Chapter Text
Kafka notices Himeko the way you notice a song you didn't know you needed — slowly, then all at once.
It was the paint under her fingernails at first. A dark cobalt blue on a Monday, second week of school, a warm earthy shade of red by Thursday, something a mix of green and purple the week after. Kafka then finds herself observing Himeko’s hands; not that she intends to. — the way she holds her pencil too tightly, the way she taps her fingers against the desk when she is thinking too deeply, the way she spreads her palm flat on her sketchbook.
Then the humming. A soft, barely audible, no specific song that Kafka can identify — it was just a continuous low note under Himeko’s breath whenever she is concentrating. It only took Kafka two weeks to notice it and now, she can’t stop noticing. It is, for reasosns she cannot explain, the most comforting sound she has ever heard.
The way Himeko tilts her head when she is looking at something she finds beautiful. Like she is trying to see it from every angle. She has always done this with paintings. Once, in the corridor between third and fourth period, Kafka catches her doing it again with a small crack on one of the vases they made during pottery class, Kafka stops walking entirely for a moment because something about it — the complete unselfconsciousness, the tenderness — hits her somewhere she doesn’t have a name yet.
They sit next to each other in art class for six weeks before Himeko says a single word to her. Kafka has been aware of her every single day during those weeks in the specific way you are aware of something bright in you peripheral vision.
When Himeko finally speaks, it's just: "Your shadows are wrong. Can I show you?"
She is already reaching for Kafka's pencil before the answer comes. Her hand is warm. She smells something like fruity and something sweeter underneath.
Kafka lets her.
"See — the light source is here," Himeko says, leaning over, and her hair falls forward and she tucks it back with one paint-stained hand, "so the shadow has to fall here. Not there. There's no logic to there."
"I wasn't going for logic," Kafka says.
Himeko looks at her for the first time. Really looks — assessing, direct, entirely unabashed. "What were you going for?"
"I don't know yet," Kafka says honestly.
Something shifts in Himeko's expression. Softens, slightly, at the edges. She looks back at the drawing. "Okay," she says. "Fair enough." And she hands the pencil back, and their fingers touch again, and Kafka keeps drawing with her heart doing something complicated in her chest.
That's how it starts.
By the month of November, they are inseparable.
Himeko’s bedroom becomes Kafka’s second home. She learns the geography of it so completely that she could go around with her eyes closed: the stack of sketchbooks by the window, the biggest one with the broken spine that Himeko keeps meaning to fix and never does. The creak of the third floorboard, which Kafka learns to step over automatically, though she is never entirely sure why it matters in a house where Himeko’s parents already know she is there. The light from the sun comes through the small gap of the curtains and hits the posters on the wall at a certain angle that makes them look majestic — somewhat like a stained glass.
She learns everything about Himeko too.
Three shots of espresso in her coffee, always, no extras — Kafka thinks this is excessive and says so on a regular basis, and Himeko ignores her constantly each time. Then, she learns that Himeko cries at nature documentaries but less or never at all at sad films, which Kafka finds fascinating and somewhat formed a half formulated theory about involving something to do with distance and the safety of fiction. She also loves to draw small doodles on her wrists with a blue pen during class — flowers, shapes, sometimes just words — and scrubs the off before the end of class as if she is embarrassed by them, though Kafka has never once seen anyone else tease her for it.
Himeko is scared of being ordinary. This is the thing Kafka understands the most.
She goes through everyday with anxiety, always in her mind that someone might suspect that she may not be enough, who works twice as hard as anyone around them just to stay even with their own self- doubt. She doesn’t know it yet — can’t see it either, the way you can never see the thing you are standing inside — that she is anything but ordinary. That she is, in fact, the only person Kafka has ever met and will spend the next years comparing everyone else to her without fully admitting to herself that she is doing it.
But that comes later. At seventeen, Kafka just knows that she wants to be in whatever room Himeko is in. That her week is organized around the moments they share. That she has started paying attention to music and light and the small details of things in a way she never did before, as if spending time with Himeko has recalibrated something in her — tuned her to a frequency she didn't know existed.
She finds the exact word for it on a Tuesday night in somewhere in late November, lying down on Himeko’s floor with her feet propped on the bed and Himeko above it, both of them listening to a record that Himeko recently purchased and loves and has been trying to get Kafka to love it for days.
The room is warm. The lamp in the corner makes everything in a shade of amber. Outside it is probably cold now. The first real cold of the year, and being inside feels lucky enough. Kafka is now looking at the ceiling, half-listening to the music, half-listening to Himeko hum along the lyrics.
She turns her head and looks at Himeko’s profile — the curve of her jaw, the slight furrow between her brows that means she is deeply immersed by the music, the paint she missed cleaning on her shoulder, crimson red, the size of a thumbprint.
Oh, Kafka thinks. Not dramatically. It was quiet, the way things arrive when they have actually been there for a long time.
It’s her. It’s been her.
She doesn’t say it for two months.
