childhood.

Atsumu raises a sharp brow at Osamu question with the most condescending tone as possible. “What?”

They’re in Osamu’s apartment, and the silver lights allude the vaguest allusion to a hospital—where people rule their lives out by the defiant ticks of the clock with each snap of its fingers. Osamu’s preparing a warm cup of tea. This is what is happening now.

“Never mind,” he dismisses. He raps his wrist against the cliff of the island for distraction.

“Never mind,” Atsumu parrots in a thin voice, because he knows exactly what buttons to press to get what he wants—a proper answer. “It’s dead winter. Everythin’s dead.”

Osamu rolls his eyes. Douche. “It’s nothin’.”

The Kansai-ben accent doesn’t feel right on the roof of his mouth, like a piece of gum he had chewed too much and lost all its flavour. He shakes off Atsumu’s lightning-packed question that scorch his tongue like bronze with a zapped glance. “Stop looking at me like that, Tsumu.”

“Well then, how does this paintin’ looks like?” Atsumu asks, as rough edged as ever. He inverts his paintbrush and jabs it at the canvas beside him as though Osamu cannot see the large fucking canvas beside him.

How? – well, it looks like a painting, Osamu could answer and in all his right could callously answer. But he doesn’t. Instead, Osamu as Osamu bluntly says, “It looks like a painting with a lotta funky colours—“ then he adds, as a brother, with equal amount of truth, “—that looks good.”

It’s painfully and understandably obvious that Osamu, ultimately, does not have much knowledge on the arts. The years of art classes he spent swashing paint above paint was done on the thread line of natural abilities and a grain of skill. That can only get one so far. Osamu is aware of this as much as he remembers his memories that sit like closed doors and dusty rooms in his mind, unexplored.

Tossed eyes, folded shoulders: the components for a drama performer in the making. “Ya have more than that,” Atsumu jabs, this time, with a frown that points everywhere but up.

“Grams is smacking at ya all the way from here,” Osamu says with a sidelong eye. They’re nineteen and still attacking each other like they’re magpies. “Yer frownin’ down.”

“Well, where the fuck do frowns point?”

Sakusa Kiyoomi enters the living room to the sound of the flushing toilet in the distance. He stares at them, expression unreadable. “Hi.”

Atsumu and Osamu stare at him back. They exchange glances. And because Osamu is much more well-kept together than Atsumu, in some ways, he speaks first, “Hi, Sakusa.”

Kiyoomi settles on the empty space on the couch, adjacent to Atsumu’s studio set up, parallel to Osamu loitering by the counter, and elegantly places his mug on the coffee table. He poises back. The clock ticks. “Hello.”

The white curtains don a façade in the pale winter sun. Its wading light pours in and paints all of the angles of Rintarou’s face in all of the correct places that it’s lethal. And they are no angel; nothing like that at all. They snort more than they laugh. They brush their teeth once a day than twice. They gravitate towards darker tones of clothes. And they announce offhandedly, whilst flipping through a volume of One-Piece, “Have I told you that I’m moving to Tokyo in two weeks?”

Osamu’s finger stops tapping on his futon. “Oh.” He readjusts his arm to elevate himself and rises to gain a better perspective of Rintarou. The walls bruise, or maybe it’s just him, as he responds almost blank, “No. You haven’t.”

And like a heartbeat, it is mundane, and it is desperate as it pounds against the chest. Desperate to break free. Desperate to hurt oneself in pursuit for liberty. Desperate to keep living.

Though, Osamu’s life has always been anticlimactic. Mundane as the beat of a heart. He supposes he couldn’t imagine how else it would happen.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Rintarou is quick to pad his answer with an apology, then supplies the cataclysmic answer, “Two months ago. It kinda slipped from mind, y’know. So many stuffs been going on. I didn’t really know…y’know,” (by know, he swallows a large gulp and completes their sentence in a tenuous voice) “right time.”

Osamu wonders if this is what it is like to love someone. He wonders if this is how much it hurts to feel. When the silence suspends a second longer than it must, Osamu shakes his head and says, “No, it’s cool.” He looks up at Rintarou, without any significant anger, disgust, sadness, or sorrow. Just looks—then smiles, like a petal shimmering in the rain. “I’m glad.”

Rintarou closes the One-Piece manga, thier movements solemn. Or maybe solemn isn’t the right word. It’s the movements one would make when it feels as though everything around them is on fire. And since everything is burning and scathing, they’re attempting to touch as little of their surroundings as possible. Remain. Still. “Yeah.”

