Love x 2 (the entire series) [easy navigation on 1st page] Complete

[OTN1]

Chapter 4 of 16

My cell phone rang so much that afternoon that it ran out of battery power and shut down.  I woke up when it was dark outside.  There was knocking at my door.  A man called out my name repeatedly.  The clock read six pm.  I was supposed to have left an hour ago.  I stayed quiet and didn't move.  All my lights were off.  I was hoping the man would think I wasn't home and leave soon. 

My wish was granted.  He left and I felt the silence consume me.  What would I do now?  I was going to miss my flight.  I had directly disobeyed the rules.  I felt like a fugitive.  A fugitive in desperate search of another fugitive.

Where was Miki?

I fell asleep again.  I slept right through until the next morning, waking up with the sun.  I rolled over onto my side and looked at the empty space beside me.  My heart fell.  I had really hoped that it had all been a weird dream.  I could tell, though, that it wasn't.  Everything felt exactly the same.

I grabbed my phone and hooked it up to the re-charger.  I checked my address book, and sure enough, there was no Miki.

I sat cross-legged on my bed for thirty minutes.  I pondered and pondered.  I reviewed everything in my mind, making impeccable mental notes of who had ever spoken to Miki, what Miki had ever done, where she'd worked, where she'd lived...

I spent the rest of the morning writing down my list.  I spent the afternoon calling these people.

Nobody knew who she was.  At first I treaded carefully, making sure to only casually bring up Miki's name. For the last quarter of my list, however, I gave up on subtlety and asked about her outright.  By the time I crossed off the last name from my list, the sun had started to go down.  I was mentally exhausted.

As if knowing that I was idling, Shibata called me.  I frowned and picked up.

"Yes?" I asked.

"Aya, where are you?" she burst out angrily.  "Your boss called me and got on my case about you."

I clutched the piece of paper that held the list of crossed out names.

"Sorry," I mumbled.  "What did you tell him?"

"Nothing, of course.  I said I hadn't heard from you."

I sighed in relief.  Best friends stuck it out for each other, I guess, no matter how insulted they felt.

"Thanks, Shiba-chan," I said gratefully.

"What's going on with you?  Where are you?  Do you need help?" she asked, disregarding my thanks.

"I can't get help from anyone.  Just trust me.  I have to do exactly what I'm doing."

"What are you doing?  Are you searching for someone who doesn't exist?" she asked.  I flared up.

"She does exist," I snapped, "And I'll prove it."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"Aya-chan, are you willing to throw away your work to do that?  You know you can't just quit the Italy project, but if you go back now, there's a good chance you won't face any consequences."

I thought about it, deeply struck by her wording.

She continued, "Can you give up your career for a girl who doesn't exist?"

Put like that, I had no choice.  I was reminded of long ago when I had almost thought my work was more important than Miki.  I didn't want to return to those days.  I was stupid and childish then.  Now I knew exactly what I had to do.

"Yes," I responded.

I knew what I had to do and where I had to go.

"Okay, than," Shibata said quietly.

I felt my heart swell up with love for my friend.  Always supportive until the end. 
"I have a feeling there's more to this than you're letting on, but I won't ask.  You've got to do what you've got to do.  Just be careful."

I had the certified Shiba stamp of "OK".  She was a fantastic friend.

"Shiba-chan, please don't tell anyone about this.  I need to go somewhere far away for a while.  I might be out of touch for some time," I confided in her.

"My lips are sealed," she said worriedly

She told me to drop her a line soon.  I promised to do that at least, and with a thank you and a goodbye, I hung up.

I put on my sharpest clothes, and left my apartment, keeping a low profile in case any of my company's henchmen were waiting in hiding to jump up and drag me off to Italy.  I went to the closest travel agency I could find and bought myself a plane ticket.  If Miki had never existed where I was going, then I'd accept that this was a Miki-less world.

I went back home and re-packed a new bag, including my warmest clothes.  Hokkaido would be cold at this time of year.

[OTN1]

Chapter 5 of 16

The flight was smooth.  I think.  I couldn't really remember it because I was distracted the whole time.  In fact, I was more than distracted.  I was terrified.  I felt like I was on the moon or Mars.  The world without Miki was foreign to me.  Not just because she wasn't there (although that was about ninety-five percent of the reason), but also because everyone was different in that they had none of the same memories as me.

Waiting for the plane, I used the internet on my cell phone and tried to find out about past work that we'd done together.  Gomattou had never existed.  It had just been me and Maki.  Same song, same dance, same outfits, but no Miki.  GAM had never existed.  Instead, Shiba-chan and I had done a lot of duet work, but we had no official name together.  Miki and I had never done our special graduation concert mini-tour together.  I'd done it with Takahashi.  I was scared that someone was going to ask me something about my past, a past about which I knew nothing.

Once I landed in Sapporo, I had to stop and regroup my thoughts.  I stood inside the airport, my bags in hand and no direction in mind.  It was late.  I couldn't make the journey to Miki's hometown.  It was too dark and cold.  I shivered when the doors opened, and I wished I had kept a pair of gloves in my handbag.  They were packed away in my larger bag. 

I finally decided on staying at a hotel for the night and then setting off bright and early the next morning.  I'd only been there a few times, the last time being two years ago, but I remembered how to get there, and if I was really on the ball, I'd be able to find her house.

The hotel was expensive but I didn't care.  I paid for the convenience.  I was hungry, but nothing appealed to me.  I turned out the lights, my stomach growling a little.  I ignored it, which wasn't hard to do.  I had a lot to think about.

I worried about the next day.  What would happen?  Where would I start?  Miki's house, of course.  That was the best place.  But what if she wasn't there?  What if the house didn't exist?  The thing that really made me anxious was this: what would I do if I couldn't find her?  I had told myself that I would accept the world as it was if Miki wasn't in Hokkaido, but could I really?  I didn't think I could.

I fell asleep worrying about these things and my dreams reflected this.

I woke up the next morning in a cold sweat, breathing hard and gripping the sheets tightly.  Habit had me curled up on one side of the bed, the other side empty.  And I cried for the first time since I found myself thrust into a Miki-less world.  I cried because I was so scared, and I cried because I missed her.  I didn't know if she'd ever come back, and this was suddenly hitting me now.  What made it even more painful was that nobody knew who she was, so they understood neither what I was missing nor the extent of my sadness.

I may as well have been travelling to the Arctic in a summer dress and sandals.  In fact, I felt like I'd have a better chance surviving there than I'd have trying to find Miki here.  It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but there was no guarantee that there was actually a needle in the stack.

I finished crying and got ready to leave.  It wasn't going to be easy, but I sucked it up and left the warmth of the hotel.  To be perfectly honest, though, I hadn't felt warm since the night before Miki had disappeared.  Something cold lay in my gut and I couldn't get it out.  Like a cancer, it grew inside me and threatened to freeze my entire body and mind.

Why was she so important to me?  I asked myself this over and over, and each time, my answer was "she just is".  There was no one reason.  I tried to snap myself out of my funk and get myself to realise that one person should not have such a huge effect on me, but maybe Miki had become too much a part of me to be able to do that.  It was like I was telling myself a joke by saying I shouldn't hurt so much.  The more I thought about it, the more I thought about the things that I loved about her, and the more it made me miss her.

Nobody else could make me laugh so much.  Nobody else could annoy me so much by being so cute and silly.  Nobody else knew exactly what I was thinking when sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was thinking.  Miki had an incredible range of feelings and countless sides, some of which I was still in the process of discovering.  I had known her for almost a decade, and yet once in a while, she still managed to surprise me.

This time she'd surprised me by pulling the perfect disappearing act.  All these memories and feelings - they couldn't possibly be dreams or delusions.  They were as real as the bags I carried.  As real as the old, rickety train that I was going to board.

The trip to Miki's hometown took me almost two hours and involved a few train transfers.  I was nervous the whole time, and I almost started to cry from the stress.  I could feel my jaw locking up.  I started to panic.  If I overstressed myself, I'd have to go and see a doctor, and that would not be good.  I wanted to lay low and not let anyone know where I was.  It was a bit difficult when you were famous and your face was plastered all over the country's walls and billboards, but I had to try.

I fell asleep on the train and had the most confusing dream.  All that I remembered from it was a boat, sweet-smelling smoke, me yelling my sister's name, and the overwhelming feeling that some disaster had happened.  When I awoke with a jerk, I felt that if I didn't find Miki, bad things would start to happen to everyone I loved.  Maybe they'd all disappear one-by-one, erased off the face of the planet without the dignity of being remembered.  I bit my lip and kept composed in front of the handful of people on the train.

Finally, the train reached Takikawa station.  I gripped my bags tightly and got off at an almost abandoned platform.  I'd never been there alone before.  Hopefully the next time I set foot in this station, it would be with good news.  Or with Miki.

I went outside to brave the cold streets alone, terrified, but determined.

[OTN1]

Chapter 6 of 16

The very first thing I did was find a cheap hotel to stay in.  Upon my asking, the front desk said that since it was out of season so the place was nearly empty and I'd have no problem extending my stay at the last minute.  I settled for three nights, after which I'd either find another place to stay or extend my stay... or leave.

I was given the key to my room and I was able to go up before check in time.  It was a very simple room.  A tiny bed, a television set, and a bathroom.  Not much room to move around in, but I didn't need much.  I'd be out most of the time.  I quickly unpacked some of my things and changed into warmer clothes.  I then set out.  I was going to find Miki's house.

I wandered around the town for over two hours.  It seemed to be devoid of anyone under the age of sixty.  Since it was a workday, everyone was off at their companies or restaurants or schools, while the old, retired people were left to wander around town and putter about.  This was good for me because none of them recognised me.  I could go about my business in peace.

At just past one o'clock, I found Miki's neighbourhood.  I'd taken some wrong turns, so while the town was quite small, getting lost made it seem quite big.

At half past the hour, I found the Fujimoto residence.  Or at least the Fujimoto residence of my memories.  The nameplate read "Saito".  I tried not to break out into hysterics, but it was really hard to do that.  When your best friend's family home suddenly didn't exist anymore, things got a little hopeless.  I circled the neighbourhood countless times looking for the Fujimoto nameplate that I remembered.  I couldn't find it anywhere.

I grew more and more hopeless and I decided to give up while I still had a thread of sanity left.  I walked away slowly.  I spent the rest of the day walking.  I probably covered the majority of the town.  It wasn't very big.  I recognised some things - shops, restaurants, and parks that I'd visited before - but no Miki, no Fujimoto family members.  In a town of just less than fifty-thousand, it wasn't a great surprise.  However, I'd been silently hoping that I would run into someone familiar who could give me a clue as to Miki's whereabouts. 

It began to grow dark, and I started to feel hungry.  I hadn't eaten anything in a long time, and my hunger was getting to the point where I was in pain.  I felt faint and my stomach began to growl ferociously in protest against my refusal to stop and eat.  It hit me like a wave, and I almost fell over.

Clenching my teeth, I dragged myself down the street and to the first restaurant that I saw.  It was just past six o'clock.

The outside of the restaurant looked plain.  There was something almost dodgy about it, but I didn't care.  I needed food.  The inside was surprisingly warm and light.  It looked friendly and not at all like what the front of the building had suggested.  The only somewhat negative point was that there was nobody in the room save for an older woman sitting behind the counter.  She reminded me of my late grandmother, and I felt a twang in my heart as I remembered the dear old woman whom I'd loved so much.

"Welcome," the woman greeted me, standing up politely.

I greeted her with a warm smile and took a seat at the counter.  I picked up a menu and ordered the first thing I saw - an eggplant and ginger stir fry.  It sounded like it could be whipped up quickly.  The woman set off to prepare it after bringing me a glass of water.  I drank half the glass and felt sick as it poured into my empty belly.  I decided not to drink anything else until my food came.

I watched the woman out of the corner of my eye.  She moved slowly, and I wondered if she worked alone.  As if in response to my question, someone walked out of the backroom.  It must have been her husband.  He looked about her age and carried himself with the familiarity of that of a husband.  I could instantly tell that he was a friendly man.  I noticed him smile when he saw me.  He went over to the grandmother and muttered something to her.  She responded.  He picked up a squash and went back where he came from.  I continued to watch the cooking process.

It took longer than expected.  I caved in and drank more water, although this time it didn't shock me like the first few gulps had.  My food came just in time to prevent me from gnawing off my own arm, and I dug in ravenously.  After the first bite, I cried out that it was delicious.  Grandma looked pleased and thanked me.  I had never eaten something so tasty.  Then again, I could have been eating raw asparagus and I would have been happy as a clam.  Hunger really was the best sauce.

I was about halfway through my meal when the outside door slid open violently, sending a loud crash sound reverberating throughout the tiny restaurant.  It also managed to freak me out of my mind.  I didn't jump, but I jerked up and dropped a chopstick on my plate.

"I'm sorry I'm late!!" a girl's voice practically yelled.

I choked on a bit of eggplant after trying to gasp.

Long, messy, brown hair, my height, half-closed eyes, hastily done makeup, clothes thrown on in a rush... Miki.

That last word stuck in my mind.

Miki was standing at the entrance of the restaurant where I was eating.  She was messy, sweating, trying to breathe at a normal pace, and a little skinnier than I remembered her, but she was undoubtedly Miki.  I just knew.

My jaw dropped open, but I quickly closed it before all my half-chewed food fell out.

How??  What??!

Miki didn't seem to notice me at all, though, and she launched into a panicked rant.

"I swear I just meant to take a twenty minute nap.  I didn't mean to sleep past-" she went on and one, making up every excuse under the moon.

My eyes were practically bulging out of my sockets, and I was ready to scream something out loud (although I have no idea what.  Probably a mess of random syllables and unintelligible noises).

"It's okay," Grandma said simply, cutting Miki off with a smile.

The girl's shoulders relaxed, and she stopped talking a mile a minute.  She shrugged her jacket off and turned to see me for the first time.  I thought she would look surprised, maybe run at me and hug me and ask me what happened... but nothing of the sort occurred.  She hardly acknowledged me.  She gave me the barest hint of a nod and then moved off behind the counter to put on an apron while I sat there gaping.

What the hell was going on?!

This had to be Miki.  She didn't just look like her.  She was her.  But somehow she didn't know who I was.

I looked down at my food.  Eggplant.  An eggplant was an eggplant.  I knew that from experience.  I'd seen an eggplant once, and from that point on, I knew what an eggplant looked like.  Miki was Miki.  I'd met Miki once, and from that point on, I knew who Miki was.  It was simple.

I was so distracted that when someone appeared beside me, I almost jumped again.

"More water?" Miki asked.

I looked up at her and nodded dumbly.  My behaviour didn't phase her, and she poured me a new glass of water.  She moved off behind the counter and started to clean up the mess of eggplant remains.  I kept an eye on her, occasionally poking at my food to make it look like I was still eating.

The old woman left the front room after ten minutes, telling Miki to take care of things while she went into the back to help Gramps.

It was just me and Miki.  I couldn't hear any of my thoughts because there were three trillion of them playing at the same time.  It sounded like radio static.

I watched Miki's every move.  She had sat behind the counter on a stool, and she was reading a big book.  Once in a while, she looked up to see if I needed anything, and then continued reading.  When she did this, I quickly looked away and pretended to be observing the decorations in the room.  Then I would go back to staring at her once she'd become engrossed in her book.

She looked very tired.  As if she hadn't slept the night before.  And she was definitely skinnier.  Not enough so that just any person would notice, but I arguably knew her better than anybody else, so I could tell.  I kept staring until she put her book down and stood up.  I quickly refocused my eyes on my meal and forced myself to eat a bite.  I heard her walk up to me.

"What?" she asked.

I had thought that she would refill my water and then leave.  I hadn't expected her to confront me like that.  I began to sweat.

"Huh?" I shot back at her weakly.

Instead of backing off, she took a seat beside me, and I wondered if she liked to intimidate all of the customers.  No wonder the place was empty.

"What is it?  You keep staring at me," she elaborated.

Her voice didn't sound offensive or challenging.  She sounded simply curious.  Not any more curious than I was, however.  I had so many questions.

"I, um-" I stuttered, "-you look like someone I know."

The lamest excuse in the history of time.  If I'd been a man, she would rolled her eyes and shot down a line like that.

"Really?" she asked with a bored look.

Her voice belied her interest, however.  She wanted to know more.

"Really," I replied unnecessarily.

There was a pregnant pause in our conversation.  I hummed one of my songs in my head, replacing every lyric with the word "awkward".

"Sorry," she finally said.  "It's the first time that someone like you has come here."

She looked away nonchalantly and scratched at her nose.

Someone like me?  What was that supposed to mean?

"Someone like me?" I asked with a frown.

She looked at me with a strange expression.

"Yeah.  Someone like you," she repeated.

"What does that mean?" I asked, genuinely confused and wondering if I should be offended.

"Well, maybe you didn't notice," she started tentatively, "but you are kind of famous.  Right?  Or did I mistake you for...?" she trailed off.

Oh my god.  Of course.  She knew who I was.  But to her I was a celebrity, not a friend.  This cruel, cosmic joke was going on far too long.  I wanted to scream out to the sky for it to stop.

"Oh," I said, looking down disappointedly.  "Yeah.  Me."

"It's a bit hard not to recognise you when I see your face six times a week on our fridge," she shrugged, gesturing towards the refrigerator behind the counter.

I looked and was surprised to see an old tea advert that I'd done years ago.  The edges of the picture were a little yellowed with age, but the face was intact.

"Oh," I said with surprise.

Miki stood up and backed off a bit.

"Um, sorry to disturb you," she said quickly, moving away. 

She'd most likely taken my disappointment as an indication of me not wanting to talk.

"No, it's not- um, a problem.  I was just surprised.  I haven't seen those pictures in a long time," I said quickly.

There was another awkward pause.  Miki smiled warily and headed back behind the counter to wipe what was most likely an imaginary dirty spot off the counter while I tried to think of a way to keep talking to her.

"So what about you?" I asked into the silence.  "What is someone like you doing here?"

She stopped "cleaning" and looked over at me with her eyebrows furrowed in the cutest way that made me want to squeal and hug her.  Had she been my regular Miki, I would have.  However, it was quickly sinking in that this girl in front of me was not the Miki I knew.  Maybe it was true that everyone in the world had a twin.  Maybe this was an unrelated girl?

"What do you mean someone like me?"

I shrugged.

"You don't look like the type to work in a restaurant."

She shrugged back.  We did a lot of shrugging that day.

"I go to school.  I have to make money somehow."

She went to school?  What school?  What was she studying?  Why so late?  She was twenty-five already.  Shouldn't she have finished school by that age?

"School?" I asked.

It didn't strike me as weird to be asking someone who was supposedly a complete stranger these questions.  My curiosity outweighed my social etiquette.

"Yeah.  School.  I'm a part time university student," she explained just as two customers walked in.

She gave me an apologetic look as she went to tend to them, give them water, taking their orders, and so on.  I stared in front of me as she bustled around.  She finally called for the elderly woman to help her with the cooking, and I watched amazedly as Miki chopped up meat like an expert and did all sorts of fancy things with it that my own mother couldn't even do. 

This couldn't be Miki.  Not my Miki.  My Miki couldn't cook that well.  My Miki didn't have the patience to study at university.  And yet her attitude, mannerisms, and looks were exactly the same.  She was laid back, not afraid to talk to strangers (which I unfortunately was to her)...

I wanted to wait until things slowed down at the restaurant, but they only got busier as more customers came in.  I had to eat and get out of there, or else I'd be there all night.  Frustrated with my situation, I stood up and went to pay the bill.  As my poor luck would have it, Miki was off somewhere doing something, so the woman rang up my bill.  I thanked her and tried to prolong my stay, but I had to eventually leave.

I stepped out of the restaurant, dejected and in a state of disbelief.  I had found Miki, but everything had been out of my control.  There was nothing I could do but try again later.  The next day.

Or maybe I could wait until later in the evening.  Maybe if I stayed outside and waited for all the customers to leave, I could go back in under the pretence of... of...

I thought hard.  What sort of non-creepy excuse could I use to go back in there to see Miki again?  I could pretend I'd forgotten something.  The old tried and true method.  I'd do that.

But I couldn't stand still and wait outside.  My warm Kansai blood was starting to freeze up.  I went for a long walk.  For the whole time I threw out theory after theory in my head.  I was certain that I had gone crazy.  It had to be true.  There was no way this could happen.  There was no other reasonable explanation.  I must have bumped my head really hard somewhere at some point and wound up in this world.  Maybe like that girl in that American movie about scarecrows and lions.  The name eluded me at that moment, but I could remember that the girl had travelled to a colourful world and had journeyed all around it, only to wake up back at home and find out that it had all been a dream induced by a bump on the head.  The same must have been happening to me.  I was dreaming and would wake up soon.  Maybe Miki would wake me up and I'd be able to tell her all about this silly dream.

But I knew this wasn't true either.  It felt too real.  I pinched my skin.  It hurt and left a white mark on my arm for a few seconds.  I shoved my hands into my pockets in order to stop myself from repeatedly pinching myself to see if I'd wake up.  I'd mutilate myself if I kept it up.

The streets were deserted, but I felt no danger.  I kept up my brisk walk so that I'd stay warm.  It lasted for an hour.  I ended up back at the restaurant.  I didn't want to go in because I was sure it was still full.  I tried to peek in through the frosted glass of the door, but I had no luck.

Just then, I heard movement coming from the alleyway.  A can was knocked over and there was the sound of rustling plastic.  Alarmed, I looked to my side and took a step back.  Out from the alleyway walked Miki.  She was carrying two bags of trash.  She noticed me immediately and let out a surprised "oh."  She crossed the street, dropped the trash off in the collection area, and then came back to me.  I stood there, my hands in my pockets, absolutely still.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

That was a Miki-ish thing to do.  Get straight to the point.

"I, uh-"

I was going to lie and say I'd dropped my wallet somewhere, but I found I couldn't stand lying to someone who acted and looked so much like Miki.

"I wanted to say thanks," I continued.  "For the meal and for the chat."

I sounded like the world's biggest moron, but was slightly comforted when she smiled.