Those two months are their own particular kind of beautiful agony. Kafka carries the knowing around with her like something she has found and doesn't know yet if she is allowed to keep. She watches Himeko and thinks I love you and then thinks don't and then keeps thinking it anyway. She becomes hyperaware of every touch — the casual, unconscious physical ease of close friendship, Himeko's hand on her arm, their shoulders pressed together on the narrow bedroom floor, the way Himeko falls asleep on her sometimes while they're watching something and doesn't apologise when she wakes up, just settles more comfortably, as if Kafka's shoulder is a place that belongs to her.
Maybe it does. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's not a problem at all.
Kafka is seventeen and this is the first time she has felt anything like this and she is terrified and electrified in equal measure, which she is beginning to understand is the specific tax that loving someone exactly this much requires you to pay.
When it comes out, it comes out unexpected.
On a Saturday morning in early January. In Himeko’s kitchen, the winter light coming pale through the window, the kind of light that makes everything looks slightly unreal, somewhat like inside of a snow globe. Himeko is making coffee — three shots of espresso as usual, while Kafka is sitting on the counter doing nothing, just watching her, which she has noticed she does it a lot and has stopped trying to stop herself
The radio is on low volume. Himeko is humming. The coffee machine makes its particular sounds.
Kafka’s chest feels very full. It has been for two months now and she is tired, suddenly, of carrying it alone. It is a lovely Saturday morning and Himeko is there and the light is doing that thing and Kafka is only seventeen and has not yet learned to be careful with herself in the way she will spend the next months — or even years, learning.
"I think I love you a bit," she says.
Like it's nothing. Like it's everything. Like the two are the same.
Himeko goes still. The humming stops. She turns off the coffee machine.
In the silence Kafka thinks: I have made a terrible mistake. I have ruined the best thing I have. I shouldn’t have—
Himeko crosses the kitchen in three steps and takes Kafka's face in both hands and looks at her with an expression so open and certain that Kafka feels the breath leave her entirely.
"I know," Himeko says. "I love you a bit too."
Eight months.
Those are the best eight months of Kafka’s life.
Himeko draws her. Kafka reads to her. They spend afternoons in Himeko’s room with the record player going, not talking, they were entirely comfortable in that silence. They argue about films and agree about music, and sometimes disagree about wether three shots of espresso constitutes a personality or a cry for help, and the argument has been going for months now and neither of them has any intention of conceding,
There is a night in May when they lie on the roof of Himeko's building and watch the city and Himeko says, quietly, looking up: "I think I could be good at this. Loving you. I think I could be really good at it."
"You already are," Kafka says.
Himeko turns to look at her. The city is orange and humming below them. Kafka thinks: I want to remember exactly this. The specific colour of the sky. The way she looks right now. I want to keep this one especially.
She keeps it. She will keep it for the rest of her life.
Then the school year ends.
The distance changes first — Himeko settled at an art school two hours away. Kafka stays in the city, defers her own plans by a year, works and tries not to think about the shape of the space that has opened up in her week. They call every day, then every few days, then when they can. The distance does something to the easy wordless closeness they had — it requires effort, and effort is not the same thing even when you make it willingly.
Neither of them is wrong. Neither of them is careless. They are just eighteen and growing in directions they cannot entirely control, and there is a specific kind of grief in knowing that love is not, on its own, sufficient foundation for a life. That you can love someone completely and still not know how to build around it.
The phone call comes sometime in September. Himeko initiates it. Her voice was careful in the way that means she has been thinking this for a while, maybe rehearsed it a few times, which makes it worse somehow — it shows how seriously she has taken it, how much care she has brought to the ending.
"I don't want to lose you entirely," Himeko says. "I'm terrified of that. But I think— I think right now, trying to hold onto this is making us both—"
"I know," Kafka says. Quickly, before it can be said more plainly. "I know. I feel it too."
A long silence. Both of them breathing.
"I love you," Himeko says. And means it — fully, with everything. Kafka can hear it.
"I love you too," Kafka says.
They hang up.
Kafka sits in her room for a long time afterward. The city outside. The specific quality of September light that will, for years after this, feel like the colour of loss. She is eighteen years old and she has just let go of the most important person in her life.
She keeps Himeko like a pressed flower in a book — something once alive that she is terrified to disturb, terrified to look at too directly in case the looking damages it. She does not delete the number. She does not delete anything. She just closes the book and puts it high on a shelf and tells herself: someday. not now. someday.
Someday takes years more.
She doesn't let anyone get that close again.
It doesn’t happen because she chooses it to. Not deliberately, not in any dramatic way. It unfolds in increments, the way most meaningful things do — slowly, and then all at once. She becomes someone who is easy to like, warm, sincerely attentive, and yet, in some essential way, impossible to reach. She learns how to start things and how to end them before they have the chance to undo her. She keeps people at a careful distance — near enough to feel like connection, far enough that losing them won’t take anything she can’t spare.
She is very good at it. She is good at it for years.
And every so often, in the quiet, she thinks about a Tuesday night and a record playing and amber lamplight and the specific simple clarity of it's her. it's been her. And she feels the shape of what she has been protecting herself from and what she has been protecting herself against, and she understands, distantly, that they are the same thing.
But understanding it and doing something about it are different problems entirely.
She is not ready yet.
She won't be ready for a long time.