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and the ghosts that we knew
will flicker from view;
we’ll live a long life.
i. In the end, it’s Hajime who plans how to leave.
You have your brunches and barbeques; you bake for the first time and test your toxic confectionaries on Mattsun and Makki, but amidst the constant noise you seem to find necessary, he is the one who collects the maps and looks up your train schedules; who makes you take time off of practicing with Yahaba to fill out your housing application and look into your meal plans. At odd times in the night, you hear him clicking around on his laptop. He’s moved into your living room for now, citing that his house is overflowing with cardboard boxes and that he can’t breathe, let alone think in that kind of environment.
“But,” you tell him in the nasally tone you adopt for special occasions like when you want to really get on his nerves. “You know my house, my shows, right?”
Hajime groans, but looks up from his screen to make tired eye contact with you all the same. You’ve trained him well, honestly. “Are we doing this again?”
Instead of answering him, you just laugh. He’ll figure it out. You know it’s wasteful of you to spend your last days of spring going through all your old tricks, but you’re not sure what else to do. Your idea of the perfect parting is the perfect month leading up and abstractly, you convince yourself that it’s the lingering sense of belonging that will cement it together for all of you. So Hajime deals with the concrete and you savor the aching familiarity of your not-quite nostalgia and together you somehow manage to cram in more time with the team than ever. It’s a good arrangement. You believe in strength through numbers and when you sit together on your veranda and breathe in the pollen-heavy air you think you’ve stumbled upon permanence.
Around everyone, it’s easy to know where you fit. With Hajime, it’s even easier. You tease him and he grouses. He has post-its of cheap travel plans and good airlines stuck all over his laptop. Sometimes he wakes up with green ink all over his face and doesn’t realize it until you’re snorting into your oatmeal. In the evenings, you pick up with your new hobby of routinely poisoning Hajime with your cooking, and he sprawls across your lawn, heedless of the danger of mosquito bites, typing as he waits for dinner to be done. You stay out long after dusk, you religiously rubbing bug-spray into your legs as Hajime snorts—which is what you’re doing now.
“I’d watch it anyway.” Hajime’s attention has been drawn toward the grass—you can tell by the way his eyebrows pinch together. Sure enough, moments later, he has a firefly crawling over the tip of his thumb. He nudges his laptop aside with his foot and smiles the same smile he has for when he knows he’s just aced a test. Nerd, you think, before he says, “They’re not that bad.”
You are delighted. “Really? Even the one where they went to—“
“Yeah, no, not that one,” Hajime says quickly. “But the other ones are mostly fine.”
“Aw, Iwa-chan, all this time you’ve just been too embarrassed to be geeky!”
This time, you get a full on laugh where his eyes crinkle. Startled, the firefly hurries from his finger, glowing, and he follows its flight with his gaze. Bathed in the light of his screen, he looks almost otherworldly. “It’s actually pretty funny how sometimes you think you’ve won something by getting me to pay attention to them.”
Because you do want to win something, even if you’re not sure what it is, you only allow yourself a smirk before you pitch your voice as high as it will go. “I can’t believe you’d think so lowly of me. How can you say that?”
“Yeah right,” and he rolls over to kick you, lightly, on your thigh.
Right on cue, you throw your blanket over his head and cackle because yes, you are immature, but the splutter that comes from Hajime’s mouth is priceless.
It’s weeks before you reflect on what any of it means. Days before you realize that your subconscious has filed this conversation away with the rest of your clues; that if loss fuels your resolve, happiness clouds your judgment as much as it pushes you to be better, to grow.
iii. Makki is planning a team camping trip in July.
Hajime tells you that he can’t make it, has a last minute pre-college bonding trip with his mom and he’s already gone, has left you two voicemails when you were asleep. The connection flickers and he curses as you hear him shuffling to another part of the train. In the distance, the rumbling sound of heavy wheels on iron tracks, or perhaps an unseasonal storm. When he paces the length of the compartment, you hear the scratching of the speaker on his six o’ clock shadow.
Beneath it all, his voice is rough. “You’ll tell him?” You realize that this is just formality. At some point you’ve become so accustomed to covering for each other that you find it stranger that he’d ask than if he’d said nothing at all. Hajime sighs—and you figure it’s because of the new show he’s watching—the one he told you was about Earth. He’s gotten addicted and he promises to show you one day, but not now, when he’s been dragged on a last minute vacation to New York City by his mother. He says his desktop background is a screenshot he took of the show, and you’re excited because if Hajime is willing to sacrifice his sleep for something, it must be good.