"You're welcome, although all I did was pour water for you and annoy you by recognising you."

We stood there silently.  She wiped her hands on the butt of her jeans and I crinkled my nose in distaste.  She should really wash her hands after taking the trash out...

"As for your question about what a person like me is doing working at a place like this," she continued.  "The answer is that it's actually a family friend's restaurant.  These folks are friends with my grandparents, so they let me have a job to help me pay my way through university."

One thing that struck me odd about this girl was that she was being too open with me.  The Miki I knew wouldn't talk to strangers like this.  But I wasn't going to complain.  If she wanted to talk to me, I wanted to listen.  I wanted to know if she was the Miki I knew.  Or part of her.

"What's your name?" I asked out of the blue.

"Fujimoto," she answered without blinking.  "Miki."

"Nice to meet you.  I'm... well, you know," I said in a defeated tone.  She laughed loudly.

"Nice to meet you, Matsuura-san."

There was more silence.  This silence was really getting to me.

"Miki-chan!" came a low, muffled voice.  "We need some help."

It was Gramps.  Miki smiled in apology for the second time that day.

"Duty calls," she said, ducking away.

"Oh, wait," I said before she went back inside.

She turned around and looked at me questioningly.

"You live in this town, right?"

"Yeah."

"Can you recommend some things around here that I can do now?" I asked, desperately trying to keep her outside for any extra time I could manage.

She thought hard.

"No," she finally said.

My face dropped.

"But if you want, I can show you some things tomorrow.  That is if your schedule's not full.  It's a little hard to get around this town when you don't know anything about it."

Never would I have guessed that I would hang out with this strange, otherworldly Miki.  I had a feeling it was a bad idea, but I nodded.

"That would be great of you to help me.  I have nothing on my schedule.  At all," I assured her.

Miki studied me closely.  Did she believe me?  Why was she offering to hang out with me?

"Well, then.  Meet me here at eleven tomorrow," she said, and without waiting for my answer, she turned on her heels and went inside the restaurant.

That evening I returned to the hotel even more frazzled than I'd been upon my arrival that morning.  Nothing made sense.  I had found a Miki who didn't remember me.  A Miki that was almost the exact same Miki, but with some key differences.

And despite the fact that it was clear she was not the Miki I knew, I found myself helplessly and utterly nuts over her.  Spellbound in the most pleasant, scary, stomach-tingling way.

[OTN1]

Chapter 7 of 16

I barely slept that night, and when I finally did manage to fall asleep, I had a nightmare.  It had nothing to do with Miki directly, but musings of the subconscious were almost always entirely symbolic.  For all I knew, the desk in the room in my nightmare could have been a metaphor for Miki as an ever-present, stable presence in my life (which, up until recently, I had always believed), although I had a little difficulty figuring out what meaning being kidnapped by Swedish pirates had.

I woke up at eight the next morning.  I felt as though I hadn't slept at all.  I took my time getting ready, making sure I was warm enough before heading out.  I dropped into a small restaurant for some breakfast before going to the restaurant I'd been to the previous night.  I was fifteen minutes early, so I stood in front of the closed door, eventually resorting to pacing out of boredom and chilliness.  Miki was ten minutes late.  She arrived on her bicycle, breathing hard and sweating from exertion.

"Sorry I'm late!" she called out the moment she was within shouting range.

This certainly sounded familiar.

"Don't worry," was my response as she pulled up beside me and got off her bike.

If she had been the normal Miki, I would have (playfully) cussed her out for making me wait in the cold.  But she was not the Miki I knew, so I reigned in any comment which could have been seen as either rude or flirty.

She parked her bike in front of the restaurant.

"How long have you been here?" she asked me when she'd locked up.

"Not long," I replied, playing down my twenty-five minute wait.

"Good."

Another one of our pauses.

"So, what are you interested in seeing?" she asked awkwardly.

"Um..." I trailed off.

What was I into?  I had no idea how to answer that question.  I hadn't been real sightseeing in a long time, especially not in such a tiny town.  When the other Miki and I had been here before, we'd skipped most of the touristy things since she was a native of the place.  I got to see another side of the town that tourists (which numbered in the few anyway) didn't.

"Anything," I finally said.

Miki shifted uncomfortably.

“I don't know where to take you.  I mean... well, what are you doing here in Takikawa?  Do you want to see something related to that?" she asked, quickly adding, "Um, but if you're under contractual obligation not to tell me any information, that's okay.  I understand."

"I'm not here for work," I said, surprising her.  "Personal reasons.  Vacation."

Looking for you.

"Then... that leads us back to the question: what do you want to do here?"

This was all too weird.  A little too perfect.  I'd found Miki in a restaurant and she'd offered to act as my personal tour guide the next day.  What kind of messed up, over-trusting, perfectly-revolving world had I been thrown into?

"Why are you doing this?" I asked suddenly.

I really had no control over what I said when I was around Miki, and this had apparently not changed.

"Why are you taking a complete stranger on a tour of your hometown?"

Miki looked at me and then looked away thoughtfully.  If she was like my Miki, this meant she was thinking of how to correctly phrase what she wanted to say.

"You're not a total stranger," she started.  "I kind of admire you."

This hit me hard.  She admired me?  So that meant she listened to my music and followed my work?  In a way this was good, but it was also terrible.  I didn't want her to think of me as someone different or beyond her.  Someone unreachable or perfect.  I wanted to be approachable, a friend on her level.

"And my weekdays are so boring that I would honestly risk doing this rather than study."

I laughed.  One thing was for sure: this Miki was just as honest as the other one.

"I hope I'm not keeping you from any important work," I said apologetically.

Miki waved her hand.

"Nothing I can't do later.  I don't have class till Thursday," she reassured me.

I started to loosen up and feel more comfortable.  I just had to pretend that I'd never met this person before.  Then I could be myself.  Of course her face and her gestures were distracting because she was entirely Miki in those respects.

"So," I asked aloud.  "What are you studying that you hate so much?"

"Oh.  That.  Economics with a side of bookkeeping," she replied with distaste.

I blinked.  Miki and economics mixed as well as mushrooms, strawberries, and cream. That was to say, not at all.  And bookkeeping?  I wondered what she was planning to do.

"I guess I'll work as a bookkeeper for some business.  Maybe my parents' restaurant once they retire," she went on.

I was surprised, but I thought it through.  With her cooking skills (the ones that I'd witnessed the previous night) coupled with her ability to manage her accounts, she could take over her parents' business and make it really successful.

I stared at this girl in front of me and wondered how many more surprise layers she was going to shock me with.  I started to wonder about her history.  How much of it did she share with the Miki I knew?  How much was different?  Why didn't her family live in the same house?  Was her favourite meal still yakiniku?  Did she have that cute little freckle on her tummy, just above her belly button?  What had she done all those years between high school and university?  Where had she travelled?  Did she still love animals?

"I see," was all I could really say in response to her statement.

That brought an end to that topic.

"I'm going to ask you a third time: where do you want to go?"

This time I blushed.  I wasn't usually this indecisive, but I had a lot on my mind.  I came up with a hasty reply.

"Just take me somewhere touristy."

She thought for a second, shrugged, and then walked off in a direction.  I followed quickly.

"So?" I asked.

"There's a history museum a few blocks away.  I'm taking you there," she replied  in an almost brusque manner. 

A history museum?  I tried not to gag at the thought.  The last thing I wanted to do was to spend a boring hour inside a dull museum looking at pictures of people about whom I knew nothing.  However, I didn't want to offend this Miki and her choice.  If she recommended a museum, we'd go to the museum.  My goal was to find out as much about her as possible.

I hushed up and walked by her side, trying to think of a conversation starter.  There was no need to.  She was talkative enough.

"Do you have family here?" she asked. 

"I, um, I used to," I said.

It wasn't a lie.  I considered Miki a part of my family, and since the one that I knew seemed to be missing, it was safe to say that I used to have family in this town.

"Oh.  I guess you never visit them much."

"Not much."

Painful silence was quickly becoming a theme for us.  Or rather for me.  I bet I felt more uncomfortable than she did.  I wanted to ask her so much, but I didn't want to get overly personal.  I didn't know where to draw the line because I never drew a line with Miki.  Or at least I hadn't needed to for many years.

"What do you do for fun around here?" I tried.

"Fun?  Well, not much.  I either stay in and watch DVDs or go and hang out with friends in the evening after work.  Laugh, eat drink, sing..."

She didn't sound too thrilled.  It probably got tedious after a while.

I tried to imagine what her friends were like, but I couldn't get an image in my head.  Her friends in Tokyo were all over the chart, no two alike.  It didn't really fit her image since she was essentially a very laid back, calm, almost lazy girl who didn't seem the type to make the effort to go out and meet a whole slew of people (and I meant that in the nicest and most loving way).  I assumed the selection was smaller in Takikawa, but if this Miki was at all a Miki, she'd have chosen the most diverse group of people she possibly could.

"What about you?  I mean, when you have any free time," she laughed.

She knew I was very busy.

"The same thing.  I have this friend," I took a deep breath, feeling weird talking about her in front of herself (far too confusing), "and we usually hang out and do boring stuff when we have time off."

"I guess an idol doesn't get to experience normal life, huh?" she asked.

I couldn't bear to have her thinking of me as some superhuman entertainer anymore.

"Please don't do that," I said.

She looked alarmed and I quickly clarified.

"Don't think of me as an idol.  I'm a regular girl.  I just want to make friends and be normal."

Miki stopped walking and I passed her by a few steps before reacting and stopping.  I looked back and silently wished that she'd start walking again because I was cold.

"Sorry," she said abruptly.  "I shouldn't do that.  You're absolutely right.  You're no different from me."

And that was when I truly relaxed.  I smiled and told her it was okay. 

We then became involved in a discussion about me.  Just to stroke my ego a little more.  I found out that when she was younger, she'd listened to my music.  That matched up with the other Miki. 

Over the next few hours, I slowly pieced together this Miki's history.  By the time we'd gotten through the museum I found out that this Miki's history was not similar to the history of my Miki.

It was identical. 

Right down to her junior high school pet goldfish's nickname and cause of death, everything she told me up to her turning seventeen was exactly how I had heard it told before.

Seventeen was when things started to veer away from her history as I understood it.  The major turning point?  The Morning Musume audition.  She confided in me that she'd been prepared to go.  I asked her why she hadn't.

"I got sick that day.  Freak bug.  Twenty-four hour influenza.  I missed my shot.  Not like I could have gotten in anyway," she said with a chuckle.

"No, that's totally not true," I blurted out.

She smiled at me, taking my words for polite encouragement.  According to her, I'd never heard her sing or seen her dance.

"So here I am, stuck in this aging village.  Did you know our population has steadily decreased since the beginning of Heisei?"

I shook my head uninterestedly and got her talking about her life after her failure to make it to the audition.  From what I could piece together, her family had moved houses after it was decided she'd live at home and commute to university.  They had not foreseen, however, Miki missing her entrance exam.  Twice.

"I slept in the first time.  That was really stupid of me," she laughed, obviously having gotten over it by this point.  "But the next year, I woke up two hours earlier than I had to.  I think that was my undoing."

"Why?  What happened?" I asked, completely captivated by the tale.

Miki trying to take an exam for university?  Weird.

"It meant that I caught the train at rush hour, and when I stepped off the train, I was so off balance from the crowds pushing into me that I tripped on the platform, fell into a salaryman and then onto the ground.  I broke my leg in three places and sprained my wrist."

I looked into her eyes to see if she was making it up.  She looked deadly serious.  The corner of my mouth twitched upwards.

"Are you joking?" I asked uncertainly.

"If I'm joking, then tell me why I'm reliving the memory of the pain right now," she grumbled.

I winced and wondered just how painful it must have been.

"Anyway," she continued, smiling to show that she wasn't angry, "treatment cost my parents an arm and a leg, so I had to find a job and then go to university only part time.  That's why I'm not finished yet."

"Well, at least you passed the entrance exam eventually and got in, right?" I said optimistically.

She guffawed.

"You really are optimistic!"

"One of my numerous charm points," I said, turning my nose up.

She rolled her eyes, and I lost myself in that moment as things between us returned to normal.

I fell out of that cloud quickly enough, though, and I returned to prying into her life after seventeen.  We talked about dreams and what we had wanted to be when we were young.

"I always wanted to be a singer," Miki laughed.

While I already knew that was the answer she was going to give, I couldn't stop something in my heart from breaking.  She'd missed out on her chance once.  She should have been able to do it, but luck had not been with her that day.

We left the museum and went to get some lunch.  I couldn't even remember what we had seen.  Ancient pottery?  Dinosaur bones?  I didn't care.  I was busy reconstructing Miki's past.  For the first time since being thrown into this world, I wondered if that was the right term - thrown into "this world".  What if this was the real world?  It was too real to keep dismissing as wrong.

After lunch, Miki took me around outside.  The scenery was stunning.  The skies were clear so that we could see the mountains perfectly.  The leaves that remained on the trees had turned red and yellow and were constantly falling, blowing in the wind.  The air was clean.  I couldn't ask for a better vacation from the stuffy, dirty capital and my stressful job.

The day ended too quickly.  While crossing some famous bridge (or at least to the local people it was famous), Miki checked the time and let out a string of expletives that surprised even me, and that was saying a lot.  I was used to her sometimes losing control and speaking her mind crudely.

"I was supposed to be at work an hour ago," she said by way of explanation.

We ran back into town.  It took fifteen minutes.  Luckily we were both in shape, I from my constant dance training, her from being a small town country girl who rode a bicycle and took lots of walks (or so I guessed).

Once we reached the restaurant, we exchanged contact information and said goodbye.  I thanked her for showing me around town, and she told me that if I ever came back in the dead of winter, she'd have to give me the outdoor tour because it was supposedly beautiful when the snow had fallen.  She quickly went inside as I walked away wondering what sort of excuse she was going to use for being late.

I dropped by a convenience store before going into the hotel and picked up something to drink and some snacks.  I wasn't very hungry.  I was on an excitement overload.  I had found Miki, and maybe it was almost the same Miki that I knew.  She seemed a bit less jaded, a little more trustworthy and open. Yet at the same time I could sense something under her skin, close to the surface but not showing.  Something that maybe wasn't so happy and carefree.  Something that she was worried or upset about.

I wanted to get to the bottom of it.  My mission slowly morphed from one to find Miki to one to figure out the Miki I had found.  I believed I had all the time in the world to do this, so that's what I would do.

[OTN1]

Chapter 8 of 16

I woke up the next morning to find an e-mail that had been sent to me late at night after I'd gone to bed.

What are you doing tomorrow?

It was from Miki.  I replied quickly that I was doing nothing.  I asked her if she had an idea.  Twenty minutes later, my phone rang.

Meet me in the same restaurant at 3:20

I wondered what we'd possibly do at the restaurant.  I hadn't thought it was open that early.  I sent back an "OK" message.

I spent the day walking by myself and doing some sightseeing around town.  I found a science museum for children that had recently been re-opened after a few years of redesigning.  It kept me entertained for quite a few hours, although I felt a bit lonely.  There was a group of elementary school children with their teachers on a field trip, some elderly couples, and a handful of young couples around my age.  Everyone had someone.  Everyone except me.

At a quarter to three, I left and headed for the restaurant.  When I walked in, I was greeted by a Miki wearing an apron, her hair tied back loosely.  She looked like she was ready to do some serious cooking.

"Let's cook!" she said cheerfully to me.

I wondered if I'd been thrown into yet another world because I had never seen or heard Miki act like this before.

"What?" I asked.

She rounded the corner and came up to me, handing me a light blue apron.

"Don't worry, we have permission.  I do this a lot.  Usually Inaba-baachan joins me," she explained.

"Wait.  We're going to just cook for fun?" I asked.

"Why not?" Miki asked, a twinkle in her eyes.  "Of course we've got to eat anything we cook.  It'll be our dinner, so you'd better be good."

Oh, I was good.  I'd show her.

I laughed, took the apron graciously, and put it on.  I washed my hands and we began to cook and chat.

I was a good cook.  Miki was better.  It wasn't a natural ability, but it was a well-learned and practiced one.  I supposed that all the time she didn't devote to being an idol she used to learn how to cook.

Our conversation wasn't complex and involved.  It was casual, calm, slow-paced.  We talked about some of our interests, and I found that yakiniku was indeed this Miki's favourite food.

We were in the final throes of a delicious-looking mushroom risotto when Inaba-baachan walked in.  She saw Miki first and greeted her.  Then she saw me.

"Oh, you girls are friends?" she asked, surprised.

Miki laughed.

"We just met the other day when she came to the restaurant."

"I see.  That's nice," Baachan said pleasantly, and she began to clean up without any further questions.

Miki and I finished our risotto and then helped to clean up.  Once done, we spooned the food out into three bowls and sat down to enjoy our meal.  It was the best risotto I had ever tasted in my life, and I felt proud that Miki and I had made it together.  It just went to show that no matter what dimension Miki came from, she and I still made a great team.

When the first customers came at six-fifteen, I left, bidding my two new friends good night.  I walked home slowly, barely noticing the cold air.  I felt good.  I felt like this had been a brief interlude in the drama of my life.  We'd cooked, eaten, and said good night.  Nothing more complicated than that.

I got back to my hotel at seven and I went to the reception desk.  I extended my stay for another week.  I couldn't leave.  Not yet.

[OTN1]

Chapter 9 of 16

My stay lasted much longer than one more week.  I went out and got a better, cheaper hotel to stay at.

Four weeks passed.  Miki and I hung out, ate, drank, cooked, and chatted together throughout this time.  Baachan often joined us in our cooking, and the three of us became a powerful and efficient kitchen unit.  Nothing ever went wrong when it was the three of us.

It eventually started to snow heavily.  In fact, this region of Hokkaido had so far received the heaviest snowfall since detailed records began to be kept.  Miki told me I was lucky to be there because the snow made everything perfect.  I felt undecided about that.  On the one hand, I agreed that snow was beautiful, but on the other hand, I hated the cold, especially when my feet got wet and frozen.

After the heavy blizzards (of which we had an unnaturally high number), Miki would take me out to see the snow-covered view.  We often ended up romping around in the snow together, de-aging ourselves by fifteen years by having snowball fights and pushing each other into deep snowbanks.  Miki usually won.  She was always the stronger and quicker one.

I enjoyed the time we spent together just talking.  I learned a lot more about her, filling in the blanks in my memory.  I still struggled with my old memories, but they were slowly becoming less important.  Each time I saw this Miki smile, I was filled with the kind of love I'd felt for the other Miki.   That's how I slowly came to believe that maybe they were the same person.  Two copies of Miki could not exist in the universe.  Only one could.  This one in front of me - the one laughing, her neck swathed in a scarf, nose running from the condensation of her breath - had to be the only one.

As the weeks passed, she began to open up to me, especially starting in the first week of December.  She slowly told me things that I'd suspected: while she was happy in her town with her family, she wasn't entirely satisfied.  She wanted something more.  She needed fast-paced excitement and adventure.  Even though she went at her own, slow pace and didn't like the craziness of the world, she recognised that she needed it to balance everything out.

And then I learned one shocking thing about her.

[OTN1]

Chapter 10 of 16

We were hiking through the hills one Sunday afternoon, talking about winter holiday plans.  Miki asked if I would return home.  I had explained to her earlier part of the real reason why I had come to this place (the reason being that I was escaping from my stressful life and work and that I couldn't go back for a while).  This time when she asked about me returning, I gave her more information.  I confided in her the Italy plans that I'd bailed out on.  Upon thinking about it again, it seemed like that had been much more than just one month ago.  Miki admitted that she'd suspected something like that had happened, but she was surprised at the enormity of the project I'd up and quit right in the middle of.

"I'm always getting slammed for not staying interested in things long enough," I said.

She ssexy beasted.

"I can see that."

We found a solitary sheep's set of footprints and followed them up a hill, wondering if the poor little thing had gotten lost.  When we reached the top of the hill, though, the footprints ended and there was no sheep.  We couldn't find any sheep as far as our eyes could see.  I commented on how mysterious it was.

"Kind of like my boyfriend," Miki laughed.

"Excuse me?" I asked with a polite smile.

I must have heard that incorrectly.

"Oh, I mean, like, I see traces of him, but when the trail to him seems so warm, it always ends cold.  He disappears.  It's like a wild goose chase," she explained.

Oh, this is priceless, I thought.

I began to giggle.  I laughed at myself for ever having thought I could have a chance with this world's Miki. I laughed at this Miki for having a boyfriend who disappeared like that.  I laughed at the guy and even felt sorry for him for having to deal with Miki's quirks, temper, attitude, frankness...

Miki asked what I was laughing about.

"Oh," I said, catching my breath and wiping my eyes, feeling myself going a little insane.  "I just assumed that you were single, but of course someone like you wouldn't be," I explained.

My laughter turned angry in my head.

"I guess I never mentioned him before.  He goes to university in Sapporo, so I don't get to meet him often."

Never mentioned him before, I repeated in my head.

I stopped laughing.  To punish myself for ever thinking that I could win this Miki's heart, I asked her to tell me all about him.  How she met him, where, when, what the status of their relationship was, and so on.

She wasn't so forthcoming with all the details, but I managed to squeeze some out of her.  The two had gone to junior high school together, but they hadn't hooked up until much later.  Next month would be their two year anniversary.

"But he's a bit out there, ya know?" Miki said with a laugh, tapping her head.  "A bit crazy in the head.  I don't know if I could marry him."

I became insanely jealous as Miki explained that he was working on his PhD, that he was a month younger than her, that he played basketball on the university team...

I wanted to find him and knock his teeth out, and I wasn't one to usually get violent.

I tried to quell the fury within me.  The only way to release my energy safely was to start running through the snow.  I took off sprinting down the hill.

"Hey!  Wait!" Miki called out.

"Let's see who's faster!" I yelled over my shoulder.

Miki was the faster runner, but I had anger and disappointment to fuel me on.  We raced with no set finish line, kicking snow up everywhere.  Once we topped our second hill, I started to get tired.  My anger couldn't give me anymore energy.  I stopped suddenly, and Miki, hot on my heels and not ready for it, crashed into me and bowled me over.  I fell to the ground with an "oof!" and she bounced about a metre away, landing on her hands and knees. 

