Four Times “Thank You”

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 space for old junk to the tiniest signs of wear in the structure.
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 planned?
The answer is no.
Before, unfortunately.
Now, fortunately.

What I mean is, 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 longer to find Aranara. I imagined her flitting from shop to shop, trying on everything she could find.
That scenario was a headache.
The reality was that she was still in the shop above the café, sitting with an obscene number of shopping bags around her and two guys by her side.
That 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.

“Eiji! You’re finally back!” Aranara tried to stand, but 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, and judging by how tightly Aranara gripped the bags, the answer was written in neon above her head.

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

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

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

I approached the counter and tried to explain the misunderstanding to the owner. Of course, I had to lie. He didn’t seem interested in listening, and I don’t know what Aranara had said—or worse, done—but I also didn’t want her to just leave the stuff, so I was left with one option: pay.

Pay what amounted to a month’s living expenses. Leaving her alone had been a very costly mistake, literally.
I never saw the point in buying clothes, coordinating them, that kind of thing, but it was probably something Aranara had wanted to do for a long time.

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

“You really went overboard…”

“You paid for it, didn’t you?”

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

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

“How the hell is 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 didn’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 some shopping?”

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

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

“What?”

“Oh! Your analytical brain’s slipping, huh? How didn’t you notice? On the way here, they were looking at me, not you,” she said, a mix of pride tangled in her voice.

“I thought…”

“Self-centered.”

“No, I meant…”

“Arrogant…”

“Aranara, let me talk. I mean…”

“‘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 going to say—the silence this time wasn’t awkward at all.
We walked out of the town center under the night sky. Maybe because of the long day, our steps were slow, though we probably weren’t in a rush to get home.

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. There were fewer people, almost no traffic. The loudest sound was our footsteps.

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

“Maybe… too much…” she said, looking at the trees, every house, even the tiny 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 there’s such a thing as ‘too much’ when it comes to your sense of fashion,” I said, trying to peek into her bags, though the streetlights weren’t much help. “Find anything for spring?”

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

“No idea why, but I’m not surprised,” I laughed.

“Nope… is that a lot?”

“I’d say you almost needed 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,” she said, showing me a couple of skirts. “I think Sayo might like these, though honestly, I don’t know her well enough. You know, it would’ve been a good idea to wait for you before buying all this.”

“For Sayo, huh…”

“Oh, come on… don’t be jealous… look.” Heavy and overly bundled, another green parka peeked out of one of the bags. “I 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? The days won’t 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 does that sound like a bad thing?” I asked, stepping closer to her.

“I want to see the receipt.”

“What? No.”

“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 searching when I got to the third bag. I let out a laugh, though there was no joke or reason to laugh.

“Aranara… what did you buy for yourself?” She just smiled, and 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 tell what’s going on inside.

“Aranara…”

I heard her swallow the crumpled receipt. She backed up against a house’s wall, like she felt cornered. “‘Thank you,’ third time.”

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

“Sorry… everyone was doing something… this time, I wanted to be the one to do it… for a change…”

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

“Now…” she said, pressing her chest, “now 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 going to explode… 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 an idiot today…” Her voice choked on words. “I don’t need to be around suicides—it was something I did out of curiosity, to understand… but now I can’t stop sharing their pain…”

“Wait a second…”

“Eiji… can you tell me the approximate 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 and 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, ever since I met you… I feel everything they feel…”

“Aranara…” I said, trying to approach her, but she kept her distance, placing her hand on my chest.

“Please, Eiji, stay there, okay? I’m… about to have to ask for your forgiveness, 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 tried to use, her tear-filled eyes and perfect smile were like someone throwing a brick through a window.

The window was over me, and the glass shattered into thousands of fragments.

“I’d never been able to feel things… since I ‘was born,’ I felt like I was watching them through a door I couldn’t cross…”

Each fragment broke into smaller ones.

“…I understand that it always hurt… it always hurts, and I know it’ll never stop hurting… because it’s part of what I am… but if this is what pain really feels like, I don’t want it. I can’t handle it…”

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

“All this is 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 it, I really love ‘my cat’… so… ‘thank you,’ four times…”

“Aranara, enough… please…” I held her tighter, trying to contain something uncontainable, like trying to hold water in your hands.

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

“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.