“I texted Mattsun instead. Makki never checks his phone.” Anyway, “Hana-chan didn’t let us say goodbye to you again,” you complain.
“Stop calling my mom that. It’s weird.”
“She likes it.”
“Well, I don’t,” Hajime says. You picture him leaning against the window, caught between rolling his eyes and holding back a smile. It’s a failsafe recipe for that I’ve-just-eaten-an-entire-lemon expression you like to tease him about.
“But Iwa-chan, we all call her Hana-chan.”
“You’re impossible.”
“And you’re used to it,” you sing song.
He sighs again, soft and slow. The train screeches to a halt and you hear the speaker scratching against his skin again. Hajime has sensitive ears, and even after the last ten years of his vacations in New York, he still flinches every time the subways jolt to a halt. Not for the first time, you wonder if he inherited this trait from the elusive Hana-chan—his mother who works late nights at Mount Sinai’s ER and only ever comes home to Miyagi to whisk her son away on another wild adventure for the summer. You’ve never met her in person before, but you’ve been promised that she’ll make time for “her bestie” (you) this July.
Secretly, you’re convinced this is only so you can make fun of Hajime together before he goes off to college and gets too grown up to blush every time you mention anything vaguely dirty. But you’re still annoyed anyway, because Makki has been planning this camping trip for months, and now you have to tell him that Hajime can’t come.
“I’m sorry,” Hajime says.
You’re reminded that he knows you just as well as you know him, and that as much as you want to keep your quiet frustration to yourself, it’s a moot point. Now it’s your turn to sigh as you stretch yourself across the grass, head tilted up to trace the movements of a satellite. Out in the fields where you played as a child, the light pollution is thin enough for you to see the brighter constellations. There’s nothing like this in NYC, if what Hajime tells you is accurate. The place is a city of steel and light; a construction so arrogant that it blocks out the universe. Or maybe it’s the primitive fear humans have of the dark, the reason why electricity is harnessed to keep the night at bay.
“You’re feeling bad for me,” he says. And again, “It’s weird. Stop it.”
The signal cuts out so you wait. You count the fireflies drifting by and squint at the sky until you half-fool yourself into thinking you can see the Milky Way. When you hear Hajime asking if you’re there, you’re ready.
“Makki will get it,” you tell him. “Remember that time when he marked the wrong date for training camp and showed up two days late, back before he was a regular?”
Hajime laughs. It’s a subdued sound. “I still think the only reason why he wasn’t a regular until late in second year is because Irihata held a grudge.”
You hum in agreement. “Be here for next year’s trip. We can go to the ocean next time. I’m going to take a swimming course in college just to prepare. Oh, and if you leave me on the beach again, I’ll put a crab in your swimming trunks.”
“You wish, Brattykawa.”
“Ack! Iwa-chan, it’s an eye for an eye. I got sunburnt.”
“Like you’ll do any better with camping. You’re such a city boy, Spoiledkawa.”
“Hey!”
He snorts and then he falls quiet. For a heartbeat, you wonder if it’s the bad connection, but you can hear the same dull protest of the tracks. He says, “But do you get it?”
You consider telling him that he’s been behaving strangely these past few months. As summer nears, he’s grown increasingly antsy. It’s like he’s been dropping clues. Suddenly there’s more to your conversations and you’re not sure if he’s aware of the underlying tension and hidden meanings. Your mouth dries. This is a recent thing, and you don’t do well with change. “I think so. You’re turning into quite the grandma, Iwa-chan, and now you’re worried that you can’t keep up with us youths.”
“I’m serious,” he says, and there’s too much there. Beneath the roar of the subway and the possible rain, you hear a hint of something unknowable.
Though you are surrounded by thick grass in the middle of May, you forget how to feel warmth. “Why are you so worried?”
You expect him to think about it, but his answer is immediate. You wonder if he’s been waiting for this question, and if this is the answer he prepared. “Just a general feeling that things are changing too fast.”
You can’t stand it, so you say, “I can give you a constant.”
“Yeah?”
It’s funny how much you want. You want him there with you in the fields where you played hide and seek. You want the fascination for bugs he never grew out of, his refusal to kill mosquitoes and spiders and the way he seems to attract every firefly in the country. You want his admiration for life and his strict avoidance of sidewalk cracks, the outdated superstitions he collects and the way his shoulders give all of him away. You want to be everything because you remember sharing his bike when yours was stolen and his phone when yours was broken—because nothing of his ever seems to break—his grip is steady as a surgeon’s and sometimes you want to tell him he could reshape lives if he wanted to. In the midst of it all, you want to be his constant.
