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When her father shows her the shōryō uma her grandfather and great-grandfather will use to come visit them, Saki doesn’t ask if her parents made one for her all these years. She knows the answer. They haven’t, because she was still alive, and they clung to his possibility until she came back, refusing to treat her as one of the deads.
Facing the altar, Saki closes her eyes and inhales, chasing away the tears blurring her vision. The people she mourns aren’t dead. They aren’t here, yet they are at the same time, in another place, in another form… But it’s still not them. Her father, who teaches her things patiently, always keeping his hand on her shoulder as if to make sure of her presence, isn’t the Masamune she knew, touched and watched chose another, and her mother, who wipes the crumbs around her mouth with a fond smile and hugs her tight, isn’t the Mutsumi she envied, hated and loved so much.
It’s not just them. Hara who taught her that love hurts, Misato who wasn’t her grandmother then and who opened her door to a stranger, everyone in Mifuse… She misses people who have never existed in this world, and there are no words for this feeling of emptiness hanging over her small frame – her voice gets stuck in her throat and her grasp on writing still too poor to convey anything to anyone. So she keeps it to herself like a secret. In a way, she misses Itsumi too. A part of herself, more Itsumi than Saki – childish and innocent, unable to live by herself – seems to have stayed behind in that illusion where she grew up and almost stayed.
Is everyone doing well? Has time resumed in Mifuse? Has Mutsumi said the truth and does she still keeps Masamune’s heart tucked in her chest, alongside hers, forever together? Do they think of her as she thinks of them, a summer ghost in winter, a being whose presence will never go away?
Saki doesn’t know. Nobody in reality does and ever will because she’s the only one who knows these people existed at all. Their struggles to keep living, to change aren’t recorder anywhere, not in the children’s books she pours over to learn how to read or on TV where the old steel factory ruins sometimes appear. The memories she clings to when nights are long and sleepless, rose-tinted and yet marred by feelings she can’t put a name to are her only certitude that they existed.
She won’t prepare any shōryō uma this year. Or the next one. Or any of the years following her return. There are holes in her heart that haven’t healed yet, created by illusions of people that never were, but as long as they’ll exist, hurting her every time her thoughts wander to that other life and to the warm smiles of everyone there, it means they’re still alive somewhere, and such souls don’t need help visiting the livings.