Suna Rintarou is no angel. But this is what they have in common with them: they never stay for long.

There are no shards in the sky because the sky doesn't crack—it absorbs. It swallows; the sun that breaks past the horizon in the most grotesque way possible; like a fresco painted by the fingers of god or gods themselves.

Or perhaps, it’s because the sky bleeds. How much it bleeds, and all we ever do is admire it from this helpless vantage point as it bleeds and bleeds and bleeds until it can no longer find its flesh.

It is vesper, just before sundown, and Osamu is praying to the gods he isn’t quite sure he believes exist.

Osamu and Rintarou rest themselves atop the apartment complex; the sky much wider, the world much larger, and themselves much smaller from up here. It is sobering to be reminded of how infinitesimal you are.

“Have you always known this place existed?” Osamu asks, the reality of this predicament beginning to bed and concrete. It is concrete, and he is falling, and no one is here to catch him.

“Yeah,” Rintarou replies with a sigh unreal like an inhale of some past life.

"Alright," Osamu agrees, complies, adjusts.

They sit down like they are children that gather around the mat for story time and look out, oceans away, a world apart, a centimetre near. They relish in each other’s discreet silence.

The cold is cold enough to bruise their skin violet, and they couldn’t quite tell whether it was the sunset or the cold.

“I’ll take photos,” Rintarou says out of the blue, eyes searching for the interrupted horizon. “A lot of them. I’ll take photos of food, the people, and even the shittiest alleyways.”

With a snort, Osamu cannot help but surrender to the impending grin denting his cheeks, dug out by Rintarou, vulnerable like the soil. “That sounds promising.”

“I have five months to prove my worth as a photographer,” Rintarou explains, a little hopeful, a little more of everything than usual. Then, because this is an awkward silence, he shuffles into another topic. “The skies during winter are the best.”

And although they are leaving him – how can Osamu be mad at that a-little-more of a smile on their star smudged lips?

Osamu dares himself to ask, “What do ya like it here so much?”                                                         

“I feel small,” Rintarou responds familiar as the backs of his hands. “And sundown is always the best sights because it dies,” they decidedly say. And because he doesn’t like sounding too much of a sap, he adds with a passive shrug, “Brutally putting it.”

“What’s so beautiful about that?”

"Because." Rintarou hooks a pinkie around his cotton sweater, the cat print rippling upon calibration, and jostles his chin to the side. "It sets despite. It's the inevitability of change." The words melt from Rintarou’s lips, sinking into the balmy sky. “And besides, that's what the cheesy artists say, right? Death is beauty.”

Ya are a cheesy artist; Osamu wants to say but the jibing words wither like tulips and bluebells upon his tongue. That would be redundant, wouldn’t it? Rintarou is a cheesy artist. An Underdog. They both understand this more than anyone and themselves, so it doesn’t need to be said.

Instead, Osamu simply nods. He nods, and he elects the imbuing quiet. He nods with the knowledge that the clouds never stop moving and the butterflies will migrate soon enough, and the sun will always rest in the west as it will always rise from the east. He looks out and out and out, to the horizon, to the city of fireflies.

They bleed in silence underneath the sky. Pain is vulnerability, the submission to nonconformity, to beauty.

And oh, how gorgeous, as the sky bleeds with us, too.

You don’t say goodbye to them. Maybe because you cling onto the leak of hope that maybe it isn’t the end since their phone number is slotted in a specific space in your phone and that must mean something, a final string between you two. But you won’t call or text them anyway—since silence is a universal language and you two understood it more than words. Or maybe it’s because you are stupid, and you are your brothers twin.

You don’t say goodbye to them. You simply await for your next hello.

To: Osamu

From: Atsumu

[3:37pm]: doorsopen at 7

“So, what do ya think?”

It’s the opening night to the exhibition Atsumu managed to weasel a spot in. It’s a small community centre, where folds of various other artists are hung upon display.

Although it’s in an exhibition, it’s a small one, not that big, as Atsumu pedantically claims with all these art critics around, he bothers to still pester his brother because children always ask unnecessary questions. In many ways, Atsumu is still a child with many, many habits he never really grew out of.  What is an artist if not the façade of an adult that bloomed around a child?

“A canvas with a lotta funky colours,” Osamu answers, honest, like a thousand times before and a thousand more. “But it’s good. Would be nice if Aran got to see this.”