When you discovered you were going to different universities, you thought it was poignant. As old as you feel, you’re seventeen. He’s seventeen. College is the setting for new places and new people. Now, you want to tell him he’s somehow dug up all your fears. You’d settled this, but of course Hajime knows precisely how to recirculate doubt through your veins just as he knows how to will it away.
Most of all, you need him to know you’re ready, for whatever this will be. So you say, “I’ll always be taller than you.”
“And you’ll always be a little shit,” he answers on instinct.
“Still taller than you,” you shoot back.
Hajime grumbles something unintelligible.
iv. It’s the last time you see him for a long, long time.
v. He calls you again, just once.
You are sitting with your neck against the cooler, caught between drifting off and fleeting daydreams in the shapes of forest shadows. Monsters stir in your thoughts. Your hands burn with a phantom ache that grounds you as much as it distances you, draws in inward. Makki is talking and Mattsun is crouching, preparing to lunge off the rocky cliffs through the glass surface of the lake. A fly lands on your arm and flees as you shift into a more comfortable position.
“What a punk,” Makki says again. “He’s such a punk. I’d never have expected it looking at him.”
“Hmm.”
Makki watches Mattsun make the dive with his stomach sucked in like he’s holding his breath. It looks a little painful. You feel the water and the fish slipping past you. “He has a soft looking face. I thought I’d have to be careful around him.”
The minnows here are curious. They nibble at the soles of your feet as you drag your feet through the water. When you reach for them, they dissolve into the shallows. “Are you worried about something?”
“I’m not worried. I’m pointing out that for a pretty boy, Mattsun really knows how to find trouble.” The words hang wrong in the air. Makki must sense it, for he tacks on, “Adrenaline junkie,” and it’s rueful enough to make you wonder.
From your discarded duffle bag, you hear your phone ring. You make a pathetic attempt to get up before you collapse over the cooler, shifting your towel so that it cushions your head against the cool plastic. But Makki laughs and tosses it to you. It smacks you in the face, and you end up releasing an undignified squeak. “Watch where you’re throwing that!”
“Shit, Oikawa are you okay?” is barely audible through Makki’s choked mirth.
“Yes I am, no thanks to you,” you whine as you unlock the screen. You gesture to Makki to hang on. It’s Hajime. You calculate the time difference. It’s three A.M. where he is and unbidden, your blood drums against your ears, against the cool surface if your phone as you press it to your face, Makki drifting awkwardly between sitting and standing in his concern. “Iwa-chan, can you hear me?”
You can tell at once that the reception is terrible. The speaker crackles. Beneath the white noise is something that just barely sounds like a voice.
“Can you hear me?” you ask again.
The line goes dead.
“Bad signal?” Makki’s face is a caricature of sympathy. You smile, because it’s how he’s settled into doing emotions.
“It was bad the other time he called too.”
“Call him again?” Mattsun asks.
You nod, dragging yourself upright and flopping around just a little aimlessly before settling into a standing position. Then, you start walking towards civilization with your phone held out before you. It reminds you of your childhood spent coming the beach for buried treasures in the sand. Now, in these pseudo-familiar woods, the sense of non-expectance but anticipation remains. “I’ll be right back.” As you go, you hear their mumbled responses behind you.
Dragonflies and damselflies and swaying leaves pave your steps. Though loud, your footsteps are muffled by the humdrum of cicadas. Then it all fades away, and you are standing in the middle of a lonely road with forest on either side. As if to mark the end of an era, telephone wires stretch across the sky; an artificial horizon. You sit down in the borderlands, in the sparse grass between paved road and wild. Your phone is burning from the sun and the heat of your hand. Three bars – you press call and hold it to your ear, half expecting Hajime to walk out from behind some towering oak tree.
The call’s picked up. “Hi,” you hear through the static.
“What happened?”
Mumbles through the static. Trying to make sense of it all, you count the syllables. “I didn’t hear that,” you say, drawing out your words as if that will help your voice overcome the bad connection. “Are you sure you’re connected to your mom’s wifi?”
This time, the pause is punctuated by the muted sounds of someone going down the stairs while attempting to balance his phone against his cheek. “It was an accident,” Hajime tells you. He yawns, as if he is very tired. “Butt-dial. It’s this mattress, I can’t sleep right on it and I keep turning onto my phone.”
