The Death and four thank yous

I found myself walking through the streets of the town center, and this time, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pay attention to the people around me.
My head was completely submerged in other things.
The room that used to belong to my grandma would probably be a good option for Sayo. She’d likely have a stack of critiques—from why I turned it into a storage dump for old junk to the tiniest signs of time’s wear on the building.
Coming from such a… well-off family has its downsides, I guess.

Now I was looking for a way to ‘even the score.’ Sure, things hadn’t gone as planned, but if I dug through my life, had anything ever gone as I’d planned?
The answer is no.
Before, unfortunately.
Now, fortunately.

I mean, a starting point is better than no starting point at all. It’s obvious, but I wanted to say it.

I thought it’d take me longer to find Aranara. I pictured her flitting from store to store, trying on absolutely everything she could find.
That scenario was a headache.
The reality was, she’d stayed in the shop above the café. I saw her sitting there, practically pinned down, surrounded by an obscene number of shopping bags and two guys beside her.
This scenario was the real headache.

“Good… afternoon?” The only way to walk into a problem is straight through the door, even if it’s a clothing store.

“AH, EIJI! You’re finally back!” Aranara tried to stand, and one of the guys held her in place. I didn’t fully know what was going on, but it didn’t take much to figure it out. Judging by how tightly Aranara clutched the bags, the answer was written in neon above her head.

“I’m not paying for all that,” I said, mentally tallying the amount of clothes each bag could hold, the number of bags, and the prices displayed in the window.

“Eiji…” she murmured, lowering her head and blinking excessively. Obviously, those DVDs had given her a skewed idea of how to convince someone.

“Irritating… you’re seriously irritating sometimes,” I said, shooting mental darts at her. But she was doing what she wanted, so, technically, she’d won.

I approached the store counter and tried to explain the misunderstanding to the owner. Of course, I had to lie. He didn’t seem interested in listening, though. I don’t know what Aranara had said—or worse, what she’d done—but I also didn’t want to leave things as they were, which left me with one option: pay.
Pay what amounted to a month’s cost of living. Leaving her alone had been a very expensive mistake, literally.

[Guess I’m getting soft, though it’s not like I was ever all that tough.]

I never saw the point in buying clothes, coordinating outfits, stuff like that, but it was probably something Aranara had wanted to do for a long time.

[How long?]

“Pretty slick, Eiji,” she said, stretching like a cat, still gripping the bags tightly, like someone might snatch them away.

“You really went overboard…”

“You paid for it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, showing my empty wallet.

“Then it’s fine,” she replied with a laugh.

“How’s that supposed to be fine? I’m broke now, Aranara.”

“You said you’d buy what you could afford, so if you paid for all this, it means you could afford it. Problem solved, as I see it,” she said, adjusting imaginary glasses.

“Ugh… let’s just go… and not come back here for a while,” I said, taking her hand. No, she hadn’t let go of the bags—we just linked pinkies. “I thought you’d be having a meltdown… you know, like that time you hyperventilated.”

“Why would I have a meltdown over shopping?”

“Not that. I mean the fact that… well… people can see you.”

“Eiji…” she said, turning her head toward me. “I noticed that the moment we left the house. Seriously, you didn’t?”

“What?”

“Oh! You’re losing that analytical brain of yours, huh? How didn’t you notice? When we were heading here, they were looking at me, not you,” she said, a tangle of pride in her voice.

“I thought…”

“Self-centered.”

“No, I meant…”

“Arrogant…”

“Aranara, let me talk. I’m saying…”

“‘Thank you,’ one time.”

“That’s new…” I said, letting out a laugh. “Think that’s the first time I’ve heard you say it.”

You know what I’m gonna say—the silence, this time, wasn’t awkward at all.
We walked out of the center, now under the night sky. Maybe it was the long day, but our steps were slow. Probably, we weren’t in a rush to get anywhere.
Strangely, these streets I hated walking to get home now seemed a bit brighter. Probably my imagination, but I didn’t care.

The streets grew narrower as we left the center behind. Fewer people, almost no traffic. The loudest sound was our footsteps.

“Hey, so what’d you buy? I figured you’d be talking about it the whole way.” I felt her pinky tighten around mine when she heard the question.

“Maybe… too much…” she said, looking at the trees, each house, even the small cracks in the sidewalk. We’d walked this path many times, but she seemed to be seeing it for the first time.

“I don’t think ‘too much’ exists when it comes to your sense of fashion.” I tried peeking into her bags, but the streetlights weren’t much help. “Find anything for spring?”

“Three dresses… no, four,” she said, her lips curving into a smile.

