Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 17: Chapter 17

Read chapter 17 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

It was a Saturday morning when I found it. My mother had asked me to bring down the old storage boxes from the top of my wardrobe, the ones that had been there since we moved into this house when I was seven, two years after everything happened. She wanted to sort through them before spring, she said. Clear out what did not need to be kept anymore. I had said okay. I had not thought about what might be in them. I pulled the first box down and carried it to the living room and opened it. Old school notebooks, a broken calculator, a summer festival program from years ago, a small trophy with my name on it that I set aside without looking at for long. The ordinary archaeology of a childhood. The second box was heavier. I set it on the floor and opened it and found my father's things. Not all of them. My mother had sorted through most of his belongings in the years after, kept what mattered and let go of the rest in the quiet methodical way she did difficult things. But there was a box she had kept sealed, a smaller one sitting inside the larger one, with his handwriting on the top in black marker. Sae. Competition things. Keep. I sat down on the living room floor. My mother was in the kitchen. I could hear her moving around, the tap running, the radio playing low. I looked at the box with his handwriting on it and did not open it for a long moment. Then I opened it. Inside, carefully arranged the way he arranged everything, were the documents and photographs and small objects from my competition years. Entry forms. Result sheets. A photograph of me at five years old holding a guitar that was almost as large as I was, squinting into the camera with the serious expression of a child who did not yet understand that photographs were supposed to make you smile. I went through it slowly. There were more photographs than I expected. My father at the back of various competition halls, always at the same slight angle, always with the same expression, focused and quiet and present. There were programs from competitions I had half forgotten. There were small notes in his handwriting, observations about my playing, things to work on, things that were going well. I read each one. Near the bottom of the box, beneath the programs and the result sheets, my fingers found something small and cool and solid. I took it out. A brooch. Small and silver, shaped like a single music note, with a tiny blue stone set at its center the color of a clear winter sky. The pin on the back was slightly bent, the way pins get when they have been used often. The silver was not tarnished. Someone had kept it clean. I turned it over in my fingers. And the memory arrived without warning, the way the deep ones always did, not gradually but all at once, fully formed, as if it had been waiting behind a door that my fingers had just pushed open. The semi-finals. I was five. The competition hall in Osaka, high ceilings and wooden floors and the smell of rosin and nerves. I had just come offstage from my semi-final performance and my father was crouching in front of me fixing my collar and telling me I had done well. And then she was there. A girl my age, maybe a few months older, with hair the color of a rising dawn and eyes the exact blue of the stone in the brooch I was now holding. She was still holding her instrument case, fresh off her own performance, her cheeks flushed from the stage lights. She looked at me with the direct uncomplicated gaze of a five year old who had not yet learned to be indirect about anything. She held out the brooch. "Here," she said. "For good luck in the finals. I make them myself. Mine is the same but with a red stone." I had taken it. I had looked at it and then at her and said nothing because at five I was already better at silence than at words. She did not seem to mind. She smiled the same smile I would come to know seven years later in a different life, small and easy, the kind that did not ask for anything back. "I am Akari," she said