She began to laugh loudly, but I couldn't join her.  I lay on my back, the snow chilling me, wondering what I could do to go back to a time when my life had been perfect.  I heard the snow crunching and turned my head to the side to see Miki crawling over to me with a big grin on her face.

"You're pretty fast," she complimented me.

I shrugged.

"Only because I'm cold," I lied.

She got up and grabbed my forearms, yanking me up before I could do anything to help make it easier.  I caught my balance quickly.

"If you're cold, don't lie in the snow," she scolded me like a mother.

She turned me around and dusted the snow off my back.  One thing I missed terribly was her touch, even if it was through a thick pair of gloves and involved more hitting than caressing.  She was finished too quickly, though, and she hit her hands together to knock the snow off her gloves.  She crossed her arms, inspecting me.

"Maybe we should go back so you can change.  You don't want to catch a cold."

I mumbled that it was a good idea, so we set off for town.  We were silent.  Usually I would have a question or something to ramble about, but I didn't feel like talking to her.  An unreasonable part of me (tiny, albeit existent) was angry with Miki.  That part of me felt a little betrayed by her, even though I knew that wasn't the case.

Miki took my silence as a pensive one.  I noticed that she looked cheerful as we walked over the hills, not bothered by my lack of things to say.  I hoped she wasn't thinking about her boyfriend.

We reached town and stopped off at my hotel.

"I'll wait here," Miki said as she sat herself down in the lobby.

I nodded and left her there, taking the elevator up.

I changed my clothing quickly, but just before going back downstairs, I stopped and looked at the room that had become a home to me.  It was an expensive room.  I'd worked out a deal with the manager of the hotel since I was staying for an extended period of time, but it was still costing me a bundle.  My savings wouldn't last forever.

I couldn't stay here, I decided.  It wasn't the money.  That had nothing to do with my decision.  I had to start thinking about going back because there was nothing for me here.  There was friendship, but I doubted that it could ever mean the same thing for her as it did for me.  We were too old now to share that naïve adoration we'd had for each other when we were teenagers in my warped memories.  We were in our twenties, I had a job, she had a serious boyfriend, and while she said she didn't know if she could marry him, the fact that marriage was an option at all was a huge deal. 

I concluded that even if I didn't leave right away, I had to keep it in mind.  In the meantime, I would make the most of the time I spent with Miki.

I filed my issues away in a cabinet in the back of my mind for later review, and I went back to the lobby with a smile.  Miki asked if we could drop by her house quickly because she also wanted to change.  I agreed that it was a good idea.  I had been to her house a few times in the past month.  A couple of times just briefly to pick something up, and once to eat dinner with her and her parents (out of the Fujimoto siblings, only the youngest, Miki, still lived at home).

We trudged through the snow for half an hour before we reached Miki's house.  She opened the door and let me in.  I took my shoes off and wandered into the living room.  Miki's mother was sitting there reading a magazine.  She said hello and we began to chat like two old friends while Miki dashed to her room to change.

I really liked Miki's mom.  We got a long well because she was fashionable and cool, much like Maki's mom, much like my mom... and not at all like Shiba-chan's mom (lovely lady, but kind of strange).  She was an impressive cook, too.

We chatted, of all things, about the weather.  I told her I had never seen this much snow in my life.  Not even when I'd come to Hokkaido in the winter before.  I told her that Miki had been taking me out to basically play in the snow all afternoon, and she laughed.  She said that when Miki was very young, she'd dragged her and her husband out to play in the snow all the time.  She warned me that if I let myself be dragged out every time Miki called upon me, I'd eventually get exhausted and regret ever having gone out the first time.  I laughed and told her that would never happen.  She sighed about how nice it was to be young.

Miki finished quickly and I said goodbye to her mom, promising to come over for dinner again.  We set off.  The whole Fujimoto residence stopover had seemed like a dreamy interlude.

Baachan was at the restaurant early, so the three of us cooked ourselves dinner.  I was getting used to our cooking time together, and I had surprisingly learned a lot from Miki.  It was during those times that I felt I was living in an impossible world.  Miki the Cook was becoming familiar to me, but I still sometimes felt like it couldn't be true.  It was as if I expected her to cook something bad one day so that I could go, "ah, yes.  That's more like it."

As usual, when the first customers appeared, I left.  I took a walk in the dark and suddenly wondered how much time Miki spent with her other friends.  She didn't talk about them much.  She must have seen them a lot on the days she left Takikawa to go to school.

And that boyfriend of hers.  I wondered about him.  What was he really like?  I wanted to meet him, but then I doubt I'd be very polite to him.  It was better that he stayed in Sapporo rather than returning to his hometown and making me go berserk.  This town didn't need an Aya on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I shook my head and banished all thoughts of him.  I thought about Miki the student.  There was another thing that surprised me.  Her schoolwork.  Not only was she a good cook, but somewhere along the way, she'd developed a bit of book smarts.  She got a lot of reading done on the days she had to go into school, and she never spent too much time on assignments.  Part of it was laziness, but part of it was because she didn't have too much difficulty understanding what she had to do.  She didn't get perfect marks, but she never had moments when she stared at something and had absolutely no idea what to do.  Or at least that's what she told me.  She might have been bragging, but bragging wasn't something Miki tended to do.  I had seen her concentrate on her reading before, and I'd looked over some of her papers that she left on the table in the restaurant.  It all flew right over my head, but she seemed to know what she was doing.

But what really got me was that despite having more intelligence than I ever gave her credit for before, she was still a childish dork who sometimes was too clueless for her own good.  It made me just a bit crazier about her.  Just a bit.

And as I took a bath and got ready for bed, I imagined a perfect world where she was both smart and stupid, sexy as ever, and crazy about me.

[OTN1]

Chapter 11 of 16

Another two weeks passed.  I couldn't bear to tear myself away from this place I'd found.  I sent Shiba-chan a few e-mails to let her know I was well.  She wrote back and told me what was going on in her life, and she worried over how I was doing.  I also sent an e-mail to my manager to tell her I was all right but in the middle of an important family emergency.  She sent me back a serious e-mail saying that if I wasn't back by the end of the month, there would be harsh consequences.  Perhaps even legal action taken against me.

I completely ignored her warning.  Being with Miki was more important than my job.  I would face whatever punishment they dealt me if it meant I could spend one more afternoon cooking with Miki.

Two days before Christmas, I met with Miki.  We went for our usual walk around the hills.  It had snowed two days before, so there was a nice, fresh, thick blanket of powder covering the ground and the trees.

"Any Christmas plans?" I asked, lightly kicking some of the snow up in front of me and watching the breeze carry it away gently.

"Hm.  I'm going to Sapporo to visit Hiroshi for a few days."

The name had taken on the sound of a curse word to me, but I tolerated it.  She didn't talk about him often, and that was fine with me.

"That's nice," I forced myself to say.

"And you?"

"Nothing," I said with a shrug.

"That sounds lonely," Miki stated sadly.

"Actually, it's a nice break," I answered honestly.  "I'm usually working on Christmas.  I haven't had time off in years."

We talked about Christmas for the rest of our hike - from our worst memories to the best place to see illumination to the best Christmas cake we'd ever eaten.

As we talked, the things I had crammed at the back of my mind - my thoughts about leaving - came back to the surface.  It was getting to the point where I had to make my decision.  I had reached an impasse and I saw no light ahead of me.  As a result, I was a bit distracted during our walk back into town.  We went to the restaurant and cooked up a storm, but it didn't seem as exciting to me.

The first customers came early at five-thirty.  Miki saw me out of the restaurant through the back.  As we were saying our goodbyes, I realised I wouldn't see her for four days.  I told her to take care and have fun and to mail me if she had time.  I really did want her to have fun.  I wanted her to have the best Christmas that she could.  Seeing her happy was what was ultimately important.  I turned around to go back to my hotel.

"Wait!" Miki called out.

I stopped.  My heart stopped.  I turned around slowly.  Miki was looking at me excitedly.  I stared at her.

"Wait there a minute.  There's something I forgot to give you."

She ran into the restaurant.  I laughed at myself in genuine amusement.  What had I been expecting?  A sudden confession of love?

Miki came back out holding a plastic bag.  She stuck her arm out and handed it to me.

"It's not much.  It's not even wrapped properly.  But here.  Open it on Christmas day."

I felt light-headed and weak as I took the bag.  She'd bought me a present?  I was touched.  I thanked her very much and gave her the warmest of smiles.

"See you later," she said a bit hastily, probably embarrassed about giving me a gift, and then went into the restaurant to do her job.

I went back to my room with a light heart.

The next day, my mood changed.  I moped for the first half because I pictured Miki getting on a train, travelling to Sapporo, meeting up with Hiroshi, going back to his apartment, him sweeping her up in his arms...

I lay on my bed scowling, staring at the present that sat on the small desk.  I wanted to throw it out without looking at it because whatever it was, it would make me love her more. 

I received a surprise phone call at two-thirty in the afternoon.  It was Baachan.  She asked what I was doing for Christmas Eve, and upon hearing I had no plans, she told me to come down to the restaurant and have dinner with her, her husband, and her son and his wife.  My heart welled up with love, and I almost started to cry, moved by the kindness she showed me.  I said I'd love to go, and she told me to be there at six.  I spent the rest of the day shopping for a small gift to bring.

At six o'clock, I arrived at the restaurant wearing my best clothes, clutching a Christmas cake in my hands.  I had never bought a Christmas cake on the day it was needed.  Like the rest of the country, I had to order. Takikawa was small enough that the lines weren't too long at the stores.  I lucked out.

I greeted the group of people, who had arrived already.  Baachan's son was a young-looking and handsome man, and his wife was equally young-looking and pretty.  In a move that surprised me, Baachan led us behind the counter and pointed to a huge pile of raw ingredients and said, "Let's cook."  We were going to make our Christmas dinner together.

The others were not surprised.  It must have been a typical Baachan thing to do.  I couldn't imagine many families celebrating Christmas at all, let alone like this.  I loved it.

We all helped, and as a team, we made the most delicious dinner that could ever have been.  I came to realise that cooking to this family was a bonding activity.  They had a family love born from the kitchen.    It brought them together despite hectic lives and age differences.  It was something they could all understand.

I began to understand why Miki had invited me to her cooking sessions with Baachan.  She must have picked up on this lesson while working at the restaurant and wanted to share it with me.

That Christmas Eve was truly one of the best nights I had ever spent with anyone.  We ate, drank, laughed, and were merry together for the whole night.  Nothing of the bad sort came to my mind at all.  I forgot my troubles and felt like I belonged.  I didn't even think of what Miki and Hiroshi were doing at ten at night because I was enjoying myself too much.

The wine flowed generously, and even Baachan got a little tipsy.  The night ended just past midnight.  We wished each other an official merry Christmas, and then the son and wife walked me to my hotel.  The night wrapped up with me thanking them and agreeing that we should have dinner again someday.

I got into my room, took a quick shower, and changed into my pyjamas.  I sat cross-legged on my bed and looked out the window at the snow-covered streets.  I stared and became hypnotised by the darkness.  I began to think about my life, about Miki's life, and just exactly where I was headed.  It seemed to become a degree colder as I thought.

[OTN1]

Chapter 12 of 16

I must have only spent about five minutes looking out the window.  I remember turning off the light and getting under the covers, laying my head down on the pillow.  Right when my head touched the pillow, I heard a sound.  My heart jumped up into my throat.  I heard the door open slowly, quietly.  I bit my tongue to keep from screaming in fear.  I tried to control my urge to run.  There was nowhere I could go.  I would never get the window open in time.  Maybe if I stayed very still, whoever it was would just steal my money and leave, not bothering to hurt me because I was supposedly asleep.

I controlled my breathing, making it as slow as possible.  It was the first and only time I regretted coming all the way up to Hokkaido alone.  I wished I'd thought to at least bring a tennis racket or a golf club.

I lay there helplessly in a state of desperation, wondering whether I'd live to see another day.  Actually, the thing I was most worried about was that I might never get to see what Miki's present to me had been. 

Oh, the small things in life.

I couldn't help but hold my breath as I heard the door close.  When I heard the lock click shut, I knew I was in trouble.  The thief (or rapist or murderer or whoever) was here to stay.  I wanted to cry, but I was too scared to even do that.

I heard footsteps sneak towards the bed.  I shut my eyes tightly.  I wished I wasn't facing away from the door because I wanted to see my murderer in the eyes.  I felt him get closer and closer and closer.

I felt the sheets move.  He'd taken a handful.  I felt them being pulled away.  A tear worked its way out of the corner of my eye.  I didn't want this to happen.  I didn't want to be there.  I'd give up anything to get out of this situation.

Someone slipped into the bed with me, and I almost lost it right there.  I prayed for a miracle.

None came.

I felt an arm encircle me.

And I was surprised.

"Aya-chan," whispered a voice.

Upon hearing the voice, I almost screamed.  My fear rushed out of me and was replaced by surprise and relief, leaving me a weak, shaking mess.  My muscles refused to work, so I couldn't even turn around to yell at her for scaring me like that.

"Her" being Miki, of course.

"Wha... what are you doing here?" I stammered.

I was still recovering from the thought of almost being attacked by some stranger.

"I missed you," Miki said, moving right up against me and hugging me tightly, putting her nose on my shoulder.  "I couldn't stay in Sapporo so I came back."

I gulped and rolled onto my back.  What was she thinking?  Did she have any idea that what she was doing was making me go insane with all sorts of crazy feelings that I'd tried to repress for two months?

"How did you get in here?" I asked.

She didn't answer, and I suspected that she had either sweet-talked the person at the reception desk or she'd performed magic.  Given my experience two months ago, I didn't count out either possibility.

"I want to be here with you.  Always," she whispered.

She kissed my shoulder, and even through two layers of shirts, I felt some sort of warmth from her lips, as imaginary as it may have been.

I was quiet for a moment.  I was pretty sure what she was telling me.

"What about me?" asked a voice from beyond the bed.

I jerked my head up in fright and saw a figure standing by the window.  It was Miki.  The other one.  The first one that I remembered.  I looked at the Miki in bed with me.  She didn't seem to notice the other Miki at all.  She was smiling, her cheek resting on my shoulder calmly.

I looked back at the Miki standing by the window and opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.  I was having another "what the hell is going on?" moment.

I watched as Miki1 walked over to the other side of the bed that the other Miki was on and peeled the sheets back, slipping in.

"You know I still exist," she said, brushing my hair back with a hand.

The other Miki was silent, content to hold me quietly. 

I knew that this had to be a dream.  This was not really happening in real life.  I'd had too much to eat and drink.  That, coupled with the anxiety I was feeling over slowly letting the old Miki go, was what was making me hallucinate.

"Where are you?" I asked desperately.

"Look for me," came Miki1's reply.

"I did," I said, frustrated.  "And I found you.  Didn't I?"

Miki smiled and shook her head, looking over at the other Miki.

"That's not me."

"Yes it is," I insisted.

"Then how can we both be here?" Miki shot back.  I looked between the two.

"Because this is all in my head.  My imagination.  I'm dreaming."

Miki suddenly grinned devilishly.

"You've got a hell of an imagination," she laughed.  "One Miki isn't enough to satisfy you, huh?"

I choked on my words while trying to deny it.  Miki laughed some more.  The other Miki stirred and hugged me more tightly.  I looked helplessly at Miki1.

"She doesn't want you.  Not like that.  Not like in the way I want you," she said.

I frowned and tried to protest, but I could only think my words, not say them.

"I told you she's not me.  She has her other life."

And then as if to soothe the pain her harsh words caused, Miki1 lay down beside me and hugged me, kissing my cheek.

"You'll always have me, though," she whispered into my ear.  "I'll be here forever."

Forever?  Here?  In my memory?  I couldn't live like that.

"And you can dream about me as much as you want.  Do whatever you want with me," she continued in a dangerously seductive voice.

I swallowed the lump growing in my throat.  I didn't want that.  I didn't believe it.

Meanwhile, the other Miki, Miki2, put her hand on my stomach and began to tickle it.  Miki1 started to kiss my ear.  I lay there wondering why I was dreaming about being in bed with two of them, not just one.  I was thinking just as perversely as the Miki1 that I used to scold did.  I couldn't stop it, though.  I couldn't stop them.  It's like they occupied two different dimensions.  They never touched, never got in each other's way, but I felt them just as equally.  I had no control because whenever I tried to protest, my voice conveniently disappeared, swallowed up by silence.  I was sure that each time one of them kissed me, they took a little bit of my voice - and my protests - with them.

Of course the majority of my mind told me that this was great.  Two Mikis.  One me.  Double the fun.  But I felt guilty and I felt dirty thinking about and enjoying the situation.  It made me more and more confused about who meant what to me, and who was who.

As the dream continued and I started to sweat, I wanted it to end.  Not because I wasn't enjoying it.  Rather because I was enjoying it.  How could I look Miki in the eye when she came back from Sapporo?   She'd be oblivious to what I'd let her do in my dreams.  She'd suspect nothing.  I couldn't stand the thought of that.  It was like lying to her.

And then the miracle that I'd prayed for earlier came.  I woke up.

I shot up, gasping for breath, sweating, shaking.  I looked to either side of me and saw no Miki.  I looked around the room.  There was nobody there.  I let out a frazzled breath and flopped back onto the bed, feeling my flushed face with my hand.  I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to calm myself.

Get a grip I thought.  Miki wasn't in my room.  Miki. Singular.  There had to be only one.

... right?

I still wasn't sure.  My subconscious wasn't quite sure either.

[OTN1]

Chapter 13 of 16

I slept unexpectedly well for the rest of the night.  My head hit the pillow and I was out like a light.  It was a deep, dreamless sleep.

The next morning I was awakened by my phone ringing.  Someone had sent me mail.  I rubbed my blurry eyes and rolled over to check the message.  It was from my mother.

I'd done something terrible.  I had lied to her.  I had told her that the Italy project had been cancelled, but that I had to work in Hokkaido for a few months and I would be out of touch.  This e-mail from her was a check up.  I hadn't written in a few weeks and she was worried.  I sent her back a message telling her that I was fine, that work was busy, and merry Christmas.

I then turned my attention to the plastic bag that sat on the table.  The gift from Miki.  I rubbed my head and wondered what I'd been thinking last night.  How could I have had such a dream (or hallucination)?

I crawled to the edge of the bed and grabbed the bag, sitting back down cross-legged.  I reached in and pulled out something soft.  It was a pair of oven mitts and a piece of A4 paper with a note scribbled on it.

The oven mitts were adorable.  They had patchwork of snowy mountain scenery and some children playing in the snow by a decorated Christmas tree.  I looked at the note.

Dear Aya-chan. 
So that you never forget cooking, Takikawa's snowy mountains, or me!  I hope when you look at these mitts, you'll remember us playing in the snow together. 
Your friend, Miki.

I hugged the mitts and lay back down on the bed.  My heart ached for something I couldn't have.  I was so happy but so torn.  I wanted to stay forever, but I needed to leave.  Soon.  I could not keep living on the fringe of her life forever.  Lying there that morning, I made my decision.  I would leave before the new year.

Instead of relaxing that day, I got dressed and went to the travel agency to book my flight to Tokyo.  December thirtieth, one-twenty-five pm.  I then went to sit in a deserted coffee shop, and I wrote to Miki, thanking her for the gift and telling her that I loved it and could never forget the past two months.  I was surprised when she e-mailed me back right away saying that she was having a great time but that she would be coming home one day earlier than scheduled.  She asked if I was free to meet the day after she came back.  I mailed her back right away and told her I was free.  I wondered why she was coming home early if she was having such a good time.  I discounted the possibility of a break-up.  She would have sounded depressed.  Right?

I waited those two days, moping and staring at my ticket, walking outside alone.  Waiting for Miki.  I laughed.  Wasn't there some French play with a similar name?  And didn't the guy that the people were waiting for never show up?  Maybe that could be used as a metaphor for my waiting.  Waiting for something that would never come.  Waiting for the part of someone that I would never get.

I sighed.  I was far too much into metaphors and symbols these days.

December twenty-seventh rolled around eventually.  I got a message from Miki telling me to meet her outside my hotel in half an hour.  I complied.

When I saw her, she looked rested and refreshed.  We greeted each other happily and started to walk.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

It seemed like she had a plan, but all she did was look at me and smile secretively.  She kept walking and I kept following dutifully.  I could handle a bit of a surprise.

We left the town and walked in a familiar direction.  We climbed up a hill that I recognised, but we took a detour from our usual route.  I wondered what she could possibly have to show me.  The snow could only get so beautiful.  It wasn't sunrise or sunset time, and no flowers were blooming.  Maybe she and Hiroshi had broken up after all, and she was going to confess her undying love for me...

Why would she do that out in the cold?  I rolled my eyes in disgust at myself.  I had to stop getting my hopes up like that.

The path ended suddenly, and we came to a small clearing in the middle of a circle of trees.  It looked like a square flying saucer imprint from those strange science fiction movies about aliens.

Without a word, Miki pointed at something in the distance.  I squinted and looked in the direction of her finger.  At first I wasn't sure what to look for and didn't see anything.  Just snow and trees.  But then I saw an off-white flurry of movement.  A small black foot.  I realised that I was looking at a sheep.  I smiled crookedly.  Miki had brought me there to see a sheep?  I couldn't tell if it was some sort of joke (we never found the sheep whose prints we followed that day long ago), or if she was genuinely impressed with herself that she had located a sheep. 

I turned my head to her and was about to make a teasing comment when suddenly a look overcame her face that made my heart jump.  It was a look of pure love.  I looked back at the sheep to see what it had done to make Miki go all soft.  Behind the sheep popped a tiny head.  Then a tiny hoof.  Eventually, a baby sheep walked from behind the protective cover of its mother.  I could have died on the spot from the cuteness of such a scene, but also from the cuteness of Miki wanting to bring me to see such a thing.  I looked over at her again and she looked at me with a satisfied smile.

"Cute, isn't it?" she asked.

"Adorable," I said in a quiet, happy voice.