His eyes roam the rest of the exhibition, of the other artists that loiter around their works in anxiety or pride. He sinks his palms into his pockets, and it is warm.

But his words are not enough. Satisfaction is a faux promise.

“The owner saw somethin’, for some damn reason I can’t see—“ Atsumu trips into his words. His face burns with discontent and confusion and shrivel like ashes as he stares down one of his many paintings—this one, a deep lullaby. “—I can’t see. What a big fuckin’ joke.”

Passion, the word drifts in the shape in Osamu’s head like an afterthought.

An echo of an answer: Is one of the many ways to burn.

Sometimes, Osamu allows himself to wonder how life would have treated him if he had enjoyed art a fingerprint smidge more than he does in this universe. When the wonderment overspills, he rules a list of perhaps and its many synonyms.

Perhaps it would have hurt more. Maybe he wouldn’t have been the best at it as far as talent gets him. Perhaps— 

Enough.

“Let’s go,” Osamu says with a voice that isn’t soft, nor harsh, nor edged with finality. His words are always edged with endless, empty questions like an attempt to count to infinity.

The night is never final either. The world is never final, is it?

Tear-streaked Atsumu and a solemn Osamu walk out of the exhibition with empty pockets and even emptier stomachs. The stars don't show up tonight; dead, dying, and dying a little more as they fade like a cirrus cloud of a too-hot and too-mundane summers day.

When they navigate themselves underneath a bus stop, Osamu tries to remember the stars, eyes searching half-heartedly over the blank canvas. The clouds seem much lower than Osamu remembers. The crescent moon seems much fuller, too.

The night is so dark. He wonders if the stars were figments of his imagination all this long.

It was a soft epilogue; I would have to squint my eyes to realise that it had ended. You left my world just as quietly as you had entered it.

This is how I will remember you, or at least—I’m sorry. I lied. These are the things that I am clinging onto, so I don’t forget about you: the smell of morning showers / wrists / soaked in morning glory / 9AM / like glass / be careful / we don’t want this moment to linger for too long / or too short. / Let’s stay here / for now.  

Oh would you have a look at that? It’s 8PM; an hour before 9PM.

It’s reconciliation, therefore, a sacrifice of confessions. Here is mine:

      I don’t remember many of my dreams.

& I’m beginning to ask—

      Were you one of them?

TRANSLATIONS OR SYNONYMS:

 Are you real?

Were you real?

Were we real?

The evening downpour has passed, but the world did not sparkle or either is it iridescent, or neither does it resurrect from the winter-long torpor. It shivers with too many teeth, like a too-cold night within a too-cold night as the stars serve as tiny freckles of heaters. They are too many worlds and nights away.

The plump clouds have gone grey and heavy and sink to earth to consume it in its entirety. Between the wounds and capillaries of the city, above the top hats of buildings. Osamu navigates through the vague fog, just barely getting by.

He had just closed for the night. Closing up tends to be an onerous task, but he’s worked long enough to know his way around the facility that Jirou trusted him with more strenuous responsibilities.

He walks up the wet back alley, and the crunch of pebbles beneath his footfalls juxtapose to the skids of the scurrying cars that blear in and out of focus in the distance of the main road. Osamu wanders in the middle of the gusty wind as his bones ache upon exposure.

When he pivots around the corner, there is a figure that stands before the main door like a shadow with no host, unbreaking or unflinching.

Osamu halts.

The silhouette does not shift. The moon smiles differently and the night opens its pores. Only when Osamu advances, the murky puddle underneath the sole of his feet shifts into brief animation of ripples that moulds around the shape of his settled shoe. The ripples reach the shadow—a gentle tap of sound. The figure turns its head, their gaze falling upon Osamu like a fallen petal in the thaw. They gain a face, glossed and doe eyed.

“Akaashi,” Osamu recognises. His voice runs fraught as he sinks his nimble fingers deeper into the safety of his pockets.

Keiji hums wirily as his eyes flicker to the ‘CLOSED’ sign. His eyes gleam, glass-like. “I arrived late.” It’s a statement, no trace of disappointment or rue that Osamu can base his response on.

So, they maintain silence, and Osamu is reminded that the world is never truly quiet.  

Distant words float like ashes of a forest fire from Osamu’s throat. It does not fail to leave a burn mark along the column of his vocals as the question releases weak. “Do you want to go out? Somewhere.” Beyond the frosted windows, a flock of birds, travelling one blue to another—a flicker across Osamu’s lip. “Anywhere, I mean.”