“So sleep on the couch. Didn’t Hana-chan promise to drag you around the whole city tomorrow?”
A quiet laugh. “Trying to get rid of me, Oikawa?”
“I’m being responsible, like you told me to!”
“For once.”
“Jealousy isn’t a good trait,” you sing-song.
Hajime snorts. It sounds like relief, but maybe you’re projecting. “You’re terrible. I hope you know that. I’m going to be pretty busy after tomorrow, so I’ll call you back in a few days.”
“I’m honest,” you correct, grinning into the receiver. “And I’ll talk to you then. I should be back by then. Want me to pick up anything for you?”
He hesitates. “It’s fine.” And again, until, “Maybe drop off the things I left over at your house off,” as if he’s deciding the way the world will turn.
“I’ll leave a surprise too,” you tell him. Then, before he can protest, “’Night.”
“Oikawa—“
You hang up, laughing, an odd swooping sensation in your stomach.
vi. It’s been fourteen days and counting, and Mattsun is pouring the tadpoles he caught in the river out into a large tank – a large tank that happens to be yours. He’s saying, “You’re sure you don’t need this? Didn’t Iwaizumi talk about wanting it?”
Nowadays, when you don’t pay attention, the swooping sensation is omnipresent. It makes you lightheaded, sometimes. When you forget to occupy your thoughts, you return to Hajime’s lack of contact and you make up scenarios for what may have gone wrong. But you’re feeling optimistic today, and you catch yourself saying, “You could share. I’ll take it over to his house later.”
Mattsun smirks at you. “Maid Oikawa.”
“He’s been infected,” Makki adds subtly. “If it was up to him, he probably wouldn’t have started packing so soon. Tsk, tsk.”
“Some role model you are,” Mattsun says.
You decide you dislike the absence of other victims for the Terrible Duo. Especially Yahaba – whose withering glare doubles up to work as a protection device. With no one there to distract them, they’re free to delve into your store of snacks and dignity. After a quick check, you realize you’re low on both of them. “You’re bullies,” you say, swatting at Mattsun’s hands as he reaches for another bag of chips. “If you’re staying the night, at least help me get the chairs inside before it rains.”
Mattsun leans back against the screen door, the last bag of chips in his hands. “Makki already put them up.”
“Oh.”
This level of distraction is unlike you, and you decide that you need to stop. But you’re not sure how, and you’re not even sure if you can at all. Then the moment passes and the world blurs into focus. “Look at you being so responsible. I’m so proud of the both of you.”
Mattsun looks at Makki, who looks away and laughs, and says, “Oh shucks, Captain. You’re really spoiling us here.”
“I thought we were bullies?” Mattsun stretches himself out across the top of your couch. His legs dangle off the cushions, and Makki decides to use them as a headrest.
You drop your backpack on the floor and sprawl across Makki’s lap – and you’re treated to said boy’s bad rendition of bedroom eyes. Caught between laughter and mock disgust, you choke out, “Whichever works. I’m practical like that.”
“Fickle, you mean,” Mattsun says.
“How mean,” Makki drawls.
It’s hard to take either of them seriously when you can hear the rain against the windowpanes, the pavement, the grass. Today’s is a quiet storm. Each individual droplet is distinguishable from the next. Besides the nimbus of sunlight miles away, everything is muted, hazy; a respite after the simmering days before. You shove your glasses to the side.
Maybe this is how you know. When your gaze flickers over the fish tank with the little black blobs inside, when you halfheartedly complain that you’re being taken for granted, there is no voice telling you off for wasting time on trivialities – whereas you could have said one word to convey it all, you’ve spoken twenty, embellished your verbosity with gestures and… and…
(Maybe, you just never wanted it to end.)
vii. The clues are all there.
Hajime’s spare key is right where he always leaves it, and you’re greeted by the stuffy smell of dust and summer heat when you open the door. He hasn’t been back for a while. It makes sense; he’s been in America for weeks. But even though he isn’t here to see it, you make a face as you walk in. No wonder why he took refuge at your house. There are boxes everywhere. All the flat surfaces are plastered with near-unintelligible notes.
You free one of the notes from under a mug.
Oh, you think.
And this is how the world ends: paper slipping through your hands like so many grains of sand, post-its and maps and plans in your pockets. You shove a chart of Sirius A and B into your bag. He must have wanted you to find this. The phone conversation must have been a farce. Angles, how to find the constellations – there – trapped beneath the custom made mug of your team’s smiling faces. He (Hajime) is there in the middle, a rare grin dimpling his face.