We went back to observing the sheep.  The lamb became a bit braver.  He was energetic and started to frolic in the snow as we watched from a distance.  We were far away enough that the mother didn't think we were a threat.

We must have sat there for an hour just watching the mother take care of her little baby.  We barely talked.  We didn't need to.  It felt like we were at a movie theatre. 

When I realised how much time had passed, I feared that we would catch pneumonia.  We climbed down the hill and went back to town.  On the way, Miki explained.

"My dad told me that a baby had been born recently.  He told me the mother took him to that clearing often, so I wanted you to see it."

I really wished she hadn't said or thought that because I could barely contain my heart within my chest.  It wanted to explode with love.

"That was really cute.  Thank you," I said.

We went back to Miki's house to change.  Our clothes were wet from sitting in the snow for an hour and she had offered to lend me some dry clothes just so that we didn't have to go all the way to my hotel.  We got changed quickly, modestly.  I refused to look at her until I was certain every part of her was covered up.  I was still feeling strange from the dream I'd had a few nights ago.  I didn't need to add fuel to the fire.

Once finished there, we headed for the restaurant.  We greeted Baachan and began to cook.  Baachan and I told Miki about our Christmas Eve dinner, and Miki whined about how jealous she was and that she wished she could have been there with us.  We joked and said that next year we'd do it again all together.  I felt a pain in my heart because I had no intention of being there next year.

We ate dinner, and when the first customers arrived, I didn't want to go.  I needed to talk to Miki seriously.  I needed to tell her I was leaving.  There hadn't been a good opportunity to do so during the day.  I pulled her aside before things got busy.

"When do you get off work?" I asked.

"Things usually die out around ten or eleven.  Why?"

I breathed in.

"Can I meet you back here after that?  I just, um, I get a little bored in the evenings these days."

She smiled and nodded, saying that it was no problem.

I went back to my hotel for a few hours.  I changed out of Miki's clothing and put them in a bag so that I could give them back to her.  I read a comic book from cover to cover and watched TV for an hour, urging time to pass more quickly.

I went back to the restaurant at ten-thirty.  There were no customers, and Miki was cleaning the tables.  She looked up in alarm when I walked in, but sighed in relief when she saw I wasn't another customer.

"I sent Baachan home early.  It's really cold tonight.  I'm locking up," she explained.

She wiped some spilled soy sauce off a table.  She looked annoyed when it wouldn't come out easily.

I sat down at a table, crossing my legs and watching her.  She had seemed relaxed in the morning, but I noticed that now she was lot more tense.  It must have been work.  It wasn't easy working at a restaurant and dealing with customers

"Hey Miki," I said suddenly.

"Yup?" she asked.

"How about a drink?"

She stopped and turned around with a big grin.

"What an excellent idea."

I didn't know what I was trying to accomplish, but I really needed to relax at that point.  It looked like she needed to, too.

So we sipped giant, quickly-prepared cranberry vodkas.  Miki left for a moment to close up the front and make sure that no other customers would come by.  No one was likely to come on such a cold day, but one never knew.

She came back and chugged her drink down, surprising me with her speed.  She went off to make another two for us while I was still only a quarter of the way through mine.  She came back and sat with me and gulped down her second drink within minutes, moving on to the third (the one that she'd made for me).  The drinks were strong.  I could taste the bitterness of the alcohol.  I wondered how many it would take to make her drunk.

When she went off and made a fourth and chugged half of it down in one gulp, I immediately became worried.  I knew that Miki liked to drink quickly, but this was a little strange.  She was never that fast.  Something must have happened.

"So, anything interesting happen in Sapporo?" I asked casually.

I played with the little umbrella that she'd put in my drink ("to make the tropical girl feel at home" was her reason).  Miki gulped down the second half of her fourth drink and put her glass down, looking at me squarely in the eyes before going off to make a fifth drink.  She drank half of that before speaking.

"He asked me to marry him."

Juice and alcohol spilled out of my mouth as I tried to exclaim my surprise in the middle of swallowing.  Miki jumped back and threw me the cloth she had left on the table behind her.  I wiped my chin and then the table.

"H-he did?" I stammered.

"Mmmhmmm," Miki replied, nodding a few more times than necessary, the alcohol starting to take effect.  "On Christmas Day."

The breath caught in my throat.

"And?" I croaked out.

Miki put down her empty glass and curled her legs up, hugging them to her chest.

"I dunno," she slurred.  "I told you before that he's a little out there.  I don't know what he's thinking all the time.  You know?"

I nodded.

"So I told him to wait for the new year.  He was upset, but I think he understood the next day after some sleep."

So they were still together.

"I came back a day early because my parents asked me to, not because I wanted to leave him."

I sighed and put on my best concerned face.

"Do you love him?"

It hurt so much to ask that.

"Of course," she said with a silly smile.  "You think I'd put up with his crap if I didn't?"

I couldn't help myself and I laughed.  Of course.

"But it's not enough, Aya-chan," she added on quietly.

I looked at her in surprise.

"I need a lot more in my life," she confided in me.

I began to suspect what her real problem was, and as she began to open up, I began to understand.

"My life is so fucking boring," she groaned.

I frowned as she went to make another drink, this time not even bothering to mix it properly.

"I work, I study, I go to class, I eat, I sleep."

It hurt me to hear her say that.  It hurt me to hear that she was not enjoying herself as much as she could be.

"But lately, you know, I've been able to have more fun.  I guess because you're new here and I got to show you around and get to know you.  We click, you know?"

I smiled and nodded.

"And I wonder what I'm doing here.  I don't even like business and studying," she frowned.  "I don't like serving customers.  I want to be doing something like you.  What you do - that's cool.  That's what I'd love to do."

I listened to her ramble and I couldn't hold my opinion in any longer.

"Then go out and become something good.  Come to Tokyo with me.  You have a good chance," I said hopefully.

She shook her head several times.

"There's too much holding me back.  My debts, my parents, my job..."

I grit my teeth.

"You have to take the chance," I insisted.  "You never know until you try.  You've got to make yourself happy, too."

Miki looked down at the table.

"I know.  It's hard, though, when you're this age.  Too many roots are starting to go down, you know?"

She was right.  It had been much easier for me back then, a young teenager, to leave my life behind and move to Tokyo to become a star.  At the age of twenty-five, one would naturally start to feel more grown up, more responsible towards ones parents...

"Well, if you ever decide to pursue the kind of life I live, you'll always have a friend in Tokyo," I told her, pointing to myself.

She smiled and patted my hand gratefully.  I grabbed on to it, pulled her towards me, wrapping my arms behind her shoulders, kissing her for the first time in-

I snapped awake.

"Thanks," Miki said, patting my hand gratefully.

I groaned in frustration in my head, but smiled back at her as she retracted her hand.  We sat in silence for another minute before Miki stood up, teetering over dangerously.

"Whoa.  Really hits you when you stand," she said, going off to the washroom.

I decided to do the right thing that night.  I stood up, rinsed out our glasses, and grabbed our coats.  When Miki came back, I threw hers to her.

"Let's go home," I said.

She slipped her coat on and we left.  She fumbled with the key and locked up, letting me check to make sure she'd done it right.  I linked my arm around hers and walked down the street slowly through the biting cold.

The half hour walk was quiet.  Miki seemed to sober up a bit.  Not that she had been that far gone.

When we got to her house, I let go of her arm and gave her the bag with the clothes she'd lent me and asked her if she'd be all right.  She said she'd be okay.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I said.

"See you tomorrow," she echoed with a watery smile.

My escorting job finished, I went back to my hotel and slipped into bed, staring at the ceiling.

I could have done something if I had wanted to.  I could have made her drink more.  I could have pushed her down on a table in that restaurant and made her realise that she didn't want to marry Hiroshi.

But I didn't for several reasons.  The main one was that that would have been taking advantage of her.  That was the saddest, cruellest way to get something I wanted.

The other reason was more complicated.  In a way, I didn't want anything to happen because that would mean I had fully accepted the world I was in as reality.  This Miki would be the only true Miki if I so much as touched her with more than friendly intentions.  I wasn't sure if I was ready to give up so many years of my memories.  However, it was becoming tempting.

I never did end up telling her that I was leaving.  I would have to make sure to the next day.

I closed my eyes and pictured Miki in my head.  I found that when I did this, there were no longer two images like before.  There was only one.

[OTN1]

Chapter 14 of 16

The twenty-eighth of December was nice and normal.  We met up that afternoon to chat and cook.  Neither of us mentioned the previous night, but when we first saw each other, I sensed that the smile on Miki's face was thankful, perhaps even a little apologetic for having been a nuisance.  Not that I thought she had been a nuisance.  She was probably embarrassed by her outburst.

We cooked with Baachan, ate, and then said goodnight.  This time I didn't tell her that I was leaving the day after next because it completely slipped my mind.  The day had felt so normal that I hadn't thought anything out of the ordinary was coming up.

The next day - my last full day in Hokkaido - Miki had to take her sister to the hospital.  The eldest, married Fujimoto sibling had injured her foot seriously, and her husband was away on business.  This left Miki, the only person who could drive and was free during the afternoon, to take care of her.  This, in turn, meant that it was only me and Baachan cooking at the restaurant that afternoon.  As we worked on a special regional nabe and chatted, my heart felt like it had broken in two.  My last afternoon had been ruined.

At around six, before the first customers, Miki appeared at the door of the restaurant looking exhausted.  She had had to wait at the hospital with her sister all afternoon before a doctor could examine the foot. She had left as soon as her sister went into the examination room, and she would have to go back to pick her up afterwards.  I watched her sympathetically as she pulled her hair back and put on an apron, getting ready for another night of serving customers.

I was able to hang around until six-thirty, desperately trying to find a way to squeeze in that important piece of information - I was leaving the next day.  No opportunity presented itself, and I grew desperate when a hungry-looking couple walked in the door.  Miki seemed to read my mind.

"Do you want to meet up after I drive my klutzy sister back home?" she asked.

I nodded eagerly.

"Yeah."

I left the restaurant with her promising to call me.  I felt bad that I was going to make her stay up late and meet me when she probably wanted to collapse in her bed and sleep for a million years.  I went to my hotel and dozed off until my phone rang at just past eleven-thirty.  Her message was simple - to meet her in the lobby in fifteen minutes and to dress warmly. 

I got ready quickly and went downstairs.  Miki was already there.  She looked even more exhausted than before, but she spared me a bright grin.

"Why 'dress warmly'?" I asked. 

Miki smiled secretively and I laughed at seeing this gesture come from her a second time.  She liked to keep me guessing.

We set out in the dark.  Like last time, she led me out of the town and into the hills.  I briefly wondered if we would be eaten by bears in the dark.  I had heard of such things happening in remote parts of Hokkaido.  I shivered involuntarily.

We didn't talk as we began to climb one of our usual hills.  The air was cold and crisp.  It felt good going into my lungs, but it didn't inspire me to breathe too much for fear of freezing my insides.  I wondered what Miki was going to show me this time.  I was sure it couldn't be another baby sheep.

She stopped at the top of a hill.

"This'll do," she said.

I looked around and saw nothing but snow and trees.

"Do for what?" I asked.

She looked at me, smiled, and then looked up, pointing to the sky.

I craned my neck and looked up... and was astonished.  It seemed as though billions of stars had gathered in the sky for my final night.  A chunk of moon shone down on us and made it even brighter.  No wonder we had been able to see in the dark on the way up the hill.  The light from so many stars had guided us. 

I twisted my neck to look at Miki.  She was staring up at the skies with a longing look in her eyes, and I guessed that she was thinking about the things we had talked about the other night.  She noticed me looking over and she turned her head.

"This is the reason why I love winter," she said quietly, as though to speak any louder would break the spell that held the fragile web of stars together.  "Clear skies."

"It's beautiful," I said in the same tone.  "I've never seen a sky like this."

We went back to looking up.

"Takikawa's best kept secret," she sighed.

As we continued to look up, I realised I had to get it over with.

"I'm leaving tomorrow."

I closed my eyes tightly and kept my face pointed to the sky.  She didn't seem to move for a whole minute.

"What?" she asked in her normal tone of voice.

I felt that some sort of spell did break right then.  I opened my eyes and looked at her.  She was looking at me in disbelief.

"I bought my plane ticket a few days ago."

"But..." 

She paused for a long while.

"Why didn't you tell me before?" she asked, looking confused, maybe even a little hurt.

"I wanted to, but there was no time.  You were busy," I said.

"Why are you leaving?" she asked.

It was funny.  The question should have been "how come you've been able to stay so long?"  She knew I didn't live there.  She knew I was living in a hotel, and that that could not continue forever.

"I need to get back to work.  I've been away too long," I replied.

Not the reason why I was leaving, but it was good enough.  She looked down at the ground.

"What am I gonna do without you here?" she asked sadly.

"Oh, come on," I chided her.  "You'll get along fine."

"But I'm losing one of my best friends."

The fact that she considered me one of her best friends after only two months was a strange mystery.  There must have been something naturally trustworthy that she saw in me. 

"You're not losing one.  There's just going to be a bit of distance between us.  That's all," I comforted her.

"You should have told me earlier," she grumbled.

"Sorry," I said, looking down.  "But it would only have made you think about it more."

Miki reached over and tugged at my sleeve, pulling me down into the snow.  She sat down normally while I flailed my arms out and fell onto my side, unprepared for the sudden change.  I rolled up and glared at her as I crossed my legs and positioned myself in front of her.

"When can you come back again?" she asked hopefully.

What was I supposed to say to that?  I didn't want to come back.  No, of course I did.  But I couldn't.  It hurt too much. 

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn't find the right words.

"It gets really nice in the spring," Miki said, starting to sell the place to me.  "And the summer isn't that bad.  And the fall... wow, you think you have nice falls in the south?  No way.  You've never seen one up here."

I smiled and shook my head.

"I don't know when I'll come back," I told her truthfully.

"Well, if it's a problem with a place to stay, you can always stay at my parents' house.  There's an extra room," she said, starting to sound a little on the desperate side.

I wanted her to stop with her ideas because they were just that - ideas.  No weight in them.  There was no deep reason why she wanted me to come back again.  Or rather, there was a deep reason, but it wasn't as a deep as I wanted it to be.

"It's tempting," I said, looking right into her eyes, "but I really can't say when I'll be back."

She sighed and was quiet.  I looked back at the stars.  Their beauty made me sad.

"Then promise you won't forget this place... or Baachan, or the restaurant, or me."

She sounded like her Christmas message.

"Are you kidding me?" I laughed.  "I could never forget."

"And I'll come and visit you.  Someday.  I'll move to the capital," she said determinedly.

If she put as much effort into trying as she did into saying she would try, she would do just fine.  She would easily succeed.

"Fine.  I'll be waiting for you," I said.

Maybe a little suggestively.  Maybe.  But she did not catch on.

We continued to observe the stars.  No more words passed between us, but it felt like we were communicating by just sitting in front of each other. 

I started to shiver after a while, and I noticed Miki was just as uncomfortable. 

"Let's go," she said quietly, standing up.

I stood up, hugging my arms around myself, and we walked back into town. 

We got to my hotel and went upstairs.  I went through my packed bags and pulled out a few pairs of jeans so that we could change out of our wet ones.  It hadn't been my idea to sit in the snow, so I blamed her if we suffered from hypothermia.  I threw a pair at Miki and she caught them in surprise.

"But how will I give them ba-" she started.

"Don't worry," I said quickly.  "When we meet again."

I had no idea when that would be, but if it would make Miki get out of her wet clothes and into dry clothes, the answer satisfied me.  No sense in letting her die of a terrible cold.

We changed, and I felt much better.  Miki checked the time and winced.  It was nearing two in the morning, and she told me so.

"What time is your flight?" she asked.

"One-twenty-five."

She did the math in her head.  We wouldn't be able to meet before.  This was it.  Our goodbye.

I didn't expect her to, but she started to cry.  She always had a way of surprising me.  I stood there watching her awkwardly, not sure what to do.  I would normally hug a friend who was crying, or at least pat her on the shoulder, but it seemed wrong for me to do so.  I was trying to pry myself away from the grip she had on my heart, not trying to get all touchy feely with her.

"Bye bye, Miki," I said quietly. 

She couldn't even say goodbye back to me, which I thought was funny.  It should have been the reverse.  I should have been the one bawling my eyes out.  Instead of speaking, she walked over and hugged me tightly. 

At first I went stiff as a board, but then I told myself to chill out.  There was no harm in a hug.  I hugged her and rubbed her back in a soothing way.

"Don't worry," I said.

I wasn't really sure why I was saying that.  It sounded like something nice to say to someone who was crying.

"I'll visit again."

It was probably a lie, but it was a white one.

She stopped crying after a minute or two.  She sniffed a few times, but she refused to let go of me.  At this rate, one of us was probably going to fall asleep before she decided to let go.  I pried her off of me gently and looked at her to make sure she wasn't actually asleep.

She was looking down, unable to look at me, most likely ashamed to be reacting so emotionally.  She had stopped her actual crying, but a few tears still clung to her face - her cheek, her nose, her lip.

And because I was foolish and selfish and a whole ton of other bad, self-deprecating adjectives, I kissed that one tear off her bottom lip.  Ever so softly.  But it was enough to make her neck jerk back in reaction.  I wished I could have shot myself in the most painful way possible for having done that.

I let go of her, looking at the door, urging her with a gesture to leave.  I could see her face twisted with confusion and quite possibly disgust as I resorted to pushing her towards the door.  She obeyed my physical commands and began to walk on her own.  She picked up the pants she had changed out of and I silently handed her a plastic bag to put them in.

She slipped on her shoes, I opened the door, she stepped out...

And just when I thought I was home free, she turned around.

"You know," she said in a surprisingly strong voice.  "I've never tried that before..." she trailed off weakly. 

I knew exactly what she was talking about.  I wasn't going to play dumb.  But I wasn't going to make this easy for her.  It was hard enough for me.

"That's nice," I said none too politely.  "Good night."

I tried to close the door, but she put a hand in the doorway.  I couldn't slam a door on her dear hand.  I stopped five centimetres short of sending the youngest Fujimoto sibling to the hospital with a broken hand to match her sister's broken foot.

"If you're going to do something, don't do it halfway.  Typical you," she said in a voice full of scorn.

She sounded very angry with me, and I thought that she might like to slam my hand in the door.

I was reminded of something I said to someone long ago.

Don't start things you don't intend to finish.

And that person had replied that I was the one who usually did that.

But that moment was blurry.  It was like a dream.  I had had one long dream.  One long, clairvoyant dream.

"Halfway..." I muttered under my breath. 

I looked up at her.  She did look angry.  But she also looked desperate, and suddenly I knew what a huge mistake I had made.  I had convinced her that she wanted something that she really didn't want.  I had made her think that the gap in her life could be filled by me, when in fact her problem was a different one.

She was so desperate for something fresh in her life that she would consider all ways to find some sort of excitement, controversial as it may be.  That meant giving herself to me.  I had given her the tiniest hint of leeway and she had grabbed onto it.  She was refusing to let go. 

I was angered because I had thrown her that line.  I was angered because she had pursued it.  And I was especially angered because it meant I had to be cruel to her and deny her anything that she so urgently thought she wanted.

So I did something even worse than denying her.  I pulled her back into my room and closed the door, locking it.  I gave up on my selflessness.  Two months of careful control amounted to this failure. 

Or was it?  It certainly did not seem like I was failing anything as she took her shoes off and I backed her into a wall.  She looked surprised, but I was beyond that.  She had asked for it. 

She started to look a bit terrified as I transformed from a thoughtful friend who enjoyed afternoon walks in the snow and happened to be a national idol, into some sort of starved human who had reached the last straw and was dying for action.

I pulled back and asked her if she was scared.  She shook her head, although she did look a little shocked.  I was pretty sure she had not been expecting this from me, especially when my cold hands made direct contact with her warm skin.

She loosened up quickly enough.  The more relaxed she became, the more I lost control, and the more I lost control, the more clothes needed to come off.  The more clothes that came off, the sexier it got. 

And the sexier it got...  well, the better it felt.

She was shy at first, but after showing her I had no shame, and after groping at her in just about every way possible, her hands began to move, and the side I knew that lay dormant in her began to emerge.

There's my Miki, I thought as I pushed her onto the small hotel bed.

"Wh-" she started to ask a question, but I shushed her up.

"No talking," I insisted.

As I expected, she didn't listen and began to ask her question again.  Luckily I knew her well enough, and I knew exactly how to make her shut up.

How I knew, I couldn't quite piece together.  That Miki that I thought I knew... must have been a dream.  A long, detailed dream.  Or a hallucination.  Or a prophecy.  Or maybe I was plain crazy.  But all I cared was that this right here, right under me, was the real Miki.  The only one that could exist.  The only one that did exist.  The only one that would ever exist for me.

I didn't know what had made me think I had known her.  I didn't think about it because it didn't matter.  Only the moment mattered.

I just enjoyed every single delicate - and not so delicate - moment this one-of-a-kind Miki inspired.

Before I fell asleep early that morning, I touched the skin of her back.  She made a sound indicating that she was still semi-conscious.  I drew a heart on her back and she made the same sound again to tell me to stop.  I put my hand flat on her back and could feel her heartbeat faintly.  I fell asleep as I adjusted my breathing to match the slow and steady thump-thump... thump-thump...

The last thing I remember was breathing out something about finally being happy.

[OTN1]

Chapter 15 of 16

I woke up.  In an unfamiliar bedroom.

No, it wasn't unfamiliar.  It was my bedroom.  In Tokyo.

Startled and confused, I looked around.  The clock read just past eight am.  The sun was coming in through the cracks in the curtain, the room was warm, and my jaw smarted for some reason.  The bed sheets were in disarray, half tucked around me, half falling off the bed.  I was lying on the left side of the bed, the right side empty save for a pillow beside mine.  In the corner, I could make out a messy pile of clothing.

The setting felt familiar.

I breathed in deeply.  It smelled like how my room usually smelled, but with something slightly different in the mix.  It smelled familiar.  Like the smell of someone I used to know... Like...

I shot up from my bed.  I knew what this place was.  What this time was.  This was the day my old Miki had disappeared.  This was the day everything changed.  The day I went on a wild journey to retrieve someone who had, according to everyone I knew, never existed.  I had somehow come to this place again.

