Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 10: Chapter 10

Read chapter 10 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

We had been meeting at the clearing every other day for two weeks. The snow had retreated from the slope by then, leaving the grass pale and flat, still carrying the shape of winter even as the cold slowly began to lose its edge. The bare sakura branches above the clearing had started showing the faintest suggestions of buds, small and tight and not yet committed to anything. February was ending. The world was beginning to consider spring without quite agreeing to it yet. The song had grown in those two weeks the way things grow when you do not force them. Piece by piece, section by section, each practice adding something small that the last one had not had. The bridge had found its tempo. The verses had found their breath. The chorus, the one Haruka had rewritten in the rain, had become the kind of thing I could play in my sleep, and sometimes did, lying in bed in the dark with the guitar across my chest and the ceiling above me and nothing else. That evening we had stayed later than usual. The light had shifted from afternoon to something softer and lower, the sky going the pale gold of early dusk. Haruka had her notebook open on the flat stone but she had stopped writing in it an hour ago. I was sitting beside her with the guitar, working through the final section one more time. "I want to try it all the way through," she said. I looked up. "The whole thing." "From the top. No stopping." I had been waiting for her to say it. We had been circling it for days, always stopping to fix something, always finding one more section that needed another pass. The truth was the song was ready. It had been ready for a few days. We had just both been finding reasons to keep working on the parts instead of facing the whole. I settled the guitar on my knee and found the opening position. "Whenever you are ready," I said. She closed the notebook. She did not look at it. She straightened slightly on the stone, took one slow breath, and then she nodded once. I played the opening. Four bars, just the guitar, finding the shape of the thing before her voice came in. The clearing took the sound the way it always did, openly, without echo, like the space had been waiting for exactly this. Then she sang. I wanna be a victim, I wanna have conviction I wanna be the hero, I wanna be the villain I wanna be a savior, I wanna be a killer I wanna go on adventure, I wanna seek my pleasure Oh-oh... I had heard her sing pieces of it a dozen times. Fragments in the music room, a line or two at the clearing, the bridge hummed under her breath while she wrote. I knew her voice by now, its register, its texture, the particular way it moved around a difficult note without forcing it. But this was different. The full voice was something else entirely. It filled the clearing the way the rain had filled the music room, steadily, from the bottom up, until there was no space in the air that it had not touched. It was not a trained voice in the classical sense. It did not perform precision. It performed truth, and truth in a voice is a different instrument altogether, one that bypasses the part of you that listens and goes directly to the part of you that feels. I'm just a wannabe, who wants everything Oh-oh, I'm just a lost soul Searching for someone to take me on I kept playing. I did not miss a note. But something in my chest was doing what it did when a thing was too large for the container it was in, pressing at the edges, looking for somewhere to go. She moved through the second verse with her eyes half closed, not performing for anything or anyone, just inside it, and the last light of the afternoon sat in her hair and on her face and the bare branches above us held very still. I change like the tide, stitched in disguise I fake the light, then beg it to rise I'm just a lost soul, fading in the night Looking for someone to make me feel right The bridge. Her voice dropped lower here, closer, like she was speaking directly into the ear of whoever was listening. My