Chapter Text
September
Time: 5.16 PM
Boston Logan Int Airport
Geto
Waiting at an airport terminal is a tad annoying experience but this time, as I awaited flight from California to land in Boston at.precisely 5:16 pm on a pleasant September evening, I felt a lot of emotions but annoyance for the delay. My stomach was swirling with a hundred butterflies and my mind kept returning to the memory.of the day I last saw him. four years ago, a little before we both were to start highschool in our respective cities. Him, in the bustling life of L.A and me in the same old golden courtyards of New Boston. He was wearing a T-Shirt that said 'Hi California in big bold letters and brown casual shorts. His white hair was messy and unkempt just like I had known them to be for my entire life. I remember crying that day on the car ride back to home.
I hid from my Mom in the back seat of our old minivan thinking that I would be the lonely miserable kid at highschool even though it was with the same people I went to middle school with. It would be Satoru who would have to start anew.
But he seemed to be all his usual boisterous self as he kissed my mother goodbye, shook hands with my father, punched me on my arm and later crushed me with one of his annoying hugs. He had whispered in my year; "I would miss you". I had hugged back even tighter and then pushed him away as the announcement to board the plane began. He blew a lass at me and I blew a raspberry back at him. That was the last time I ever saw him. My heart was breaking that day. And I know — Satoru's was too. But both for entirely different reasons.
His mother died in California two months after they moved away and he was hurtled from relative to another as his dad was a busy person who had to go on business trips and technically, lived in Paris, than be with his only son. Satoru and I had texted and exchanged mails daily, but after.his mother passed away, we grew distant. Satoru stopped returning my mails everyday and when he did, they were distant and cold.
He told me about the food, the places his rich aunt (who had taken custody of him for the time being) had taken him to. He never talked about his mother or how was he holding up explicitly. Before Satoru and I talked for hours on end. We were joined at the hip as mothers liked to put it. But then, it just all ended. One day I didn't send him anything either a mail or a "how are you doing?" One day, we just stopped talking and a whole year passed. I was jerked out of my reverie, by the sound of my mother calling me back into senses. "Suguru? Suguru? The flight has been delayed. Would you mind grabbing cheeseburgers from the burger joint? "I realized the cool female voice reverberating the same thing ( the flight delay, not the cheeseburgers) and I nodded at Mom who was now looking at me suspiciously. "Are you nervous honey? It's alright. You two have known each other for your whole life. You will be glad when you see him again. She tried to smile at me and I thought my mother had it alI wrong I would be glad to see him. God, I was dying to see him again. It was Satoru who might not be who might even be too disgusted to look at me. For what I did to him For the pain I caused him from miles away last summer.
Mother doesn't know that, doesn't know me she has no idea that deep down I know that Satoru and I are not friends anymore.
I silently get up and make my way to the burger joint