But... how...?

I looked around.  She wasn't even here.  The bed was empty but for me.  I felt my stomach churning.  I wanted to scream out for this to stop.  For this power playing with me to leave me alone and let me be happy.  I had found her again.  The real her.  And I had given myself up to this fact.  I had accepted my new reality.  I had let go of the other world in my head...

Maybe the two months in Hokkaido had been a detailed dream.  Maybe I had gotten it wrong.  Maybe I had fallen asleep after realising Miki was missing and I was making up crazy theories.

Stunned, I walked out of my bedroom, exploring this familiar yet baffling setting.  There was nobody in the kitchen or the living room.  I shouldn't have been upset about that, but my face fell.  I felt more broke-hearted than ever before.

Whether this was a dream or the other world was a dream, I could never be happy.  Not really.  I could never be satisfied.

And then I heard water running in the washroom.  I bolted for it and there I saw a figure leaning over the sink, hands cupped under the water. 

It was her.

I forgot everything and grabbed her from behind.  She let out a yell, and all the water that had collected in her hands went splashing down the front of her pyjamas.  I paid this no heed and I clung onto her with a tight hug, squishing my face against her neck.

"Aya!!" she hollered.

"Don't you ever leave me again!" I yelled furiously, and I started to cry, clinging on for dear life.  "Don't do that again.  Don't ever disappear," I said through my sobs. 

She backed away from the sink, but there was very little room.  My back touched the other wall.  I moved my hands up and grabbed her head, feeling it.  I turned her to face me as I desperately felt her cheeks, her ears, her hair... She looked at me, eyes wide open in fright and confusion.

"Don't go anywhere," I whispered, kissing her.

She muttered that I was the one leaving, and she kissed me back, but she obviously had no idea what was going on as I hung on to her.  She finally pushed me away from her.

"Listen, if you wanted to start something, you could've waited till I went back to your room, you know," she laughed. 
I didn't laugh along.  I just stared at her as if I hadn't seen her in months- which was quite the case.

"Aya, what- are you all right?" she asked.

She was starting to realise that I wasn't just being silly or dramatic or crazy.  Well, maybe I was being crazy, but not the usual kind.

"Where did you go?" I asked her, my voice trembling.

I didn't even know what to say to her. 

"I just came here to wash my face.  I felt grimy," she said with a frown.  "And you, little miss whacko, got my pyjamas all wet because you decided to go postal on me when I wasn't paying attention.  I'd say that qualifies you for an award.  Maybe-"

"Shut up," I said, grabbing a hold of her again and hugging her.

"Ok, whoa whoa whoa. What is going on with you?" Miki demanded, pulling back again. 

She stood there frowning - no, glaring - at me, the lines on her forehead quite pronounced.  She looked like she was going to box my ears in if I didn't explain myself to her.

And my heart sang. 

While I'd found an almost identical Miki after the one I knew had disappeared, she wasn't the same as this original one.  There was something special about this one.  She was more blunt, a little more jaded, but there was something extra-lovable about her.  In the end, I wanted her no other way than the way she was now.

"I missed you," I said quietly, running my hands through her hair.

She didn't complain about my hands, but her glare stayed.

"I was gone for twenty seconds at the most.  You were asleep.  Are you that obsessed with me?" she questioned half in earnest, half tongue-in-cheekily.

"Yes," I said, allowing myself a small smile.  "I'm definitely that obsessed."

I pushed myself up against her again and kissed her slowly, remembering what it was like.  It had been so long.  Miki wrapped her arms around me and pushed me out of the bathroom.  We ended up standing in the living room.  She pulled away from me again and sat me down on the couch, taking a seat beside me.

"As much as I love it when you're all excited in the morning - and I really do love it - I think there's something bothering you.  Am I right?"

She had a thoughtful look on her face, which made me melt.

"I'm not bothered anymore.  Trust me.  Everything's perfect now."

"So it was just a bad dream?" Miki asked with a smile.

"Something like that," I responded, returning the smile in full.

But I wondered if it had been a dream.  It had felt too real.

"A bad dream where you weren't there and I had to go and find you."

"Did you end up finding me?" Miki asked playfully.

She was humouring me, but also just being silly and sweet.

"I found an echo of you," I laughed despite my confusion, "but not the real you."

"That's depressing," Miki commented with a pout.

"No, I learned things from that echo.  Then reality came back to me and you were here.  The same old you.  So I did find you in the end."

Miki threw her head back and laughed a hearty, pure laugh.

"You must be exhausted after your journey.  Are you sure you wouldn't like to go back to sleep?" she teased me, but then she held back a yawn.

She was the one who wanted to sleep.  I started to shake my head to say no, but then I thought better of it.

"Yeah, let's go back," I said, taking her hand and pulling her back to my room. 

But something caught my eye.  I pushed Miki ahead and ignored her questioning look.  She shrugged and went back to bed.  I went into the kitchen and over to the stove, my jaw dropping in awe.

Hanging on the hook was a pair of oven mitts.  The picture on the mitts was that of a snowy mountain, some children playing in the snow, and a tall, brightly decorated Christmas tree. 

Memories flooded my mind, but I couldn't be sure what was true and what wasn't.  I was certain that I had only seen these mitts before once in my life.  But how could they be here with me now?  The time didn't match up.  It was still October.  The reality didn't match up.  This Miki - the original Miki - had never given these to me.

I shook my head.  Why question it?  It had happened.  Whatever it had been, it had been a truly remarkable thing.

I went back to my bedroom feeling lighter than before.  I lay down in bed and faced Miki.  Finally able to relax now that I was back, she closed her eyes and I took her hand and held it between us.  We remained there silently for some time.  I couldn't sleep, so I just watched her.  I had no idea what had just happened, but two months undoubtedly had passed since I'd last seen her, and I was going to enjoy looking at her for a long time in order to make up for it.

"Are you really going to Italy today?" she asked me suddenly, opening her eyes as she spoke. 

Italy?

Italy!

I had forgotten about Italy.

There was no way in hell I was going to go.  I would pull out.  I would quit my job.  Whatever it took.  I couldn't go.  Right now I had to stay here and be with the important people in my life.  I had spent two months of my life searching for her and I had finally found her.  There was no way I was going to let go within hours.

"I'm not going," I said.

"What?" Miki asked with a blink and a laugh.  "You just woke up and decided that?"

I nodded.  I couldn't explain.  Or at least not yet.

"I don't want to go.  I decided this, um, recently.  If it means having to quit my job, I'll do it.  Right now I just want to stay here.  I finally have a life here.  A real life with you and my friends, and my family's not too far away."

"But-" Miki started to protest.

"No, I've spent too much time living for other people and obligations.  Right now I need to take a break," I insisted.
Miki's face softened.

"Come and work with me and my company," she said with a childish smile. 

I laughed and squeezed her hand.  While it was unlikely I could suddenly get a job where she worked, it was a cute suggestion, and it showed me that she would not mind at all if I stayed in Japan.  I'm sure she had her selfish reasons, but I knew that she also backed me one hundred and ten per cent in my decisions.  She'd been ready to let go of me for three months.  She was now ready to keep a hold of me.

Her eyes began to droop, and I could tell that she was going to pass out on me at any point.  I could hear her breathing start to slow down.  She murmured something under her breath about being happy that I had chosen to stay.  I watched as awareness of the outside world began to slip from her face.

"Go to sleep," I said, echoing the same words she'd said to me so many months ago when I'd last seen her.

I felt her grip on my hand loosen.

"I'm right here, Aya.  Right here..." she muttered, warming my heart and sending an instant smile to my face.

"I know."

[OTN1]

Chapter 16 of 16 (Epilogue)

She woke up with crazy talk about me disappearing.  She seemed completely serious when she started to grab at me and sob her eyes out.  What sort of dream she had had, I didn't know, but it must have been pretty realistic to make her react like that.  My strong Aya who always comforted me when I had nightmares.  This time it was the reverse.  I didn't consider myself very good at comforting people, but since it was her, it was okay.  She knew that.  As usual, I tried to make her laugh to forget about any bad thing.  It was easier than I thought, because she suddenly perked up. 

Then she told me some ridiculous plan to skip out on her upcoming job.  I let her say it, but I didn't really believe her.  She would sleep for a few more hours and then change her mind.  I told her she could come and work with me.  That would be nice.  We could hang out during our breaks like we used to when we worked for the same company.

Sometimes I wished I could write a magazine article.  I would call it "How it Really Is".  I would also write a follow-up book.  "All About Us".  I would explain how Aya was a nutso.  A real whackjob.  Sometimes that's what I honestly thought about her.

I told her as much when we woke up again, this time at eleven-thirty am.  Sometimes we were such lazy slobs.  She ignored my comments regarding her sanity.  She had heard them a million times before from me.

She was serious when she had said she wouldn't go to Italy.  I was flabbergasted and delighted when she picked up the phone and dialed her boss' number.  She told him right away that she refused to go to Italy.  Their conversation continued for a while until the point where even I, sitting on the bed, could hear her boss' frantic voice from the the cellphone receiver, located across the room where Aya was standing.  The call finally ended and Aya clapped her hands together, looking at me.

"He wants a meeting right now," she said.

"Will you go?" I asked worriedly.

"Sure," she said with a shrug.  "It's the least I can do for the inconvenience I'm being."

'Inconvenience' was hardly the word I would use to describe her.  If I were her boss, some of the ways I would describe her would be 'completely unreasonable', 'traitor', and 'extreme pain in the ass'.

"I guess I should start figuring out how to be that powerful CEO I'm always claiming I want to be," she mused.

I was infinitely glad that I wasn't her boss.

"You're amazing," I whispered in awe, standing up and walking over to her and hugging her tightly.

Was she not amazing?  Nobody could say she wasn't amazing.  There was something about her that was so... Aya.  It was the only way I could think of it.  She was stubborn to the level just below stupidity, and she was motivated by who knows what.  It was strong, though.  Sometimes she told me I was her motivation, but I didn't believe her all the time.  Sometimes something drove her to do drastic things, and it wasn't me.  It was something in her.  It was, as I told her, amazing.

"You really are amazing," I repeated.

She laughed and pushed me away.

"Don't talk like that," she said with embarrassment.  "All these years and I still can't handle mush from you."

It made me feel so good to hear that.  No matter how many years it had been, we still could have these fresh moments where we surprised each other.  I let her go and went back to sit on the bed.

"When is your meeting?" I asked while inspecting my toe nails.  I needed to get them done soon.

"He told me to go there right now," she replied.

I looked up from my toes.

"Now?" I whined.  "Aya, this is so messed up..." I complained.

"Why are you complaining?" she asked me in monotone.  "It's my neck on the line."

I grinned stupidly and looked back down at my toes.

"Okay, okay.  Go to your meeting," I said, smiling at my toes.

"Come with me?"

Not an order.  A request.  A plead.  But it could have been a bossy order and my reply would have been the same.

"Of course."

We got ready quickly and headed off to the office where Aya's boss worked.  I could hardly believe any of this was happening.  I had spent the past week and a half preparing myself for Aya's departure.  I had done everything I needed to do short of saying the words "goodbye."  I had even bought her a stupid Pingu clock so that she would wake up on time overseas.  And now she was planning not to go.

The minute we stepped into the building, the secretary picked up the phone.  Aya was calm, but something under the surface of her skin was jittery and nervous.  She must have known that this was a very important meeting.  I waited in the lobby while Aya went upstairs for her meeting.  I mailed a bunch of my friends and then flipped through a fashion magazine while I waited.

And hour and fifteen minutes later, Aya came back down.  I had fallen asleep, but she tapped me on the knee, sitting beside me and making the couch move.  I awoke with a jerk and my heart lurched for a second when I saw her.  She was going to tell me that she was being forced to go to Italy...

"Let's go home."

That's all she said.  She offered me a hand and helped me stand up.  I straightened out my clothes and we left the building.  A block away, I stopped and turned to face her.

"What happened?"

She stopped walking, so there we stood halfway down the sidewalk, the occassional pedestrian walking by.

"They tried to convince me to go.  It didn't work," she replied with a pleasant smile.

"Okay..." I trailed off with a frown.  "And then?"

"And then they offered me alternative suggestions like cutting the length of time by half a month, higher pay, and more benefits.  All of which I refused."

"And then?"

Geez, I thought.  It was like pulling teeth.

"And then they accepted my decision and told me that I was being suspended for six months."

I gulped.

"Six months?  Aya, that's a long time," I said softly.

"Wrong answer," she said with a glint in her eye,

"What?" I asked.

"You're supposed to ask..." she said, making a gesture with her head.

A "you know what I mean" gesture.  I had no idea what she meant.  She stuck her head out even more and her eyes bulged from her sockets more than they usually did.

I got it.

"And then?" I asked.

"And then I quit."

This time is was my turn for my eyes to do a bit of bulging.

"Are you serious?  You actually quit?"

"Mmhm.  I told them that my happiness was more important than making billions of yen for them."

She quit her job.  Her wonderful job that she loved to bits and pieces.  The one that she had worked so hard to get.

"How- why?" I asked.

She reached out and poked my stomach with her pinky finger lightly.

"Because.  My life here and my family are more important to me than anything else."

"But..." I didn't even pay attention to her words.  "You can't quit.  Go.  Accept the half-month-less deal.  Or- or more money so that you can waste it on visits home, or..." I babbled nonsensically. 

Aya grabbed my hand and led me away from the main street so that we weren't surrounded by people.  We started to walk along a much quieter sidewalk.

"Shouldn't you be a little happier?" she questioned me with a smirk.

Of course I was happy that she was staying.  But I didn't want her to sacrifice her wonderful job just so that she could stay in Japan.

"But why, Aya?  You have such a good thing going on," I said sadly.

We stopped walking and Aya faced me squarely.

"Exactly," she said, my sadness not affecting her in the least.  "And that's why I have to quit my job.  I don't want to go to Italy and miss out on this good thing that I have."

And then it struck me that maybe she was talking about me.  Me and her family and friends.

"But if you stay because of me, I'll feel bad."

"Fine.  Then don't think about it," she quipped.

I didn't know what to say, so I looked at her sadly.  She mimicked my face, pouting like me.

"If you get like that, maybe I'll turn around and go get my job back.  I don't want to be stuck here with a depressed Miki," she joked.

I tried to smile, but I still felt guilty.  I didn't want to be the one to hold her back.  The pout disappeared from her face.

"You're not holding me back."

She said it quietly.  Almost mumbled it.  She had read my mind.

"The reason why I'm staying is mainly because of you, but I consider that a good thing.  A great thing.  Life without you is just... just not worth the bother."

That frightened me a little to hear.  I thought to myself that I better not die any time soon.  She had been acting strange since morning.  Her and her sudden obsession with me.  Maybe she had been thinking about death or...

"ARG!" I said out loud, shaking such depressing thoughts out of my head and scaring Aya. 

"What...?"

"Sorry," I apologised sheepishly.  "I was thinking of bad things.  Let's go home."

We walked down the street and in the direction of the subway station.

"Hey, Miki," Aya mumbled suddenly.

"Hm?"

"Do you mind if I stay in Japan?  Are you happy?" 

Was she really asking me that?  We had known each other for almost a decade and she was asking me if I minded if she stuck around?

No words could properly express the huge amounts of 'okay' it was for her to stay, so I smile broadly, took her hand, and swung it, looking foward at the path we walked down.

The end.

[OTN1]

My Own Private Funeral
story 6

Chapter 1 of 10

My eyes opened slowly, naturally.  No alarm clock woke me up this morning.  I looked around my room in the darkness.  The sun had not yet risen, although the faint beginnings of light were showing themselves.  The sun was just below the horizon, waiting patiently to appear.  Everything was still young, untouched by the aging light of day.

I rolled over onto my side and stared at the wall, my mind a blank.  The whiteness of the plaster was going to be bright within half an hour.  Bright like a fluffy cloud in the sky.  Now, though, it was a muted off-white, looking no more appealing than the sky on a cloudy day.

I took a deep breath in and closed my eyes in order to properly picture such a sky.

I looked up at the grey sky and saw the light struggling to get through but failing.  A slight shadow was cast on the land and the trees, but not a depressing one.  It simply dulled the shininess a slight bit.  People could hardly notice it.  The uniform cloud across the sky was not threatening, but comforting.  Protective.

I continued to stare up at the sky, imagining I could see through the clouds and out into space.

I looked back down to the land and saw trees, grass, and mountains.  A river in the distance.

It was a foreign land that I had never been to, although it did not surprise me to be here.  It was interesting.  Everything had a different smell, and the mountains were huge.  Much bigger than the ones I grew up around.  I looked at them, awed by their enormity.  The tops were capped with snow.  They were impenetrable fortresses.  The perfect border for a country with so much to protect.

The clouds that covered every corner of the sky seemed to bend and shape themselves around the mountains in a blatantly impossible disregard of the rules of weather systems and nature.  I was not a scientist, however, so I did not particularly care.  "It looks neat" was the best way I could describe it.

I carried on watching the sky.  I saw a break in the cloud cover.  A sole ray of sunlight thrust itself through, and as if setting a trend, more rays followed, seeming to widen the tear in the cloud.  A bit of warmth emerged and touched my face.  I smiled as the heat travelled through my skin and into my bones, heating them up in a pleasant way.  I felt at peace with everything in the world.  I was comfortable where I stood, comfortable in my skin.  I was truly and simply happy.

My peace was shattered by a terrible sound - a loud rumbling like a train - making me cringe.  From behind me it came like a charging bull out of control, rabid, leaving behind it a trail of dust so thick it could choke up an ocean.

As the plane passed overhead, it seemed to screech out words I could not understand.  Maybe it was the people inside yelling.  I watched in horror as the plane headed straight for the mountain.  I knew that it would never clear it.

I was proven right when the plane crashed nose first right into the side of the mountain, high up where the snow started.  It hardly made the sound I thought it would.  It was so far away that it sounded like someone had blown up a paper bag, popped it, and then muffled the echo.  A few mini explosions occurred and I saw a small fire start up.

Watching the scene unfold, I stood paralysed with fear, my stomach churning and making me feel sick.  I could swear that I heard screaming from the wreckage.  People begging for help...  But it would have been impossible to hear any voices from such a distance.

I was helpless.  I could do nothing.  I did not even have a cellular phone.

I overcame my paralysis and started to run, mapping out in my mind an impossible mission to scale a mountain with no equipment, no proper clothing, and no experience.  Each step I took I felt the sinking fear in me become worse and worse.  I was going to find something I did not like.

This did not stop me, though, for every step I took also made my sense of urgency increase tenfold.  I needed to get to my goal.  I needed to know some things.

I somehow scaled the mountain.  It was like I flew.  The wreckage of the plane was in my line of sight.  We were on the same level now.

I crawled over to it, exhausted, my hands and legs freezing up in the snow that covered the ground.

The fire I had seen break out was on the opposite end of the plane.  Conveniently, the side I was on was untouched by the flames.  There was a huge tear in the body of the plane where the wing had once been attached.  There was a perfect space beside it to crawl inside.  I did so.

The plane had been tipped over so that the wall of windows had become the floor.  As I reached the entrance, I could see bodies scattered along it.  They must have not had their seatbelts buckled up properly.  I ignored the disgust I felt welling up at the back of my throat and I crawled through the bodies, which I soon found were in fact dead bodies.

I kept going, looking for something.

I heard a whimper.  I looked sideways immediately.

There she was strapped into her seat, hanging from the "side" of the plane like a dead rag doll.

But she had made a sound.  She was alive.

I stood up quickly and undid the buckle at her stomach.  She started to tumble down, but I grasped at her, my hands slipping unexplainably as I helped her down safely.  I put her on an empty space on the windows, resting her on her back.

Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing.  Shallow, infrequent breaths.  She whispered something.

"What?" I asked, my voice sounding hollow.

"Water..." she rasped out.

I could not help but break out into a smile.  She could at least speak and evaluate her position.  She felt thirsty.  She knew she needed wa-

"W-water?" she repeated, this time in English.

I frowned.

"And... ex...tra blanket?  Please..."

I felt her forehead.  She was burning up.  She was delirious with what felt like fever but what was more conceivably shock and pain.  She did not know what had just happened.  She was speaking nonsense, probably repeating the phrases from her Learn English in 20 Minutes Per Day CDs.

When I brought my hand away from her brow, I noticed sticky blood on my fingers.  There was a lot.  Oddly, I did not feel hurt.  I inspected my hand for a cut, but I could find none.  I realised with a sinking heart that it was not my blood.

I pulled back to take a full look at the incapacitated girl.  Her shirt was wet.  Scared, I reached out to touch it.  It was cold and sticky.  When I pulled my hand back, my fear was confirmed by the blood that coated my fingers.  This was why my hands had slipped about when trying to help her down.

I pulled her torn sweater and shirt up ever so slightly and peered under, almost gagging in horror.  Something must have fallen in her lap during the crash.  There was a vicious, gaping wound in her stomach that I knew could not be repaired in time.  I pulled her clothes back down and looked for something to stop the bleeding.  I found a blanket and pressed it into her stomach.  I was sure that was not what she had wanted when she had asked for an extra blanket.

"Just keep breathing," I said quietly as though I were a paramedic.

"Water," she choked out, this time in her native tongue.

Then a miracle happened - she opened her eyes and looked right at me, tears of pain in her eyes.

"Help me," she pleaded in a weak, pathetic voice. 

Gone was strongest girl in the world, replaced by a feverish child who could barely breathe on her own.  My heart, had it not already broken, would have broken at that sight alone.

What did you say to someone when you knew her fate was sealed?  She knew what was to come, too.  I could tell.  The fear in her eyes was not born from nothing.

I nodded and I could not help starting to cry.  The tears overflowed and fell as I blinked them away.  My vision became blurred from too many tears.  I had to wipe my eyes quickly with one of my blood-covered hands.  My other hand took hers and squeezed.

"I'm helping you," I cried, my voice breaking.

"Water..."

I shook my head.

"I don't have any."

She suddenly gripped my hand in a surprisingly tight hold and looked directly into my eyes, her eyes wide open.  With a reserve of strength like that, maybe she would be all right and pull through...