“Home,” the note reads.
One multicolored scrap at a time, you put it together. You lay it out on the porch out back. Asteroid 327, the letters, the graphs in the recycling bin – like a jigsaw puzzle you should have pieced together so much sooner. By your side is the telescope you used to sneak over to borrow. You look at the chart, and back through the lens. After all these years, you still remember how it works. Of their own accord, your hands move to zoom in on a cluster far, far away.
Asteroid 327 is somewhere beyond it, hidden.
Home.
(Hajime is an alien.)
Something in you twists.
(How dare he?)
viii. I couldn’t tell you while I was there. I couldn’t even say it when I was on the phone.
ix. I wasn’t scared of telling you. I just didn’t want it to end.
x. There was a time during those years that I thought I was human.
I was surrounded by humans for most of the day. When we played volleyball, there was no line between species. All I wanted to do was win. Looking back, I wonder if you ever thought I was different. You always latched onto the weirdest things. But I don’t see how you could have known. Did you ever have a feeling that not everything was right?
Maybe it’d come from how my mom was never actually around. How after more than a decade, you’ve never met her. She’s an alien too, and she’s not my mom, but you probably guessed by now. We were stationed here for research. She was good at the role. Like I said, sometimes I forgot I’d never be human.
xiii. You’re not sure what it is within you that believes. Likely it’s been conditioned into you to trust him. How could you not? He was the one with the solutions. He has a cabinet full of band-aids and sports tape still, ready for whoever next needs it. There was a year when you and Mattsun cleared out the entire section. You still remember his disapproving scowl as he shoved handfuls of gauze at the two of you; the steadiness of his hands as he wrapped up Mattsun’s elbow.
It strikes you that he is the same he thinks he should provide the answers –
(Insomuch as you’re the natural leader, Hajime takes charge of all contingency plans. Even now, you need him here; you want to shake him; you need to ask for a way out. It’s only later that you consider this might’ve been Hajime’s way out. Leaving clues and double-meaning scattered across his house so he wouldn’t have to face you.)
and perhaps now, he is all out of answers.
You stand up, a short gasp of a laugh pushing past your lips. This is ridiculous. As if you’d really let him off so easily. If he’s here to collect data – he should know by now given all the opportunities he’s had to examine your psyche.
xi. Meet me at the pier.
I should go now. The rest of them are leaving. I don’t really –
xiv. Around this time on Saturdays, Mattsun is probably still awake, his eyes glued to his latest racing game. It’s possible that Makki has taken over his bed in the meantime. Around this time on Saturdays, everyone is racing for the bus, and the usual suspects always miss it. They show up late to practice grim-faced, sporting steaming cups of weak coffee from the cafeteria.
As you run, you remember how you memorized these streets. All the late night walks and bad decisions. And you remember the fireflies and summers spent cataloguing the best places to catch them, to chase after shooting stars and stag beetles and dreams that never seemed so far away.
Hajime said to meet him at the pier. Hajime who isn’t human.
Your lungs burn as you run, the cool morning breeze as unforgiving as the sea.
xii. What would you do if it was your last chance to go home?
Oikawa, what would you do?
I don’t want to be the last one here.
xv. He’s standing in the waves, ankles deep in the water.
Nothing has changed. It’s cloudy and the beach smells of kelp and lost fish, of tide-pools and hidden mollusks beneath the sand. Around him is an array of seagulls and other unidentifiable birds. Throwing your shoes off, you move toward him. Then you’re both standing (unevenly) by the shoreline, the waves crashing around you. His shoulders are tense, from the cold or because of your presence.
It’s like a dream.
“You found out?”
You wonder if he slept at all, and when he got back from America. You think he might be living off of coffee, whatever his alien biological system is. “You wanted me to. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Hajime snorts. He turns away from you. “Did you even believe me?”
And why should you? He has two arms and two legs. That time when you accidentally elbowed him in the face – his blood was as red as your own. Still, you feel a sort of calm that you’ve either tricked yourself into believing, or that comes before acceptance. But then he looks back, and you see that he isn’t lying. You know.
You’re an alien.
“You’re an idiot,” you say instead. You want to throw something at him, as payback. He didn’t have a hard time doing the same to you and you want to return the favor. But the waves still span the distance between you. It’s one of those times where doing nothing might be better than risking everything falling apart.
(Stop lying to yourself.)
For the first time in years, Hajime looks young. Like he’s put off feeling as lost as the rest of you till now, and it’s all hitting him at once.
