Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 22: Chapter 22

Read chapter 22 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

That is my side of the story. I have always wondered what hers was. What it felt like to come back. Whether she arrived the way we arrive in dreams, already inside the moment, no memory of the transition. Whether she knew from the beginning exactly how much time she had or whether she discovered it gradually, the way you discover the shape of a room by moving through it in the dark. Whether saying goodbye at that bridge had been as hard as it looked, or harder, or whether by then she had made her peace with it in a way I will never fully understand. Whether she had known, when she pressed that brooch into a quiet boy's hand in a competition hall in Osaka twelve years ago, that she would one day come back and find him older and broken and still carrying it. I do not know. I will not know. That part of the story belongs to her and I have learned, slowly, over these seven years, to let the things that belong to others stay with them. What I know is my side. And my side ends here, on a hillside above a valley, sitting beside a memorial stone with a silver brooch at its base and the February sky enormous above me and the river running grey and patient below. Seven years to the day. I come here every year on this date. Not out of guilt anymore, not out of the particular heaviness that used to make this day feel like something to survive rather than something to mark. I come because she is here and I want to be where she is for a little while. Because some things deserve to be returned to. Because the river sounds different from this slope and she was right about that, it sounds more patient, and on days when I need patience I find it helps to sit somewhere that already has plenty of it. I told you it would be a journey I wished, more than anything, I could relive. I meant it. Not because it was easy. Because it was hers. Because for a few weeks in February she stood beside me in the place where I had stopped and said I am here and meant it completely. Because that is not something you unlive. That is something you carry forward, carefully, the way you carry something that is both fragile and heavier than it looks. I have been carrying it forward for seven years. Tonight I am going to play. I stood up from the ground and brushed the cold off my coat and looked at her name on the stone for a long moment. "Tonight," I said. The wind moved through the bare branches above the slope. The river ran below. The sky held everything the way it always did, without effort, without preference. I picked up my guitar case from where I had set it beside me on the ground. I had brought it here every year since the first time. Not to play on the slope, just to have it with me. She had always said the music did not leave. I thought it was only right that the music should come when I came to see her. I gave the stone one last look. The brooch at its base catching the pale February light, the blue stone bright and small and permanent. Then I turned and walked back down the mountain. The concert hall was in the city, forty minutes from the station by taxi. A large venue, two thousand seats, the kind of stage with rigging above it and a sound system that could fill the space all the way to the back row without losing anything. I had played bigger stages in the years since. I had played smaller ones that meant more. This one was different for reasons that had nothing to do with its size. Tonight was the seventh anniversary. I had chosen the date deliberately when the booking came through six months ago. The promoter had thought it was a marketing decision, a meaningful number, a round figure. I had let him think that. My band was already in the building when I arrived. Four of them, people I had found over the years who understood that music played for truth was a different instrument than music played for performance and who had chosen the former without being asked to. They were in the green room running through arrangements, the sound of it reaching me t