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The weather is bright, sunny, and perhaps uncomfortably hot. Children play and sing songs on playgrounds, parents buy ice cream to placate the energetic little ones. It is just a normal, happy summer day. For most, anyway.
But not for Suguru and Satoru.
Suguru’s gaze was unfocused, occasionally looking down at his hands. These hands, his hands, what were they meant to do anymore? At one point he was sure they were meant for good, to save, to protect, to give life, not take. But now? Things are different now.
Now his hands felt selfish and ravaging and completely unlike the Suguru he once knew himself to be m. Oh, how far he had fallen and in such a short time, he didn’t know when the rug was pulled from underneath him but he was completely tangled in it now, unable to escape this world’s unrelenting grasp. It contorted him into what it wanted, what it saw in him, shattering the mirror of his heart and taking his body as its own, a vessel for what was deemed necessary, not desirable.
Why did he keep fighting for this? Why did he start? And why can’t he remember? Who is he anymore? Was he even a person to begin with? Or just a vessel?
Satoru knows Suguru’s mannerisms, knows Suguru, the fidgeting and shallow breaths. He knows the other is shutting out his presence but he can’t help but make himself known. That’s always been how things are. If Satoru was around, he could not be discreet about anything.
Despite his typical cocky facade, though, he understands Suguru’s plight as well. He just doesn’t know how to express it. He doesn’t know how to save him from a problem he himself hasn’t yet found a means to escape. He can’t catch the other when he’s falling because he can’t get his own parachute open. If it were up to him, he’d take the other’s pain as his own. But he isn’t dumb or naive enough to think it plausible.
So, they continue this game of fleeting glances and words left unsaid, both aware the other knows more than they let on, both afraid to fall into the others grasp for fear of losing themself while seeking solace in the shattered pieces of the other.
They know their hands are getting cut by each other’s rough edges and yet they cling like they are all that each other knows. They are all they have left, and that much is glaringly obvious. They know it well enough that to speak otherwise, to so much as mention another, feels like sacrilege. But they feign ignorance, and act like they don’t, act like this means nothing to them. Act like life is in their hands, just a game that they play for fun and not much else, as if they aren’t simply pawns setting up for gambit. Fresh bait, still alive and flailing around as if it can evade capture now.
The precipice draws ever nearer, walls closing them in from all sides, the claustrophobic feeling of simply seeing one another nearly enough to shove them off. But when a tree falls around no one, it’s hard to say it makes a sound. For this reason they willfully ignore the other’s disposition, ignore their own constitution, and close their eyes to what is perhaps the only thing in life that has any right to matter to either of them; each other. They are the same. They are mirror images of each other, unable to touch, parallel lines endlessly stretching on to a direction they are too fearful to follow but helpless to change.
Satoru’s eyes are wide, almost manic, as he stares at Suguru, flicking back and forth between what was real and what wasn’t. As if he could see the strings connecting everything in the world at once. He could see, but not sever.
He is not an agent of change, but the opposite; merely a means of keeping chaos under control. Everything must be exactly as it was, because to be any different would be to plunge him down nearly forty stories with no way of stopping the elevator ride of his life. And he could live with that, he can live with the fact that life was not up to him because he could still enjoy the small amount of consistent anomaly in his life that was the being known as Suguru.
However, it is apparent he has gotten much too comfortable being a bystander of his own life. Suguru has severed their ties, has cut the cables of his elevator car, and sent him reeling, has left him scared, unprepared, naked. He’s been thrust from the passenger to the driver seat and his hands are shaking too much to grasp the wheel. He’s going to crash. He’s going to crash. Suguru is going to kill him.
Suguru’s hands were not meant to give. Only to take, to keep, to hurt, not heal. He has accepted this now, and he is not upset by it. Because now, Suguru has found purpose. Instead of being condemned to life, he and Satoru are now able to live it. But what has given Suguru life feels more like death to Satoru. To separate himself from Suguru, from that inexplicable reflection of himself, part of himself, was to dig his own grave.
But life and death were not opposite, he as the living has no reason to fear death. If Suguru were to lead him he would have no qualms about following. Still, Satoru has never been the one in control. To start now is to be born again. What he feared was not death, but life.
They might see each other again, one day. Or every meeting might be the last. They might regret leaving words unsaid, leaving glances idle, leaving topics light. Regret was to revisit all their past mistakes and make them real, assert them into the narrative and affirm the overbearing doom that hangs over their heads, creeping in on them from every corner.
Maybe they’ll have succumbed to that fate by the time they see each other again. Only time will tell that distant future, only time can heal the wounds not yet caused and reunite them with each other, reunite them with themselves.
Until then, life was still just a dream far away from them. Still out of grasp, constantly evading them, perhaps eternally, infinitely far. Suguru thinks it is a dream worth chasing. Now he is a walking dreamer yet to be woken up. Satoru knows he is going to end up dying if he chooses to leave; knows they both will. And yet they both know it was for the better.