It takes ten seconds before Keiji calms on an idiosyncratic response. It takes a second for the execution. “That’d be a pleasure, Miya.”

It is a pleasure; Osamu wants to agree aloud. He suctions his tongue to the roof of his mouth and sucks. There’s an itchy spot somewhere back there.

“Long distance was difficult for a whole year, but we managed.” 

Thirty minutes later, they’re in an unnamed boba shop and Osamu pays for both his and Keiji’s orders because Osamu is a self-certified sweet talker when he can be.

Keiji tells his story in some timeless transition within an osmosis of unmeasurable minutes, they talk about everything, nothing, and everything in between.

He met Koutarou in high school, one year apart by age and year level, and have leaned on each other's shoulders ever since. Now they’re struggling university students clinging onto each other, and don’t plan to sunder any time soon.

Keiji shuffles in his seat and seems to rock from one side to another like a baby manger in a cradle of clouds. His eyes flit around everywhere and anyone except Osamu, who is right in front of him. “Somehow everything sorts itself out. I moved up here a month later, and we share an apartment for convenience’s sake, but also because we want to.”

Osamu bites the inside of his gummy cheek. “And is it nice?”

“And it is nice,” Keiji affirms with a wan smile.

He swirls the boba in his drink and pauses as the tips of his mouth waver. “But, at the time, I thought I was the farthest life had ever taken me. Now I look back. And it feels silly that I was even worrying about it.” It sounds more like a clandestine confession, more intimate than it seems to be. "Bokuto always says that I think too much sometimes, and I can agree. Friends from high school know me as a notorious overthinker. But I couldn’t help it sometimes, you know? It’s a habit, and thoroughly practised habits eventually become the air you breathe before you even realise it.”

Osamu understands that. He understands it like the way he breathes, the way he walks with one foot after the other. Like the brutal cold that makes his fingers shudder into fists. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand that.”

Keiji tilts his head left to right, left to right, like he’s tempering the words in his head. “The future will always be terrifying,” he whispers, silver.

Then a stifling silence that is not quite settled like the snow outside, but not quite intense as whatever is left of the January winter either. Osamu’s eyes join the slow scene beyond the beautiful windows. What he sees is a sky that refuses to see the stars. 

Someone is always watching – who told him that before? 

“Rin left,” Osamu announces.

The letters and vowels press a boot over him, his cheek in the dirt, and carry his flesh like soot underneath their feet like it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Drowning seems easier than breathing.

“He’s in Tokyo now. Pursuing an apprenticeship for photography. He’s taking his shot, I guess. But, I mean, it doesn’t matter, anyway. Good for him, really.” Osamu shrugs to shake the tenderness beneath his ribs. It only hurts more. “We were, well. We weren’t really dating. And I don’t like him, romantically.”

Then everything drains. How cruel words are—how they destruct and leave nothing behind just like the wind. After all, words, no matter what language, always translate whatever is in the mind and heart a little differently—always too-strange, too-less, too-something.

First, the predicted, “Oh.” Then, the unpredicted, “Well, does it matter?”

Osamu squints and rereads Keiji. “Huh?”

Keiji is quick to apologise in mortification by his boldness in such a bleak conversation. “I apologise for my candidness, Miya, and my presumptuous speculations. I shouldn’t have had made a quick conclusion.”

He momentarily tilts his head low as his glasses reflect the golden lights that grieve above them. It’s honest, but because today has been so yellow and bitter, Osamu can only manage to stare at Keiji with so much fatigue it blemishes his eyes. 

He holds a breath and proceeds. “That’s the thing about love, Miya,” Keiji softly says, an echo within an echo when time and space are nothing more than synonyms of the other. He ruminates over his paper-like fingers. Something of a lovely and honest smile slips on his face. “Nobody knows where love will lead them, whether it be better or for worse, or what love even is. You can’t comprehend it; you just know that you’re in it.”

(In truth, Osamu’s already forgotten what he’d said for Keiji to say this. But he thinks he understands that. He thinks he does.)

They’re on their way home from the boba shop after boarding the Shiei 207 bus. Now, they’re beneath the waves of starlight, the cold of night like a thousand of nasty acupuncture needles on their skin. The sky is heavy overhead with its unique gravity. 

Osamu has been flagging a few steps behind Keiji for the entire walk, maybe subconsciously, because it feels a little wrong to be standing beside him. There isn’t any more words that need to be exchanged, anyway. The night had absconded all of them. Twigs and specks of green litter the damp asphalt that Osamu strolls along as though it were a guide in a wayward storm. But around him, it is all quiet.