“No clue why, but I’m not surprised,” I said, laughing at the end.

“Nope… Seems like a lot?”

“I’d say you nearly had me needing Sayo to buy the whole store to cover what you got.”

“‘Thank you,’ second time.” I felt my hand tug—she’d stopped walking.

She let go of my pinky and started digging through the bags. “You know, I got a lot of stuff,” she said, showing me a couple of skirts. “I think Sayo might like these, though honestly, I don’t know her well enough. Would’ve been a good idea to wait for you before buying all this.”

“For Sayo, huh…”

“Oh, come on… don’t get jealous… look.” Heavy and overly warm, another green parka peeked out of one of the bags. “Guess I’ve used this one too long to give it back like this. So I thought… you know, you should have a new one.”

“You know I won’t wear it till next year, right? It’s not gonna be that cold this time of year.”

“I know, Eiji, but I’m sure it’ll look great on you,” she said, clenching her fist like she’d won an Olympic medal.

“Aranara…”

“What?”

“Say it again.”

“It’ll look great on you…”

“Why’s that sound like a bad thing?” I asked, stepping closer to her. “I wanna see the receipt.”

“What? No-o!”

“Aranara, give it to me.”

“I said no, Eiji!” she replied, raising her voice as she crumpled the receipt and stuffed it in her mouth.

I started rummaging through the bags. Something in my mind felt like a needle—I had a bad feeling, and it wasn’t one of those baseless hunches.
I think my hands stopped at the third bag. A laugh slipped out, though there was no joke, no reason to laugh.

“Aranara… what’d you buy for yourself?”

She just smiled, and I think that smile said more than she could’ve explained.
Like when someone cracks a joke at a funeral to ease the tension—you smile, but you can see what’s happening inside.

“Aranara…”

I heard her strain to swallow the wad of paper. She backed up a few steps, leaning against a house’s wall, like she felt cornered. “‘Thank you,’ third time.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, standing up. My voice probably sounded more annoyed than concerned.

“Sorry… I wanted to do something ‘good’ for a change…”

I tried to speak, but she silenced me with a simple gesture.

“It hurts too much, Eiji.”

[What are you talking about?]

“I’m glad to feel all these things… now I can say I’m truly ‘glad’… but that doesn’t change what I am, and what I am can’t be changed.”

[So you knew…?]

“My chest feels like it’s gonna burst… Eiji, people didn’t stop killing themselves just because I stood in the middle of the line…”

“But you’re here now, Aranara.”

“You’re really dense today…” I could hear her voice choking on words. “I don’t need to be with the suicides. That was something I did out of curiosity, to understand… Now I can’t stop sharing their pain…”

“Wait a second…”

“Eiji… can you tell me the rough number…?”

“700,000 people a year… one person every 40 seconds…” My hair stood on end as I said it—not for me, it was a simple calculation, but because I knew what it meant.

“What they think about… who they think about…” Her voice choked more. She kept bringing her hand to her throat, like she was trying to make room for the words. “If they won… how much they lost… Eiji, I feel everything they feel…”

“Aranara… since when have you…” I said, trying to get closer, but she kept her distance, pressing her hand against my chest.

“Please, Eiji, stay there, okay? I’m… about to have to apologize to you, and I don’t want you to ruin the moment…”

The street was so quiet I could hear her ragged breathing, and no matter what language I try to use, her tear-filled eyes and perfect smile were an image that felt like someone hurling a brick through a window.
The window was me, and the glass shattered into a thousand pieces.

“Eiji… even though I could never feel much… since I was ‘born,’ I’ve shared every feeling of every person who took their own life…”

Each piece broke into smaller fragments.

“…it always hurt… it always hurts, and I know it’ll never stop hurting… because it’s part of what I am.”

“Aranara, listen, just stop talking for a second, okay?” I moved her arm, making a stupid, pathetic attempt at a hug—the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb.

“This is all really great… I love spending days with you, Eiji, even when I couldn’t taste the food, when that fake normalcy you created seemed stupid, it always made me feel good…” She spoke without moving, not wrapping her arms around me, just letting herself be held, like her body no longer responded. “I love ‘my cat’… so… ‘thank you,’ four times…”

“Aranara, enough… please…” I squeezed tighter, trying to hold something unholdable, like trying to cup water in your hands.

“The truth is, I never believed I could be human, but I clung to that because I came to envy them…”

“I said enough…”

“Eiji… I wanted to be human so I could die… ‘sorry,’ one time.”

Like I said, the brick hit the window.
The window shattered into pieces.
The pieces became thousands of fragments.
And now, in that moment, that night, with those words, every fragment was piercing into me.