"Mama," she whispered.  "Mama, I'm scared..."

I could not even begin to react to being mistaken for her mother because her hold on my hand slackened in an instant and she stopped breathing.

I shook her gently and then put my ear to her chest.  I could hear nothing.  No heart beat.  I put a hand over her mouth, but nothing happened.  No warm breath emerged.

She was dead.  No hope. 

I knew it.  I knew it before I had reached the crash site.

That is why I did not scream out her name, nor tell her to hang on and demand that she wake up.  She was fated to have gone, and nothing I could do would change it.  I resigned myself to this fact.

I touched her forehead once and then stood up, looking down at her.  She looked like she was in such pain.  Her eyes open in terror, her body twisted in an awkward position.

But she did not feel a thing.  Not a thing anymore.  She was off somewhere, flying to some other place where nothing could hurt her anymore.  Somewhere where she did not have to remember the pain she had just gone through.  It could be endless darkness and nothingness or it could be eternal light and bliss.  I did not know and did not presume to judge what did or did not happen after death.  All I knew was that she was there and I was not.

I left her body there.  I was not meant to bring it with me.  I walked out of the plane and out into the cold mountain winds.

I walked away from the plane.  I knew that it would eventually burn up.  The remaining fuel in the engine's tanks would make certain of it.  It would convert everything in that small flying machine into the elements that would float up into the sky and become smaller parts of the universe once more.  In a way comforting, in a way upsetting.

I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked out across the Italian Alps, mountains being all I could see.  The sun had fully emerged from the curtain of clouds that had held it hostage, and it now warmed my cold hands.  The blood on them began to dry and crack.  The snow below me became saturated with little red flakes.  I knelt down in the snow and put my hands in it, scrubbing them vigorously.  The snow at my knees turned a pale red.  I stared and thrust my hands deep under, keeping them there until I felt such burning that I had to pull them out.  Tears of pain came to my eyes, but I ignored them. 

I stood up and looked behind me.  The whole plane was on fire.  I could feel the heat on my back.  I watched as Aya's body floated up to the sky as smoke.

Bye bye, I thought.

I blinked away more tears.

It was like my own private funeral.  Saying goodbye.  Burning the body.  Seeing off her ashes.

All the things I never had a real chance to do.

I opened my eyes.  I had dozed off and had had the same daydream.

Correction.  It was a new dream, but it was a variation of an old dream of eight years.

The wall in front of me had become brighter.  The sun was peeking out over the horizon, signalling a new day.

A sad day for me.  The anniversary of a loved one's death was never a good day.  It seemed my subconscious was trying to help me overcome some of that remaining grief by giving me a sense of closure (albeit a strange one), but the grief would never be fully removed.  It could never be.

I turned over for the second time that morning and looked at the sunlight coming in through the blinds.  I lay in bed lazily, wishing that I had someone that would come in and yell at me for being so lazy.

But the one person who I would allow to scold me like that (besides my mother) was gone.  She had burned up into tiny atoms and floated into the sky along with two hundred strangers and a few tonnes of metal and fuel.

Maybe at night when I looked up at the stars, the brightest ones contained a bit of her in them.  She had always looked over me and taken care of me.  Maybe now she was in the position to take on the duty fulltime from above.

This was how I comforted myself.  Or maybe tricked myself.

Because I knew deep down inside that my dreams meant nothing.  My thoughts had no effect on the outside world.  Romantic ideas of souls surviving and guardian angels watching over me would get me nowhere.

So I heaved a sigh, rolled out of bed, and went to brush my teeth.  It was all I could do.  I was living in the world.

[OTN1]

Chapter 2 of 10

I had never smelled burning flesh before and I had never seen a dead body, yet these things seemed so familiar to me.  I did not dream of them every night, but often enough to remind me of mortality.  My own, as well as that of all the people around me.  We were fragile things.

But I had learned long ago that the thing more fragile than the body was the heart.  Especially mine.  I had always thought I was so strong.  That I could keep my real emotions packed tightly within me, hidden from view.

My opinion changed when I met Aya.  I am sure she never meant to, but when she started to become my friend, her mere presence made me realise how weak I was.  How fragile my mind was.  Instead of seeing this as a bad thing, I came to see it as something special.  Something that was so human and essential.  It made me feel more like a person who was worthy of the pleasures of life.  As simple a thing as smelling a sweetly-scented flower became more of a treat when I thought of it her way.

Aya had two sides to her personality.  One side was incredibly easy to please.  That was the side that I appealed to more often, whether I needed to tell her something important or I just wanted to make her laugh.  That side also influenced me, relaxed me, made me realise that basic things had great value. 

The other side of her was tougher than me, and I wished anyone trying to reason with that side a dry "good luck."  That was the side that I appealed to when I needed strength.  That side also reasoned with me when I was doing something stupid.  It kept me balanced when I overreacted.  She was not always right, though, and I learned how to tell her that.  I learned how to talk to her so that she would listen to me and understand me.  Perhaps my greatest accomplishment in the world was that.

However, I only let myself become like that around her.  To the rest of the world, my attitude was closer to the cold and calculating bitch that I am sure many of my coworkers wished to publicly label me as.  If my natural reaction was too strong or too personal, I would hide it and pull out one of my set expressions or responses.  I tried to appear in control of myself every second of the day, although I did not go so far as to alienate myself from everyone.  Of course I had my moments of weakness.  Moments when I would cry, laugh uncontrollably, or show a friend or co-worker pity.  Genuine displays of those were infrequent, though, and after they happened, I would quickly revert to my composed self.  It was my coolness.  I gave myself a little more leeway on television.  Everybody knew TV was mostly an act anyway and that we were ordered around and scripted to no end.  I could not be held entirely responsible for the things I said and did there.

Over the years, Aya had been my unwavering post.  A dock where I could land and roam around free, anchored by nothing.  Thinking about it now, it was very therapeutic, especially after I became fully comfortable around her.  In all the years we stood together, I grew into a respectable person because of her.  I learned to love properly because of her.  Even if I had not been in love with her, she would have taught me how to use my heart.  If it had not been her I gave my heart to, whoever I did give my heart to would have Aya to thank for its ability to work.  We had a special connection that transcended everything else.  One that had nothing to do with romantic love.  We had just happened to take it that way.

If Aya-chan taught us and the people on this world how to do something, it was to love and how to use our hearts. I think you've learned the most out of all of us. Don't let that knowledge go to waste.

Shiba-chan's words echoed in my head.  She had spoken those words eight years ago, and I had forgotten them until recently.  Until last night, in fact.  I had taken a trip through my memories and had finally had the courage to sit quietly and think about my first conversation with Shiba-chan after we had found out about Aya's death.  Before yesterday, it was one of my most reviled memories.  I never let myself fully recall all of its details.  Since remembering every little detail the previous night, however, it had remained lodged like a stubborn thorn in my mind.  Those few sentences repeated themselves over and over in my mind.

With a start, I realised where I was.  I was kneeling on the floor of my kitchen and picking up some uncooked grains of rice that I had spilled the night before.  I had become lost in thought, something that happened often around this time of year.

I got up and threw the rice in the sink. 

Aya always yelled at me when I did something like that even when there was a little net in the drain to catch unwanted particles.  I smirked.  She was probably screaming her head off now if she was watching me.  I wished I could tease her about how uptight she was about that sort of thing, but of course I could not.  I felt a chill go through me as I sobered up and went off to make my bed.

Shiba-chan was absolutely right, I thought as I tucked the corners of the sheets under the mattress.  I should not let the valuable lessons I had learned from Aya go to waste.  I knew I would never find someone I could connect to the same way I did with Aya, but that should not have been something to stop me from finding new friends and finding a new environment for me to get along with people in.  I knew at the very least I should revive those feelings, remember how they tasted, and channel them into something useful.

It was easier thought than done.

I found myself standing beside my bed with the pillow in my hands.  I shook my head and continued fixing up the bed, putting the pillow where it belonged.

At seven o'clock am I took my jacket and left my apartment, walking briskly to the station.  It took me almost forty minutes and two transfers to get to where I was headed.  It was worth it, though.  The powerful feelings that welled up in me were a welcome change from the constant drone of halfway feelings.

I walked up to the concert hall doors and put a hand on one of the handles.  I knew it was locked so I did not try to open it.  I looked up at the building and tried to remember a day about fifteen years ago.  The day that I first met Aya.  The concert we had attended.  How we happened to find each other there and recognise each other.  We had clicked.  I had been polite and civil to her, but some sort of excitement had rumbled beneath my surface.  I knew who she was, and I had my assumptions about the kind of person she would be, but I had thrown away my expectations after a few moments in her presence because she was so much more than what people saw on television.  It felt like instant friendship.

I was wary for a while, of course, hardly able to believe that she could be such a good person.  I waited nervously for the day she turned on me and transformed into a horrific purple monster.  That moment had never come, and my fears dissipated and were forgotten.  She became my best friend.  I had never had one like her before.  Back home I had called some friends my "best friends," but they did not come even close to what Aya and I had.

I moved away from the doors and walked around the complex.

The first meeting.  Fifteen years ago.  We had lived on the earth while knowing each other for seven years.  That was hardly anything.  A couple of footsteps along a thirty kilometre long road.

I grit my teeth in anger.  I fought my anger on a regular basis.  I had been getting better at keeping it in, placating myself when I became distressed over the unjustness of the world, but it had a habit of lashing out from within at bad times.

My anger turned to pain and then into sadness.  I did not hold back my tears, however.  Not today.  I was allowed to cry, and so I did.  I stopped walking and sat down behind the building near a fire exit.  I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them, letting my tears flow with no worry of being discovered.

But I had trouble figuring out what I cried for.  Was I crying for Aya, a girl who had died prematurely?  Or was I crying for myself?   For my situation - my loneliness, my numbed state, my loss?

I grimaced at the thought of such selfish tears.  I was sickened.  I hoped that my grief went beyond that.  I tried to bring up my least favourite memories and aspects of Aya and cried harder because there was nothing I did not like about her.  Our most vicious of fights was better than nothing.  Her most biting words would be like a warm bath to me now.

I began to cry harder as I remembered her.  I let out a sob.  A little too loud.  I looked around to see if anybody was around.  I could not see a soul, but I began to not care.  I put my face down and wrapped my arms around my head, crying loudly into my knees.

The harder I cried, the more I began to understand that I was crying for the both of us.  I cried for myself because I was lonely and miserable without her.  I cried for her because she had been in the middle of living with such vigour and happiness when it was all torn away from her in a few minutes.  I cried for the both of us because if we were not together, then there were two hearts in the world that were incomplete and crying out for something.

"It'll never..." I squeezed out of my tight throat as tears wet my lips.  "It'll never..."

I could not finish my sentence because I was choking.  My throat constricted and I started to breathe spasmodically as I tried to control myself.  I was crying so hard I could not catch my breath.  I heard Aya's soothing voice in my head.

"Calm down.  Shhhh... shhh.... You're safe here."

She stroked my hair slowly and held my hand as I lay curled up in pain on my bed.

"Shhhh.  I'll stay here." .

Whenever I became so depressed that I felt like I was going to suffocate, I would remember times when Aya had calmed me down when I was sick.  They were some of my most vivid memories because she was so perfect in them.  She did not tease me or make jokes.  She gave me one hundred and fifty per cent of her caring attention and would sit beside me, hold my hand, and tell me it would be okay.

My breathing slowed down and became steady again.  I stopped sobbing so hard.  I concentrated on the memory and imagined that Aya was here with me, leaning her shoulder against mine and letting me know that I was not alone.

I took a few minutes to compose myself before I stood up and continued to walk around the building.  My eyes must have still been red, but at least I could breathe again.

Aya was not coming back.  She had died eight years ago in a fiery plane crash in the Italian Alps after the plane had lost control in a bad weather system and veered off course.  When I had wordlessly said my goodbyes to her in Tokyo before she left for her three month business trip, I had not known that it would be goodbye forever.

My circle around the concert hall complete, I left without a look back.  Being there was too painful.  I wandered to my next goal.

I had done this same thing for the past seven years.  I had visited the places that had meant something to me and Aya.  They varied from year to year, but I always did go to a few.  I would visit where we first met, first took purikura, first went for coffee... One year I had even travelled down to Kobe and stayed at the same hotel we had stayed at after her nineteenth birthday concert.   Many firsts there, too.

That had been the most painful day.  I barely succeeded in containing my tears until after I had gone through the check-in process.  When I had reached my room - the same room we had stayed in - I had broken down and not moved for the entire night.  Maybe I had overreacted.  Now that I was on Tokyo soil, I could think so.  But I knew that once I was in the situation, it was hard to keep a level head and judge my behaviour.  In layman's terms (my preferred way of thinking), bad things happened and I got sad.

My next destination was reached.  It was the one place out of all that I went to every year.  I entered the coffee shop and ordered tea.  The place was one that we had gone to often because it was quiet and out of the way.  I could not remember the first time we had discovered it, but apparently we liked it enough to keep patronising it for many years.  I often wondered how it could still be in business after so many years.  I had expected it to suddenly go out of business and disappear without a word, much like many things in this city.

The owner of the place was somewhat of an enigma.  She had come to know me and Aya by sight, but she rarely spoke to us.  Occasionally she would ask if we were well.  When Aya had died, I did not visit for a year.  After, I would go infrequently.  At first I had been afraid that the staff would start acting strangely around me.  Aya's fame was not a secret from them, and neither was news of her death.  They did not say a word, however, and they treated me no differently than before.  The owner asked no questions about the girl missing from my side and continued to putter about behind the counter, asking me how I was every few months. 

There was one thing that the owner did do for me.  She had probably pieced together my tradition after the first two times, and from the third time I went there, I noticed that for that dreary week in October, she put fresh floral arrangements on all the tables.  Simple white flowers in small glasses.  Neither of us had said anything, but my continued patronage at that place said enough: I appreciated the gesture.

This year, the owner came and sat with me for the first time.

"Mind if I sit here?" she asked in her whispery voice.

She reminded me of an American hippie from the olden days.

I did mind, but I did not want to be rude.  I shook my head and she took a seat.

"I have a bone to pick with you," she started.

I sighed.  I did not want to fight on this day.

"What?"

"Why don't you ever order the recommended desert?"

"What?" I asked in surprise.

What kind of question was that?

"You order all of them except for the recommended one.  Why?"

I was at a loss for words.  There was no reason.  I just did not look at that part of the menu where the recommended desert was written.  I told the owner as much.

"Fujimoto-san," the owner began, addressing me by name for the first time in the ten years I had been going to her shop, "for the past six years I have struggled to come up with the most appropriate desert for this day especially for you, yet you have snubbed my efforts six times.  I've had enough!"

I looked at the woman in horror.  Had I snubbed her?  I had done no such thing! 

"I'm... sorry?" I apologised unsurely.

"Don't apologise.  Just order the damned recommended desert!"

I made an "eep!" sound and ordered the dish. 

It was brought out quickly and placed in front of me.  The owner looked on proudly as I inspected it.

It was a slice of vanilla cake with white icing, served with white powdered sugar on a shiny white plate.

I'm sensing a white theme here, I thought sarcastically.

"I made it myself."

I nodded my thanks and tried it.  It was delicious.

But why had she been making deserts for me for the past six years?  Because I had lost my friend?  Was I really important enough a customer to be slaving away at the kitchen over?

I looked up at her to ask, but she was gone.  I looked around and could not spot her.  Had she disappeared into the back?  How had I not noticed her leave the table?

I poked at the cake with my fork.  At least the fork was silver.

But the cake was entirely white.  The flowers were white.

The colour reminded me of Aya.  Or rather, the interpretation of the colour reminded me of her. 

There were two ideas.  One was the obvious.  Death.  White was the colour of death.  Aya was dead.

The other was along the lines of pure and innocent.  Now, Aya was never the little goody goody everyone thought her to be, but her heart was good.  When she felt things, she did not go halfway.  She gave everything her all.  I could give a hundred examples (all involving me) of her complete lack of innocence, yet she had still sometimes retained a childlike view of things that would make me laugh as our roles reversed.

Sometimes I would picture her dressed all in white, floating above me like an angel in a movie, but without the religious connotations of one.  She would watch over me, guide me through trouble, celebrate with me in times of happiness, hold my hand when I was sad, and laugh at me when I was silly.

It was the same role as the one she had had when she had been alive.  That was part of what she had been for me.  A guardian.  She had taken care of me.

She had taken care of me!

I took a quick bite of cake and chewed thoughtfully.

She had taken care of me, and in my own way, I had taken care of her.  Now that she was gone, there was nobody there to take care of me.  Conversely, there was nobody for me to take care of.

That meant....

I chewed some more cake.

That meant...

The giddiness in me started to fade.  I had thought I was on the verge an idea.  Some sort of revelation that would make life from now on as perfect as it could get without Aya.  I was excited for nothing.  Nothing came of my thoughts.  There was no meaning behind the white flowers and white cakes.  The owner of the coffee shop was simply being hospitable and showing her respect, not trying to send me a message.

With a sigh, I finished my cake quickly, swallowing down my tears, and I left the shop without trying to find the owner to thank her.

I went back home and lay on the covers of my bed, staring up at the ceiling.  The white ceiling.  I turned on my side and looked at the wall.  The white wall.  I closed my eyes in frustration, but all I could see was the imprint of the white wall.  This presence of white was beginning to annoy me.  It meant nothing.  It was an empty symbol.

Except...

As I lay there with my eyes closed, I remembered a day almost ten years ago.  It was winter and we were lying on the carpeted floor, covered in blankets and reading magazines.

"Hey, Miki."

I looked up from my horoscope.

"It says here that when you die, all you see is white."

My eyebrow twitched.

"Why are you reading an article like that?" I asked.

"It's interesting.  You've read about near-death experiences before, haven't you?"

I nodded carefully.

"This talks about seeing white at the end of the tunnel.  Some people have survived it, but they guess that when the time comes and you die, you're thrown into a room of white light."

I had no good response.

"What do you think?  Don't you think that would be strange?  Closing your eyes and finding yourself in the light?"

I squirmed uncomfortably.

"Why are you thinking about this?  You're not dying anytime soon," I said, trying to brush off the scary topic.

"What do you think?" Aya insisted.

I shrugged.

"I think when you close your eyes, you see what you always see: black.  And bits of colour.  But eventually just black," I murmured.  I shook my head.  "Anyhow, when you die, your eyes stop working and you can't see anything.  The question is meaningless.  You wouldn't see white or black or anything."

"There you go being all practical," Aya grumbled.

Funny, that was usually my complaint about her.

"I just don't want to talk about dying.  It worries me," I said in a small voice.

She took the hint right away and closed her magazine, leaning over my shoulder to share mine.  I forgot about the conversation as she read horoscopes with me.

A room of white light.

Is that where Aya had gone?  Had she seen white after she took her final breath? 

I thought about it hard. 

I wanted her to have seen that white light.  To have seen black would have been too gloomy.  Too unforgiving. 

I wanted her to have been happy in her final moments. 

I wanted her to have smiled and to have had no regrets. 

I wanted her to have known that I would never forget a thing about her.

I would never know what really happened, though.  Thousands of kilometres and eight years lay between me and her.  An eternal distance.

The only thing I could do was remember.

So that is what I did on that day.  I remembered everything.  I remembered and cried.

Forever goodbyes were too hard.

[OTN1]

Chapter 3 of 10

That memorial was a big waste of time.

That is what someone looking from a cold, rational point of view would think.

I did not believe that was quite true.  Yes, I got nothing practical done and I spent the entire day essentially moping, but it was cathartic.  I was able to cry it all out.

The following day was always hard to face.  This year I had to go into work, but bits and pieces of sadness still lingered in me.

Shibata e-mailed me.  She said hello, asked if I was well, and confirmed our late evening coffee date for next Thursday.  She mentioned nothing about the anniversary of Aya's death, but the act of sending an e-mail on that day (when she could have sent it much later) said it all.  Why say "I'm sad, too" or "I thought of Aya yesterday" when she could just poke her head in and remind me that I had someone to talk to.  Like I said time and time again about my friends, they knew what gave me comfort and what made me uncomfortable.  If Shibata had sent me an e-mail saying "I'm thinking of you", I would have felt embarrassed and she would have lost points.  She knew that.

Not once had Shibata asked what I did on that sad memorial day.  I had always preferred it that way.  I did not want to talk about something so personal.  However, for the entire week, all I had wanted was for Shibata to ask me.  This perturbed me, but made me even more eager to meet her.

I wrote back and said I was fine and that I would see her next Thursday.

The week passed by in a blur.  Thursday came quickly and I found myself standing in front of an Italian restaurant, waiting for the tardy Shibata.  We had both changed our coffee date to a dinner one at the last minute since neither of us had eaten yet.  She arrived running and her evident happiness outshone my own eagerness to talk to her.

We greeted, went inside, and ordered dinner.  As we started sipping white wine, we began to get into the meat of the talk.  I started us up.

"Okay, enough pleasantries.  What's your news?"

I was certain I knew what it was.  Certain.

"Well, you know I've been dating Yuya for four years," she started, her tone giddy, her face absolutely beaming. 

I smiled because of it.  I looked down to pick a piece of fluff off the table and then looked back up at her.

"Yes," I urged her on.

He asked her... He asked her...

"I asked him to marry me!"

My prepared exclamation of "congratulations" got stuck in my mouth and never made it past my lips. 

I had not expected that.

"Whh... you...?  You asked him ?"

"Mmhm," she responded in a peppy voice.

"And he said... yes?"

"Of course!  We've set the date for next summer," she grinned.

I groaned.

"Shiba-chan, you forgot the first rule.  Never ask him.  He's got to ask you.  That way you can be sure he approves of the idea.  Marriage is a big, scary deal for guys."

"I thought you'd be way more open-minded than that," Shibata sighed.

"Well, no.  I mean...  It's sort of..."

It was just the way I had grown up.  The way I had been taught to think.

"Besides, what would you know?" she deadpanned teasingly.

Double ouch.  She had a point.  But oh, how uncharacteristic of me it would be to simply accept my loss.

