Hahaha, I would consider doing that if I wrote the scenes and felt like they simply
had to be shared.
6"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 realized 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 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 realized 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, feeling 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 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 thought 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 - 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 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'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-san. 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.
~~~
I'm curious to know if anybody ever entertained the possibility of Sayu being the person Miki called.
I'm reiterating a lot of the things I've written before. It's time to move on. Go to Italy, Miki!