You sit down in the waves, not caring that you’re in your pajamas, or that the force of the tide threatens to topple your balance. You stare out into the ocean. From far away, the surface looks flat and serene. A jewel-toned dragonfly flitters over the water and disappears from sight. Soon enough, Hajime sits down beside you. The finality of the motion gives you courage enough to lean your head against his shoulder. It’s funny; a lifetime, and you’re still finding lines you never dared to cross and questions you weren’t brave enough to ask.
So you don’t ask him why he waited to tell you. You leave out all mentions of America, of Hana-chan, the mother who was real enough to you, and maybe even real enough to him to count. This is because you like to win fair and square, but you’re willing to take the easy way out if you can. That’s why you start out with an answer you already know.
“Do you want to stay?”
You read doubt, and certainty, and hesitation across his brow. “What kind of a question is that, Stupidkawa?”
Interesting. The quivering in your lungs has subsided enough to allow you to tilt your head to the side. He’s predictable like this sometimes. It makes convincing him a little easier. “Then stay,” you tell him. “You could have told me when we met, so I’ll consider it a debt you owe to me. The easiest way for you to make it up to me is to stay.”
Hajime looks at you for a long time. You wonder what he sees. Out here under the grey sky, anything is possible. “That’s blunt.”
“You told me that I should be.” You were afraid, you want to say, that he’d leave if you couldn’t get the words out soon enough. But that’s not the truth. The truth is, you knew he wanted convincing. Hajime wants a compelling argument for what he can do here that he can’t accomplish on Asteroid wherever, and hearing his logic repeated back to him would make him feel better. After all, flirting with the idea of leaving your identity behind (or the source of it) is different than going through with starting anew.
“Damn it,” Hajime says, his voice small.
“You lied again in that letter.”
“Wait—“
“No,” you say, grabbing onto his elbow. Not tightly. As an anchor. “How many people are on this planet?”
When he doesn’t answer, you plow on. “Seven billion people. And how many people do you know? You’d be meeting new people in college, and you’d still have the team. I’d still be there, Iwa-chan, so why don’t you stop fooling around, for once, and realize that this could have all been resolved so quickly if you stopped running away from your decisions?”
The tide has a rhythm. You breathe to it, pacing yourself so that your breath evens out. It’s working, but you’re still flushed red. You can feel the heat spreading across your neck, the remnants of white-knuckled desperation. You know you should wait for an answer, but you can’t stop now. “You wouldn’t be the only one left here, and –“
And you’re out of reasons.
(You can’t name the most important reason of all.)
Still, Hajime knows what you mean. He leans back against you and slings an arm across your shoulders. The additional heat is welcome; even this far into summer, the waters are chilly.
i. A conversation you buried deep in your memory:
“That’s the Lyre,” Hajime says.
You’re six years old and you’re not sure what’s part of your daily fantasies (chasing dragons and rescuing your friends) and what’s reality.
“How come you know so much astronomy?”
“I just do.”
“Oh,” you consider. “That’s cool. What’s that one?”
“It’s dark where you’re pointing, but behind that distance, it’s asteroid 327. I come from there.”
You wait the appropriate time before you laugh, making the right oh-ing and ah-ing noises. Then, more because your mom’s nagging sunk in at some point or another, you ask, “But this is your home now, isn’t it?”
xvi. You don’t remember how that conversation ended.
(It’s been years.)
Possibly Hajime made his excuses and left it at that. Maybe neither of you knew what to say so you resumed all the preoccupations of adolescents. You played with Legos and built skyscrapers of orange and blue tiles. Yet now, as you’re sitting in the sand, your feet and calves immersed in the sea, you think that it ended in something else. Something along the lines of a yes, or an of course.
You’re home, you know.
You close your eyes.
You want to make him proud. The next year when you go your separate ways, you want to surprise him when you meet again. You want him to see you as someone who can be relied on, as a better captain who’s taken a page from his book. Someone who keeps spare bandages and braces in his cabinets in case of emergencies. It doesn’t matter that he’s from outer space. Well it does, but not so much that it affects any of these things.
(The thought is too absurd and sci-fi classic-cheesy to voice.)
But one day you will tell him.
One day, you will all stop moving in your silly orbits of extraneous words and actions; one day you will all learn to say what you mean. One day, you’ll know everything about aliens and pry Hajime for information about your childhood fancies. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, you’ll internalize that you’ve never needed to make things last. They simply will.
For now, there is the world at your feet, and the sand, and tides, and time.