"I've been proposed to!" I cried out defensively, taking a nervous gulp of wine.

"Yeah.  By your sixty-three-year-old boss," she continued to tease.

"He was serious at the time!"

"You mean he was drunk at the time," Shibata corrected.  "But did his asking mean he was ready for marriage?"

"He was already married..." I said, feeling the need to argue dwindle.

I was losing this one fast.

"And your reply to him?"

"Was no..."

I shrunk in my seat.

"Because?"

"I wasn't ready for it," I said defiantly.

Shibata laughed at my dismal attempt to save my pride.  I let her have her laugh before we moved on.

"I'm happy for you," I said genuinely. 

"Thank you."

We made a toast to happy summer weddings, and then I made her tell me all the details.  For twenty minutes I grilled her with questions and she answered.  Everything from the month of the ceremony, the proposed honeymoon destination, and even the wild idea of having children.

When our food arrived, we ate in silence for a bit, both hungry from a long day of work.  All the while, I begged some higher power to make Shibata ask me about last Tuesday.

"So what about you?" she asked.

I looked up and finished chewing.

"Anything new in your life?"

I knew she meant to ask anyone.

"No," I replied.  "Busy with work.  I'm recording an album.  No time for play."

I winked, but I guess the smile fell off my face a little too quickly.

"You know..." she said, her voice going into a certain zone that I knew was serious. "I think you need to lighten up."

Talk about being frank.

"I take plenty of time off.  Last Tuesday, for example."

It was my subtle hint to ask me what I had done, but she did not go for the bait.

"Ever since Aya died, you don't make any real effort," she said bluntly.

My stomach twisted at hearing the abrupt mention of her death and at the sounds of a fight I heard building up in Shibata’s voice.  We had had this argument before. 

I sighed.

"That's not true.  I make an effort," I responded, getting ready to list off my examples.

I could not get another word in edgewise, for she continued.

"No, you don't.  You sit around and think about the past.  You cry about it, but you don't make any effort to change it."

Never before had she bitten into me with such aggression.  It hurt me enough to make me want to cry, but of course I did not.  My defence mechanism started up.

"Well, what else can I do about it?  I can't change it.  The past happened.  You know that," I retaliated angrily.

"You could stand to learn from it.  Eight years, Miki-chan.  Eight years and you haven't grown up one bit."

Why was she ragging on me now all of a sudden??  I hushed up and did not speak a word.  I sat there staring at her, fuming.

"You're still the same.  No... gloomier.  Destroying yourself bit by bit."

I swallowed my fear and looked at her through narrowed eyes.  She put her fork down and stared back.  We sat, locked in a battle of wills in a cosy Italian restaurant in Shinagawa.  It was not exactly an ideal situation.

What she had said... she was right.

But what did she know?  What kind of connection did she have with Yuya?  What did she understand?

"And if you think I don't understand what you and Aya had," she said, displaying her ability to read minds, "then you're right.  I don't.  But it doesn't mean I don't appreciate it."

I fought the urge to walk out of the restaurant.

"I know you hate hearing this kind of thing, but I do care about what happens to you.  There are lots of people around you who do.  If you would give us a chance, you could be happier.  Maybe be able to love some people a bit.  Don't think that associating with other people and being happy is some act of betrayal."

Inside I cringed.  Yet deeper insider, I agreed.

"I don't think it's a betrayal," I spoke tentatively.  "I just... I can't let go.  It hurts too much."

I was comfortable enough to admit that much.

"Of course it does," Shibata said, her tone doing a one hundred and eighty degree flip and turning soft and sympathetic.  "I told you already before that it's not easy.  But after a few steps, it gets better.  You have to make an effort."

I remembered her words.  Eight years ago.

"Remember how you told me that Aya had taught us - me - how to use our hearts?"

She smiled knowingly and nodded.

"And how you told me not to waste what I'd learned?  I think I've wasted it."

I could tell that she knew my admission hurt me.

"No you haven't."

But she gave me no further evidence.  I must have blown it big-time.

"Do you know what I did last Tuesday?" I asked, finally opening up the touchy subject myself. 

Shibata shook her head, so I explained.  I went on to tell her that I had done it every year for the past seven years.  She listened, holding her comments back.

"And so my whole life revolves around that one day.  My year is spent preparing to go on my little walk down memory lane.  You're right.  All I do is sit around and cry," I said bitterly.

"Miki-chan, I had no idea you did that every year.  All alone?"

"Yup."

She looked sad.

"You need to share it with someone.  You need to talk to someone," she said passionately.

I arched an eyebrow.

"The last set of friends I had that tried to convince me to see a shrink got the eternal brush off," I warned her.

"No, not a shrink," Shibata said in a repulsed way as though such a thought would never occur to her.  "I mean friends.  Friends!  Me, whoever else you talk to, family.  We can help you.  A shrink can't give you love, but we can."

I sighed for the nth time that night.

"I'd love to, but not many people know the whole story.  My best kept secret, remember?"

"I know it.  But people don't have to know the whole story to help."

"I can't," I said dejectedly, lowering my voice.

"Can't what?"

"Confide in you."

I truly could not.  The only person I could talk to did not exist in this world anymore.  I was unrelenting in my opinion about that.

"What do you think, Miki?" Shibata sighed.  "That Aya's going to come back?  That the universe is going to go 'oops, mistake!' and spit her back up?"

Gone was the niceness.  Back was her cold, hard tone.

Aya still alive?  I knew it was impossible.

But what if something crazy happened?  I did not go so far as to believe she would be resurrected, and I did not believe any sort of conspiracy theory that claimed Aya was an intelligence officer who had faked her death in order to go into deep cover (I had actually read a piece in a magazine that had suggested something so idiotic).

But what if...

What if this was all a dream?  A nightmare, rather.

Or what if she had survived but had lost her memory and was now living in a reclusive northern Italian village with a kind, adoptive family that had never seen an Asian before?

No, that was unlikely.  All I knew was that I could not let go for reasons that were unclear even to me.  It was a gut feeling that told me remembering Aya was important.  It was all that I was familiar with anyway.

"She's not coming back."

Hard words that felt like sandbags in my ears.

I knew it.  I understood it.  But the irrational part of me had had too many years to grow bigger and stronger.

"I know that," I scowled darkly.

We were silent as we ate for another few minutes.

"Miki-chan, have you ever been to Italy?"

"Excuse me?"

"Italy.  Have you ever been?"

Another one-eighty.  This time no anger.  Just curiosity.

"No," I answered.

"You should go.  It's a beautiful country.  I've been once."

Shibata took a casual bite of lettuce, the crunch clearly audible.

I nodded blankly.

"When Yuya's finished his dissertation, he's going to move to Tokyo."

More words out of the blue.  If she had been anyone else, I would have thought she was desperately trying to change the subject to keep the awkwardness away from our table.  But this was Shiba-chan, and she would never do something trivial like that.  She always had a point.  The trouble was sometimes it was hard to get.

"Oh?" I said politely.

I knew that Yuya was studying in a university in Kyushu.  He had six more months before his final paper was due.  Shibata's was due a term later.

"Then we can live together once our papers have been judged and the decision has been made.  We're just waiting for our universities to seal our fates,” she said with a chuckle.

"I see."

She smiled at me.

"And you're wondering why I'm suddenly saying all this."

I gave her a silent, affirmative look.

"Come on," she said, looking down at my plate to see I was finished.  "Let's get out of here and go for a walk."

She drained her glass of wine, wiped her mouth carefully on a serviette, and stood up.  I scrambled to copy her, following her to the cash register.  We paid for our meal and left.

We did not speak for some time.  Without warning, Shibata linked her arm around mine and walked in stride with me.  I became very uncomfortable.  She was not usually the overly-affectionate type.

"Why don't you take some time off work?" she asked.

"And do what?"

"Travel.  Go somewhere.  For example, Italy."

The symbolism of travelling to Aya's final resting place was not lost on me.

"Now's not a good time," I mumbled, reminding her that I was recording an album.

"Now is a perfect time," she insisted, playfulness working into her voice.

I shrugged out of her hold and walked alone once again.

"What are you angry at?" she asked as she walked a pace behind me.  I looked back at her.

"I'm not angry with you," I said quickly to kill any misunderstanding.

"No, you're angry at something.  What is it?  The mountain for being in the way?"

What a cruel, tasteless joke!  I could not believe she had just said that.

And yet she was right.  Was I angry at plate tectonics for creating the mountain that Aya's plane had crashed into?  The Earth for not being a flat plain?  The plane's manufacturer?  Whose fault was it?

Nobody's.

"No, it's not anybody's fault," I said quietly.

"And you don't have some sick, hair-brained idea that it's all your fault, do you?"

I laughed involuntarily.

"No, I'm not that stupid."

I had learned my lesson about being that insecure.

"Then why the anger?"

It was the only question I did not try to deny or answer.  I just looked at her without expression to show her I did not know the answer.

"Don't be scared," she said.

The last person who had said those words to me and had meant them was Aya.  And now, today, someone was saying them to me again and she meant them.

Suddenly I felt like a rotten, selfish, blind, hypocritical moron.  Here I was ignoring all of this girl's attempts to help me, while inside I was crying out for someone to listen to my fears.  Could I have been any stupider?

But I could not tell her this.  I did not know the words and the correct way to say it, so for the time being, I concluded, I had to keep silent. 

But perhaps I could do something - say something - to hint at what I was thinking.  To show her that I was going to take her advice from now on.

"Where in Italy do you recommend?"

She smiled widely and took my arm again, a hold that this time I willed myself not to squirm out of, as she began to single-handedly plan my trip.

I think she got my hint.

[OTN1]

Chapter 4 of 10

The next day, Shibata skipped out on an important dinner gathering with several professors in order to help me plan.  I knew what that kind of sacrifice could cost her, so I tried to be as amiable as possible as we sat at the computer in her apartment.  I doodled on the pad of paper I had brought with me and then put my pen down as I was filled with doubt.

"Are you sure I should go?"

"What do you think?"

Ug, that infamous Shibata expression.  Trying to make me think for myself!

"I guess it'd be nice to see a new place..." I said hesitantly.

She grabbed my shoulders and shook me enough to wake me up.

"Go.  It'll be good for you.  And if you don't go, I'll never talk to you again."

She was starting to sound a bit like Aya, which creeped me out more than making me feel warm and fuzzy.

"I don't even know where to start," I whined.

"How about Rome?" she said simply, and I groaned at the relaxed attitude showing through in her words.

"Fine.  So I'll go to Rome.  Then what do I do?  Look at churches and fountains all week?" I asked caustically.

"No, you don't have to stay in Rome.  Travel around a bit.  Maybe go up north to the mountains," Shibata said with such nonchalance that I put my foot down right there and pierced her with a glare.

"Oh no.  No, don't start with that.  I'm not going to go on a pilgrimage to some plane crash site so that I can make peace with the ghosts of the past and come back refreshed and ready to open my heart to the entire world," I snapped, foreseeing where her suggestion was going.

"I never suggested that," Shibata said quietly.  "I went up to the mountains when I was there.  It's beautiful.  I thought you might like it, too."

I could not tell if she was lying or speaking the truth.  Because I remembered I was trying to be nice, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.  I grudgingly backed off.

"Any place in particular?"

Shibata thought briefly, no doubt sifting through the great amounts of information in her brain, and then nudged me over to type something on the keyboard.

"There's a tiny place right on the border.  It's where I went with my team."

"Team?" I asked, getting us off topic.

"Mmhm.  My photography team," she clarified as she took the mouse and started to go through some websites.

Shibata had a photography team?!

"Since when did you join a photography team?" I asked in surprise.

She stopped clicking on links and looked at me.

"It's one of my hobbies.  I joined a group a while ago, and every few years we go somewhere new in the world and take pictures.  Just an amateur thing, really.  I thought you knew."

She went back to surfing the internet and I looked around desperately for a hard wall to bash my head into.  Was there nothing this girl could not do?  I bet she had climbed Mount Everest, too.  She resembled one of those overactive, eager-to-please high school students that joined every club and every cause.  She wasn't as peppy and obnoxious as one, though. 

"Here," Shibata said, pointing to a webpage.  "It's small, but comfortable.  The people there were fantastic."

I stared at the words on the page.  They were meaningless to me because they were all in Italian.  I told Shibata that, and after apologising in advance for her lack of Italian skills, she proceeded to translate the entire page for me.

Her modesty was far too exaggerated, but at least it was genuine and better than the boastful alternative.

"It sounds nice," I said with a little less apprehension in my voice.

As I looked at the pictures of snow-covered mountains, I felt an indescribable chill pass through me.

"Okay, then how about you start in Rome for a few days and move up to..."

We spent the evening planning out my trip, Shibata making suggestions and giving me advice as I absorbed it all and tried to make decisions.

When I went home that night, clutching a neatly folded piece of paper with price estimates, recommended hotels, and names of tourist sites to see, I felt a mixture of confusion and relief.

I was relieved because Shibata had helped tremendously.  She had helped me map out an approximate route for my week-long stay, and she had provided me with helpful information and even the names of some Japanese friends she had in Florence.

I was confused because I still was not sure why I was going.  I had gotten angry at the thought of being sent there just so I could go and make peace with the mountains. 

The mountains that had caused so much pain for me.  They jutted out violently from the earth and towered over me, terrifying me, threatening to devour me, swallow me up into the rolling, never-ending cold and darkne-

I shut my eyes tightly.  I saw specks of colour dance across a backdrop of blackness.

I don't want to go and see where she died, I screamed in my mind.

I did not want to be reminded of it anymore.  I was sick of seeing it in my head and in my dreams.

I sat on my couch, shaking at the overwhelming feelings in me that triggered an urge to run away.  My fingers trembled as I tried to smooth out my hair a bit.  I needed a semblance of order in a world that I thought had become a chaotic and spinning mess of all that was negative.  I sat on my hands when they would not stop shaking and I took deep breaths, trying to push out of my mind the familiar vision of a plane crashing explosively into a mountain, people screaming in fear and pain, bleeding all over themselves and strangers, moaning for help, dying in unceremonious, disgraceful heaps on the freezing cold floor of the plane, burning into little bits as the flames consumed them indiscriminately, being forgotten by everyone that survived them...

I grit my teeth, closed my eyes again, and lay down on my side, curling up into a tight ball and holding my knees to my chest.  I trried to conjure up images of ice cream, cherry blossoms, my parents' faces... Anything pleasant in my life.  Anything that would flush out the nightmares that lived in my head.

Maybe my disowned friends were right.  Maybe I did need help.

[OTN1]

Chapter 5 of 10

For the first time in four years, I overslept and was late for work.  We had a meeting first thing in the morning with bosses from our two main sponsor companies.  I was supposed to be present at that meeting for reasons I could not understand.  Maybe they wanted to check out the goods to make sure it was worth keeping their money in our company.  They were always a bit sleazy like that, but I could not complain.  It was business after all.  We used them in other, worse ways.

I ran into the building at half past ten, trying unsuccessfully to catch my breath.  The meeting had been slated for nine o'clock sharp.  It was supposed to go for two or three hours, including a break at the midway point.

When Tanaka, the secretary, caught sight of me, she jumped up and grabbed me, ushering me into a little room beside the meeting room while scolding me for being so careless.  I outranked her in our company, but she was older than me and I really respected and liked her, so I hung my head down and allowed her to unleash sharp words about how I looked like a mess and was not presentable to the rest of the world and that the inevitable fall of our company was entirely my fault, etcetera, etcetera.

When she finished her scolding, I found myself feeling bad.  She took pity on me, smiled, and told me that I still had a chance to save everything.

"Just be yourself.  Everyone likes that tough Fujimoto charm."

I snorted.

"Don't try to fool me.  Nobody likes that."

She looked like she had been caught in a lie and then laughed while patting my shoulder.

"Well, they might not like it, but they'll definitely fall victim to it.  They all do."

So I went into the meeting room.  Feeling a bit stronger because of Tanaka, I bullied the two big bosses - by sweet-talking and complimenting them - into agreeing to a three-year binding contract with us.  I had perfected the art of passive aggressive coercion, and I could see my boss almost tearing up with gratitude.

When the talks were concluded, my boss came up to me in private.

"You did a wonderful job here.  Thank you very much."

I smiled and nodded.  He lowered his voice.

"If you are ever late for another meeting again, I will fire you."

I sighed as he walked out of the meeting room.  I knew he did not mean it, but this would be all over the company within hours.  I could just hear the conversations now...

"Miki got the big boys to sign a three-year contract, but she was late for the meeting!"

"I heard Bossman threatened to fire her."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"From his secretary.  She overheard."

"That Miki.  She's got it coming to her."

"Yeah.  What's up with her anyway?  Always so stoic.  Gives me chills."

"But she's so hot.  I mean, she's two years older than  me, but she doesn't look it."

"Huh!  Yeah, I'd do her.  I don't care how old she is."

"I  hear she's single."

"Haha, I bet she goes through 'em like fire through tissue."

"Well, I heard she hasn't had a boyfriend in over ten years."

"Yeah right.  She's probably been fucking the boss.  Why does he always get the hot girls and we don't?"

"Because we're only security guards.  And you're married, you wanker."

"Yeah, but that didn't stop me before."

"You two are horrible!"

"Uh... ah... Fujimoto-san.  H-how can I help you?"

"You can start by confessing to your wife and apologising to her!"

"AAAAAAA!!!!"

Screaming ensued.

I smiled as I imagined scolding them, unleashing my sexy and dangerous words on them.

Sometimes I let my imagination run wild with the conversations that the people around me must have had regarding me, and they often ended with me bursting onto the scene and scaring them.

"Fujimoto-san.  Call on line two!" Tanaka's voice called out, breaking me out of my reverie. 

I walked out of the empty room and over to the phone at Tanaka's desk.  My heart sped up to insane speeds and I swallowed down my fear as I picked up the phone, pressing the button for the correct line.

"Hello?"

"Have you done it yet?"

I groaned.

"Shiba-chan, leave me alone."

Last night after my strange fit, Shibata had happened to call me to give me a final pep talk just before going to bed.  She had made me promise to tell my manager the next day about my upcoming trip and then she said good night and hung up while I sat there wondering why I felt like a tamed lion that was being made to jump through the hoops that she held.

Since when did I get totally and completely owned by Shibata?!

"You haven't, huh?  Do it now!" she encouraged me.

Ordering me around like she's my master.

"I'm gonna do it in a second.  Relax!" I snapped in reply.

Nobody but one person had ever owned me.

"I am relaxed.  You're the one who's uptight," she laughed lightly.

Teasing me.  Nobody got away with teasing.  Just one person.

"Why didn't you call me on my cell phone?" I demanded.

I always insisted that calls to me on the main line at work were in the case of emergency only.  Emergencies like having to notify me of a sudden death...

"I did but you didn't pick up."

I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder and used both hands to search through my purse.  I could not find my phone.

"Shit," I swore quietly.  "I left it at home."

I tried to picture in my mind where I would have left it.

"-an, are you okay?"

Did she just call me Miki-tan?  If she did, I'm going to kill her!

"Miki-chan?"

I'm hearing things.  I'm hearing things...

"I'm fine!" I barked into the phone, quite obviously not fine.  "Don't call me again here.  I'll call you later."

I slammed the phone down on the hook and Tanaka jumped.

"Get drunk and give your work number to a stranger last night?" she asked jokingly, but I was in no mood for kidding around.

"A really annoying friend," I growled, and I stalked off, probably killing my chances of ever becoming friends with Tanaka.

I headed to the little alcove they called my office and I sat down on my chair, turning the stereo on and plugging my earphones in to listen to music.  The digital readout said that my files were being played randomly.  Old Christina Aguilera music started to screech into my ears and I picked up a pen and doodled on a piece of paper on my desk.

Christina switched to Suzuki Masako.  Suzuki Masako switched to Koda Kumi.  Koda Kumi switched to Matsuura Aya.

I hit skip.

Britney Spears' earlier works.  Two tracks played.

It switched into Matsuura Aya.

I hit the skip button.

Natsukawa Rimi.  Boring.  Not in the mood.  Skip.

Matsuura Aya.

SKIP.

Matsuura Aya.

SKIP.

Matsu-

SKIP!

I yanked the earphones out and slammed my hand down on the stereo's power button.  I got up and went over to the window, opening the blinds.

"It's not funny," I mumbled to the city that lay before me.

I had a good view of Shinjuku from the twenty-fourth floor.

"Stop playing with me.  Stop it."

I was not quite sure who I was addressing.  Maybe a higher power.

Maybe a ghost was playing with me.  A mischievous spirit.

She was always mischievous.  Always liked to cause me grief.  Maybe she was here controlling my stereo, urging Shibata to call me at work, filling my mind with visions of her death.

I hit the glass of the window and turned around slowly.  I knew what I had to do.  I walked to my desk and sat in my chair again.  I thought carefully about what I was about to do.  I did not like it, but I needed to do it.

I took a deep breath and then picked up the phone.

I dialled a number that I had not dialled in months.  Quite possibly a year.

The phone rang five times.  I was about to give up when a never-changing, sweet and cheerful voice answered.

"Hello?"

"Hi," I said shakily.  "Can I talk to you?"

[OTN1]

Chapter 6 of 10

"Mi... ki...?"

Uncertainty and disbelief filled her voice.

"Yeah."

"It's been a long time." 

She spoke quietly, probing for an explanation.  We had not spoken for a year for a reason.  She wanted to know why I was calling her out of the blue.

"It has." 

I felt guilty.  I could not offer an explanation.

"What... What can I do for you?" 

She became cheerful again.  All the questions were swallowed down.  She could tell I had something serious to say.  She could sense it with some special sixth sense.

"Listen, I, uh... I want to ask you some things.  Do you have time now?"

"Yes.  I don't have any appointments this morning.  What is it you want to ask?"

She had no idea what was coming.

"Eight years ago," I started, pausing to let her mind go back eight years.  "That year was a bad year, don't you think?"

I cringed at my own words.  They sounded so stupid.

I knew that she had realised what year it was I was talking about when the air between us changed for a second.  Even on the phone, I could feel her small intake of breath.

"It ended very badly, yes," she said solemnly.

"You know what I'm talking about," I said just to confirm. 

