Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 18: Chapter 18

Read chapter 18 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I put the brooch on my desk and lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I did not sleep. I did not reach for my phone. I did not do anything at all except lie there with my arms at my sides and let the memories come, because they were coming whether I invited them or not and I was too tired, finally, to keep standing in the way. They came the way they always came when I stopped managing them. Not in order. Not with any consideration for what I was ready for. Just arriving, one after another, from both directions at once, the past and the almost-present layering over each other until I could not tell anymore where one ended and the other began. Akari at five, holding out the brooch with both hands. Here. For good luck in the finals. I make them myself. Haruka at the school gate, rubbing her forehead after our collision, her hair catching the February light. No, it was my fault. Akari at the semi-finals, her cheeks still flushed from the stage, her instrument case in her hand, looking at me with the direct uncomplicated gaze of someone who had not yet learned to be anything other than exactly what she was. I am Akari. I will see you in the finals. Haruka in the music room, sliding the lyrics sheet across to me. Did you like them? These are great. They settled in without hurting the heart. But they surely hit it hard. My father crouching in front of me backstage at the Kahio competition, his hands straightening my tie, his voice low and steady. She is probably not coming, Sae. You know what happened last night. The earthquake. Very few survived. He did not say it cruelly. He said it the way he said hard things, plainly, because he believed I deserved the truth even at five years old. But you made a promise to me. You said you would play. So play. I had shaken my head. Not without her. I will not play without her. He had looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that meant he was deciding something. Then he had stood up and buttoned the bottom of his suit jacket the way he always did when he was about to do something he had made up his mind about. I will go and check, he said. Just to be certain. And while I am gone you will get ready to play. And when I come back, or when your name is called, whichever comes first, you will walk out onto that stage. Promise me. I promise, I had said. Because he was my father and he was looking at me that way and I would have promised him anything. He had walked out to his car. He had driven toward the place where the aftershock was still settling into the ground. He had not come back. Haruka in the clearing, her voice filling the open air for the first time, fully open, the last afternoon light in her hair. The way the clearing took the sound. The way her voice and my guitar found the same place in the air between us. Haruka on the stage, her keytar holding the song on a single thread while I stood with a bleeding hand and looked up at the yellow light. Do not betray your partner number one. Do not be afraid. I am here. Haruka at the bridge, her hands around my bandaged fingers in the cold night air. The blue stone in the brooch she had given me when we were five, the same blue as her eyes, the same blue as the sky above the clearing on a cold February morning. Goodnight, Sae. A tear ran from the corner of my eye sideways across my temple and into the pillow. I did not wipe it away. I let it go and lay still and looked at the ceiling and let the next memory come. The morning after the competition, seven years ago. I was five and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room and a woman I did not know was sitting beside me and the fluorescent light above us was very white and very loud and outside the window the sky was the specific grey of a morning that does not intend to improve. Someone had told me. I do not remember who. I remember the words but not the face. Your father was in the aftershock area. He did not make it out. I had sat in the plastic chair and looked at