“My apartment is further down.”

They pause and exchange brief glances as though they are perfect strangers. Maybe they are. When does a stranger ever stop being a stranger? They stand for five seconds. It takes a muffled moment for Osamu to process that Keiji had spoken. Keiji makes a gesture down the bleary lit street that veers right.

Osamu is going left.

“Oh.” Osamu looks out to the street and notices the sudden schism. How long have they been walking? “Right.”

For a moment, the starlight is brighter than the streetlamps, a sea of stars above their heads. Osamu believes that underneath the loom of these shadowed buildings, the streetlamps dampen the night more than they dapple it. He readjusts the thin grey scarf that’s wrapped around his neck and deepens his gloved hands inside his jacket pockets. Winter has already up and gone, but the dewy winds still carry residues of its leave.

“Thank you for the pleasant evening, Miya,” Keiji says pensively. He examines the skeletal trees as a curl of smoke twirls from his parched pink lips. He seems to release a resemblance of a shudder, then announces, “Spring is coming.”

There is an eerie beat. Then, he levels his attention back to Osamu with a small smile that fails to wrinkle his eyes.

Above them, branches of plum blossoms rise in wake, some full bloom, some still blooming, nevertheless, ephemeral. They carry the final ghosts of snow that is left in the sky. Spring is already here, Osamu would typically counter. But when Osamu mimics Keiji’s gesture and points his chin skyward, the world is a few centimetres wider, brighter. The clouds lift. Blue leaks from the bare night. Keiji is right. It is only just arriving.

“Spring is coming,” Osamu echoes, and it sounds more like a revelation than an agreement. He shifts his eyes back from the sky to Keiji, but it hardly makes a difference. “Thank you for the evening, Akaashi.”

Keiji nods, resolute and fond. “Anytime.” 

To: Ma

From: Osamu

[4:03am]

I have stomach pain

To: Osamu

From: Ma

[6:00am]

uh oh. green tea baby

It’s a mistake to reminisce past 9PM. 

That night, it’s 9:01PM, and the sun sets again in Kyoto. It sets another thousand-fold for the earth that fails to abandon him. The earth orbits the sun. The earth rotates in itself. He attempts to abandon the earth, but he’s on it all the same.

Winter has been here for 3 months, 2 days, and 10 hours. A briefcase is clasped in winters hand, and it’s waiting expectantly beside a door. Sleet taints the highways and pavements. Spring swells.

Time trips and halts, then sprints. Late spring peels in the horizon with a gentle glow and idyllic warmth. Time, despite its meticulously measured nature, is ironically very subjective.

It is February, and it is ending.

The world rotates as it always has. It rotates with everything in it, everything without.  

Tonight, and for many nights more, dinosaurs roam Osamu’s dreams.

━━━━━━━━━━

How is the weather today?

It’s raining.

It is, isn’t it?

Yes. Yes it is. It’s beautiful, right?

Yeah. It’s beautiful. And I’m soaked and it’s cold.

Ha, ha. I guess we are.

━━━━━━━━━━

The wisteria hang over the balconies, again, and the drying laundry catch breeze, getting up, then letting go. The moon-white plum blossoms drift into nonexistence, into the next thaw of winter. Confident cherry blossoms flourish to signify the birth of April and frames the branches that have roused back to life.

The spindly trees seem to grieve for the clear sky mourning a requiem that only comes out as silence. Osamu bows his head in respect and thinks about his dreams. He thinks about them, and how dreams are like rain.

Like the rain, you cannot see it, like your dreams. Well, maybe if you know how to look at it, you may see it, each individual water droplet that purples from the heavens. But how it ricochets off the already wet concrete, how it soaks and resets the world. How when it falls and finds home upon your skin. All of this is proof that rain is real.

Which is why people make generic weather conversation, really, if you think about it.

For storytelling is, if not, a craft that makes something feel real. Because to tell another person your story, is to affirm that it is real.

Osamu begins at 9AM. The sun is rising, and so does the wind.

He roots his feet to the ground that has always been there for better and for worse, and inhales the pink of early spring. And he looks down at the lines on his palms over and over, then up to the bruised sky. A few strands of hair stray his vision, a few water droplets hang in the air and nip his face.

He inhales life in its entirety, and Miya Osamu is certain that he is real.