She hummed a response in the affirmative.

"I want to ask you something.  After that happened - after Aya-chan died in that accident-" I forced myself to say it, "did I change?"

Deathly silence.

Her cheer was evidently not perpetual.  She could laugh at gunpoint, make a co-worker giggle after a break-up, make everyone look brightly into the future after a disaster, but never had I seen her able to talk about Aya's death with the same sanguine attitude with which she addressed all things in life whether depressing or joyful.

"Change?  Um..."

"Be honest.  You know I can take it," I added in before she could find some diplomatic way to answer my question without offending me.

"Yes, you did."

Her tone was resolute.  Besides being a very happy person, she was also a very determined, very firm person.  She was strong.  It may not have seemed that way on the outside, but I had gotten to know her much better since we first worked together, and I could say without a doubt that she was so much more than what met the eye at first sight.  She was more than just a pretty, sweet face.

"Was it for the better?"

A pause.

"No, it wasn't."

I knew that would be the answer.  I did not want to hear it, but I knew it was the truth.

"Did I push you away?"

"Yes, you did."

"But we were still friends, right?"

She hesitated and I swallowed.  I had thought I would have had a chance of her saying "yes".  I guess even my worst predictions had not been pessimistic enough.

"Yes," she said, uncertainty in her voice, "but we drifted apart eventually."

"Because of me."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Pardon?"

I blinked and decided I had to stop being so cryptic.  Talking with Shibata so much was making me go a little loopy.

"Sorry.  I mean, why do you think I changed like that?  Why did I push you away?  I want it from your point of view."

It was a huge thing to ask of her, and I understood that, but I needed to hear it from an outside party.  Someone who had known me and Aya fairly well but who had not known the extent of our relationship.  Someone who was close, yet kept an arm's length away.

"Well, I always assumed that you were affected by the, um, accident.  I mean, she was your best friend."

That she was, I thought sadly.

"And then maybe other stuff happened to you.  I know that the next year was kind of hard for you with having to move and switching your job.  I guess somewhere along the way, you lost touch with your old life."

It sounded reasonable.  Anybody could have told me that.  I could have gone to a shrink, told half my life story, and then had him tell me those exact same words.

"Yes, that's true, but that could happen to anybody.  What is it specifically about me?"

There was an uncomfortable pause and I realised that she knew exactly what I was asking her but was too nervous to say it.

"Be honest," I reminded her.  "I'm Miki the Blunt.  You can't topple me."

I tried to insert a bit of humour into the situation to comfort her, but it was obvious that I was just desperate to hear what she had to say.

"Honest truth? 

My silence told her "yes".

"The truth is that you've never been an easy person to get along with.  I mean, at first.  You and me... we clicked together as well as, um..."

She searched her brain for an appropriate image, having obvious difficulty.

"... as well as soap and a cookie," she finished.

I smirked.  What a silly image.  No doubt I was the soap and she was the cookie.

"Yes, I remember," I said.

I felt a bit nostalgic at the mention of our past.  Our Morning Musume days...

"I know you didn't like me so much-"

"No, I never didn't like you," I protested weakly.

"Okay," she said, re-evaluating.  "Then I wasn't your favourite person."

"Hmph."

"But after a while - I mean after I grew up a bit - we got along much better."

I could not deny that.  Quite a few years had matured her and had mellowed me out.

"I think - and this is just from me observing and from trying to get to know you - that it takes a while for you to trust someone.

That was not too hard to figure out.

"And I think Aya-chan was one of those people that you really trusted.  Like, really really.  I think she changed you a lot."

"How so?" I asked, curious to hear her opinion.

"You calmed down a lot.  You became a little easier to get along with.  You, um, got nicer..." she trailed off nervously, thinking I would chew her out for saying that. 

She picked up her courage again when I did not complain, and she kept going.

"And then when she, um, when she was gone, you got sad and then I think you just never recovered."

"What did I do?  What exactly?"

She hesitated again.

"You just seemed to lose interest in the world around you.  You seemed to not care.  You drifted away from your friends and your family.  You became obsessed with your job and your music."

She spoke as though all of that should have been crystal clear to me.  I knew that those things had happened, but I had not noticed the scope of what had happened had been so obvious to everyone.

"And to you?  I did what?"

"To me... You seemed to lose interest in keeping in touch, to put it simply.  A few years after Aya-chan - you know - you didn't call so much.  I always called you.  And then we had that argument a year ago."

She stopped talking.  She probably reckoned that she had dragged up enough of the past to the surface.

I thought back to the quarrel we had had.  In retrospect, it was based on something stupid and was fully my fault.  I had asked her for a professional favour, she had refused with good reasons, and I had gotten angry and lashed out.  I said some things that we both knew were not true, and we had not spoken since.

"I'm sorry about that argument," I said.

Apologies killed me, but this one felt liberating.

"I'm sorry, too.  I couldn't help you..."

I smiled because it was so typical of her to feel bad for something that was not her fault.

"No, you were doing your job," I reassured her.

"But I think you wanted that argument."

My ears perked up.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I was getting too close."

This was interesting.  She sounded determined, filled with fresh courage.

"Maybe to you, Aya-chan was the only person you would let get that close.  Maybe you wanted to keep it like that even with her gone.  Not let anybody else have that role 'cause it was special.  Hers only."

"I, um..."

No clue what to say, I shut up and listened.  I had not expected her to be that observant.  She was like Shibata the Second.

"And maybe," she continued, on a roll, "Aya-chan's, like, your soulmate."

"What?  Soul... huh?" I asked, starting to sweat.

"Oh, but not, like, in an icky way," she giggled and clarified.

I rolled my eyes.

"But some people find their soulmates in their best friends, you know."

I had read plenty of magazine articles about soulmates.  I was fully aware of everybody's theories on this or that or the other.  All complete nonsense.  You could not define that kind of thing on paper with words.

"So you push people away because nobody's worthy of having that place of honour."

I thought of my actions the past few years.  I thought of how the closer Shibata tried to get, the harder I pushed.  I thought of my mother complaining about how I never called just to chat like I used to.

"But you end up really sad 'cause then you have nobody, uh, to talk to."

Had I really been that self-destructive?  That stupid?

"How could one person affect me so much?" I mumbled out loud accidentally.


It was a question I sometimes I asked myself, but only myself.  Not others.

"She was special," came the reply.  "She affected all of us.  Some more than others.  I mean, look at Rika-chan."

She had a point.  Rika had taken it upon herself to improve her singing after Aya's death, inspired by the girl's life and wanting to help contribute to the world of music that Aya had loved so much.  She had come a long way over the years.  Even when she took up acting fulltime, she continued to sing.

It seems like that was what I heard from everyone - Aya had a big effect on the people around her.  Since I was around her the most, she had had the biggest effect on me.

I sighed.

"Do you think I'm a bad person?"

"Well, you're certainly not a good one!" was the reply.  "You've always been so baaaad."

She burst into a fit of giggles and then caught her breath.

"No, you're not bad.  I think you were just, um, like, misguided.  You got a little confused.  But you know what that says about you?"

"What?" I asked apprehensively, scared to hear it.

"That you're like a soft little rabbit," she announced with glee.

"Oh brother," I muttered.

"And you just act like a meanie.  But it's all a ruse!  I should've noticed that sooner when I met you."

I had to give it to her.  She could always make me laugh.  I had not laughed with so much ease in such a long time.  Years, it seemed.

"But really, no.  You're not a bad person.  I don't hate you.  I always looked up to you even though you ignored bratty little me.  You'll always be my big sister no matter how many fights we have."

Me?  Her big sister?  I never would have suspected that was what she thought of me.  She had never told me, never spoken about it in magazine interviews, never mentioned it to any of the other girls.  Her unanticipated words touched my heart, and even though that wannabe-cool-cat part inside my mind threatened me with bodily harm if I got sappy over it, I felt my eyes become a little misty.

"Thank you."

There was a pregnant pause in our conversation.  It seemed to signal the end had come.

"Now that I've helped you, you have to answer a serious question for me.  Be honest."

She sounded very serious, and I wondered if she was having issues, too.

"Of course.  Anything," I said kindly.

"Who is the cutest girl in the world??"

My face twitched and my brain went into spasms.

"You are.  Of course you," I groaned. 

Nothing like an old joke (in her case, it was not a joke) to bring us out of that mood.

"I know!  Just wanted to hear it!"

I thought of letting loose and pushing her around a bit, insulting her for fun like I used to.  But then I remembered that I was, after all, talking to one of the biggest media moguls in our country, the head of the hottest fashion magazine to ever hit the Japanese market in all of printing history, and the woman who could make or break my career with a single nod of her pigtailed head.

I settled for gratitude.

"Thanks, Shige-chan.  You've helped a lot."

"You're welcome," she replied happily.  "I hope this means you'll call again before the next millennium."

"Sure," I laughed.

I meant it.  We said goodbye and we hung up.

[OTN1]

Chapter 7 of 10

And so that was what propelled me towards Italy.  Talking to the self-proclaimed cutest girl in the world had given me that final push.

It cost me a lot, and not just money.  I had to take one week off from work, my manager was furious (although perhaps more perplexed about my sudden desire for a vacation), and my co-workers were all jealous.  I battled my way through it, shamelessly reminding them all that I had just secured for our group a re-contracting agreement from the biggest companies we did business with, also reminding them that I was the uncontested star of our company and that if I wanted a rest, I would get it.  Nobody could disagree with that.  I hated to play the diva, but this was important.

Or so I thought.

The minute I set foot on the plane, all my doubts hit me.

All that was for what?  Wandering around in a foreign country all alone and ripe for getting mugged, not to mention being in the same place where Aya died.  If anything, this was going to depress me, not make me feel better.

How did I let Shibata talk me into this?

I asked myself this question twenty thousand times.  I spiralled back down into that dark tunnel where nothing was sure.

By the end of the second week of November, I stood on a quiet street corner in Rome, a map in one hand and nothing in the other, trying to find my way to the famous Trevi Fountain.

Rome was, simply put, breathtaking.  The history that lived in the streets was overwhelming.  It seemed like there was more in one neighbourhood of Rome than there was in all of Japan.

I could not find this famous fountain.  It was supposed to be easy to find huge tourist sites.  All one had to do was follow the hoards of people.  But somehow I had wandered off and gotten lost.  In a huff and feeling very lonely, I turned down a wide, empty street and walked into the first church I saw, Shibata's words of advice echoing in my head.

"If you get lost, find a church.  Church people are usually nice.  You're guaranteed hospitality.  Just point out on your map where you want to go and they'll know how to get there.  They're helpful that way."

The church was devoid of any signs of life, and my footsteps echoed loudly in the cavernous room.  It had looked so small from the outside.  It seemed as if I had willingly walked into the belly of a camouflaged beast.  The dim lighting did nothing to help.

I approached "the main part of the church where all the things were".  I did not know the name, but it had all those statues, a stand from where the preaching was done, and a bunch of candles and other decorations.  On the back wall, there was a huge sculpture of a barely-dressed Christ hanging on a cross, his head slumped to the side.  I shuddered at the thought of dying like that and wondered why people would want to hang that grim sculpture in an otherwise pretty church.

Dazzled by this close-up view, I did not notice that someone else was in the church with me.  He must have come from the back.  I noticed his presence beside me suddenly, and my heart jumped in fear.

"Good afternoon," he said in a deep, rich voice, speaking the only Italian word I knew (not including food-related words.  I knew my pastas and my meats).

I tried not to gape.  The man standing beside me was a handsome priest.  He was tall, had broad shoulders, a well-defined jaw, could not have been much older than me I, and, possibly the most captivating thing of all, he looked Japanese.

"Ah... um... I'm..." I stuttered, unable to recall any of the useful phrases from my Italian guidebook.

"How can I help you?" he asked with a warm smile.

He spoke in fluent, accent-free Japanese.

"Yo-you're Japanese?" I asked in surprise.

He nodded, his smile still on his face.

"I..." the words would not come.  What was a Japanese man doing dressed as a priest in a Roman Catholic Church in Rome?

"I'm lost," I blurted out.

"I can see," he chuckled.  "Where are you going?"

I brought out my map and pointed to the area I was trying to find.

"Ah, Fontana di Trevi."

I nodded.

"Now let's see.  Where are we...?"

He studied the map as I stared at him brazenly, wondering how he had come to be here.  He looked up without warning and caught my eyes.  I looked away casually.

"You're wondering what I'm doing here playing priest."

I looked back at him and I did not apologise for my actions, although I did feel a bit bad for prying.  I was definitely guilty as charged.

"I grew up in a small village along Osaka Bay," he said, ploughing through my shame in a move that surprised me.

I wondered if I was about to get a full life story.

"My parents were strict Buddhists, but I knew I wasn't meant to follow in their footsteps.  I had always been enthralled by the Italian language and the Catholic Church," he said

He gestured to the grand church we stood in and I took a cursory look before he continued.

"My calling was to study and teach the words of God, and so that's what I worked towards."

"But how did you end up here in Rome?" I asked, bewildered.

He smiled at my curiosity, but his smile carried some sort of weight to it.  It was not entirely happy.

"A terrible tragedy eight years ago," he said softly.

My heart skipped a few beats.  Well aware of the pain it caused to speak of tragedy, but my mind suddenly alert, I probed.

"What kind of tragedy?"

"Eight years ago, my younger sister was caught in a terrible plane crash on her way from Japan," he explained quietly.

My heart stopped.  I felt weak.

"There were no survivors and I was unable to bury her body.  She wasn't Catholic, but she left everything up to me in her will.  She trusted me more than anyone else in the world."

He took a deep breath and clasped his hands behind him, looking at the crucified Jesus.

"So I came here to serve God and the people.  To watch over this land that my sister had died in.  To be close to the place where she spent her final moments on Earth.  It was the anniversary of her passing a few weeks ago," he finished with a sad smile.

I swallowed down my fear and disbelief at this utter coincidence, and suddenly, without warning, I started to speak.

"I lost a friend in a, um, plane crash in the Alps eight years ago," I said.

He looked at me in surprise.

"She was coming here from Japan.  She was very important.  She was like a sister to me."

We looked at each other for a moment.  It had to be the same plane crash.  Commercial airline planes did not have a habit of frequently crashing into the Italian Alps.  Certainly not more than once within the same few weeks.  Our dates seemed to match up.

"When did-" he started to ask.

"October," I jumped in quickly.  "October twenty-sixth in Japan.  Twenty-fifth in Italy."

He smiled unexpectedly.

"It seems God has brought us together.  I have never met any of the other families or friends of the poor victims on board that plane."

I smiled nervously.  I was sure his god had nothing to do with it, but I did not want to be rude.

"Tell me about your friend.  This sister of yours."

I took a breath to ease my mind.  It was all going by so quickly.

"She loved music," I started.  "She was very dedicated to her job, but also to her family and her friends.  She worked hard and never cut corners.  She was confident in herself.  She believed in me..." I trailed off.

Speaking in the past tense made something inside me ache.  It started as a dull pain, but it grew worse and worse.

"Everyone around her loved her so much.  And then she was torn away from us."

The priest kept his silence.  I looked down at the wooden floor, thinking about the last day I had seen Aya, thinking about the last words we spoke to each other.

"See you, Miki."

"Take care, Aya."

The last time I had ever heard her voice.

Stupid Aya, I thought.  You didn't take care...

Why could I not stop this torture?  It was driving me to the brink.

I let my words slip out.

"I miss her."

"I understand completely."

The priest put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently.  At that moment, nothing else in the world existed but us.  We stood at the front of the sanctuary of one of the world's most powerful religions, this stranger touching me, both of us sharing sad memories.  I did not shy away from him because I felt like he was the only one who could understand me.  I let him hold my shoulder and enjoyed this human contact.  No questions of indecency between priest and visitor were raised, no cries of sexual harassment were heard.  Those were childish, irrelevant things that we were beyond at that moment in time.

"What was your little sister like?" I asked.

"She was bright and cheerful and had a rogue streak you would never believe possible."

He flashed me a smile and I chuckled.  It was nice that he could talk about her so easily.

"She always had to question authority.  She was not God-fearing like me, but she never questioned my path.  She loved me very much, and I returned that sentiment fully.  She was my best friend.  The one human who really understood me."

"Sounds like me and Aya," I said nostalgically.  "Uh, except neither of us are - were - God-fearing," I amended quickly.

"Aya was her name?  My sister's name was Naomi."

"Naomi," I repeated reverently.

I felt like I had just been privy to a secret that only the worthy were meant to know.  I studied the large podium at the front for a bit before I decided to ask.

"Are you still sad?"

"Hmm, that's a hard question," he said thoughtfully, crossing his arms.  "Of course I miss her.  And the memory of her death isn't a happy one, but I've made peace.  I've accepted her passing.  She's in a better place now."

"How did you get over it?" I asked shakily, hoping to find a miracle cure.

Maybe there was a magic word that I could say to erase all the pain.

He smiled secretively at me.

"My boss helped me," he said.

"Your boss?" I asked, befuddled.

How could a boss help him get over the death of a family member?

He nodded, smiled, and pointed up.  I followed his finger with my eyes, looking up and expecting to see someone standing on a balcony up above.  However, his finger pointed to an indistinguishable spot on the ceiling.  Beyond the ceiling. I realised what he meant.

"I see."

"She is with Him now.  He will take care of her for me.  I'm greatly comforted by that."

He looked absolutely convinced, and I sighed in my mind.  He had his religion to help him, but that kind of thing was not for me.

"Shall we say a prayer for the souls of our sisters?  Come," the priest said

He led me to the front.  I followed, shocked by the bizarre request.

He knelt down, so I copied him, kneeling beside him carefully.  He clasped his hands together and closed his eyes.  Out of respect, I did the same.

We kneeled there for eternity.  I did not pray, but I did think about what I was doing there.

Easy.  Shiba-chan sent me.

... No, that's not it exactly.

Maybe I had secretly wanted to come here all along.  Maybe I had hidden that fact even from myself.  Maybe by seeing the mountains that killed my number one, most important, most loved and treasured person, I would somehow be healed.  I could move on.

Maybe that would work. 

I decided on that.  If I saw the mountains, I could be healed.

I'm not here to forget Aya.  I'm just here to... to tuck her in.

I smiled at the image.  Cute Aya in her silly pyjamas that were not one bit sexy but that she looked so hot in, especially when she rolled over sleepily in the morning and they hung a bit loosely on her as her eyes opened slowly, her expression looking almost sultry in its laziness... The impish look she got when she saw me already awake and watching her wake up with a grin that spoke of both the appreciation I felt for being able to start yet another great day in a great life and all the different ways I could think of to say good morning...

I opened my eyes quickly to banish any further thoughts.  I was not Catholic, but it still felt wrong to lust after a now dead girl while kneeling at the front of a church with a kindly priest at my side praying for his younger sister's soul.

I looked sideways at him, but he was still praying.  I closed my eyes again.  I decided it would not hurt to express my gratitude to the people closest to me now.  Speaking in my mind, I thanked my family and my friends, Shiba-chan especially.  Then I thanked Aya.  I would not be half the person I was without her.

I opened my eyes and the priest was looking at me.

"Would you like to join our church?" he asked.

"Uh, me?" I asked, startled.  "Oh, well, it's a bit... I'm only visiting for a few... uh..."

His laughter echoed throughout the room.

"It was a bit of a joke.  You seemed so involved in your prayer."

I flushed and looked up at the front again.  This place was not for me, but I had found something important during this odd interlude: quiet and kindness.  This place was silent and this man was gentle.  It had been a good pause for me.  I had been able to regroup and hear all my thoughts clearly.  And I had found out what to do in order to have a chance at coming to terms with my loss.

"Where is the mountain the plane crashed into?" I asked, my words a cold dagger in the warmth of the church.

The man looked at me gravely, and then without asking for my reasons, he wrote down the exact location of the site.

"These directions will take you to the base of the mountain at the front of the section the plane crashed into."

With a trembling hand, I took the paper from him.  It was written in Italian and Japanese.

I read the name of the place and was filled with a memory.  I had read the name once long ago, but I had pushed it out of my memory.  I had not wanted to hear it ever again.

"I hope you can find the peace you're looking for," he spoke slowly.  "I will pray for you and for the soul of your sister."

That was the best kind of encouragement that could come from a holy man like him.

"Thank you."

I stood admiring the decorations some more when the priest waved something in front of my face.  It was my map.

"By the way, I found the best route," he said.

I had forgotten all about my quest to find the Trevi Fountain.  I almost did not want to go anymore.  I wanted to go up to the north and seek out these mountains.  I forced myself to be patient.  The mountains would still be there the next day.

The priest showed me the simple way (a straight line, really), and he walked me to the door.  I thanked him for his time and help.  He reached into his pockets and pulled out something rectangular-shaped.  A business card.

"If you're ever back in Rome, come visit again.  Or if you need to talk to somebody, drop me a line.  That's my work e-mail address."

I gaped at this tiny card that proved I knew nothing.  I had no idea priests carried business cards, let alone had e-mail accounts.  I had always assumed that church people all wore brown robes, lived in bare cells, ate only bread and drank only water, and spoke in an archaic language.

I studied his card.  "Hiroshi Sato" and "Roma" were the only words I understood.  That was enough, though.  I scrambled to get one of my own cards.  I had two left, so I handed him one.

"You're interested in music, too?" he asked immediately, recognising the music label.

I was surprised.  It was a relatively small company.

"Yeah.  I'm a singer," I replied simply.

His face burst into a beautiful, radiant smile.

"Keep the music alive.  If that's what your friend loved, carry it on for her."

I was filled with warmth by his caring, and with a bow, I walked off, away from this small, unknown church and back towards the bustling crowds.

I felt renewed.  I had a new purpose.  I was no longer afraid of being here in this country.  The pull of the mountains, a pull that I had resisted for all this time, now had a hold on me.

I resolved to head up there the first thing next morning.

~~

disclaimer: I don't know much about religion in general.  What I know about the behaviour of priests and of "church people" is from watching movies and TV and reading books.  I'm sorry if what I've written is unrealistic... although I can't imagine it would be offensive to anyone... would it?  I just wanted to try something I've never tried before.