“Once more, with Feeling,” I said.

“Because I love you, Kira Ishikawa. In every dream I see your face, and my very actions are puppeted by a glimpse of our future, your hand in mine, like the call of the ocean to an earth-locked soul. Be mine, Kira, and I shall use my blood to nourish the soil so flowers may grow, when no water remains, even for tears.”

Caught by surprise, Kira wasn’t certain how to respond. The winter’s breeze offered a reply in her stead, whistling through the onyx waterfall flowing down to her shoulders.

The boy – the man, technically, not that this fact took away the gravity of those words marching out his mouth, nor improved them – waited for a response, the moments he counted on a tapping finger ticking away in silence. As much silence as one could hope for in downtown Shinjuku, where winter had dropped like an insect net over the ward.

The words were the bars on the jail windows. The steel trap snapped shut, teeth biting down on soft flesh. Hunger unsatiated, despite shoving food down the gullet from dusk until dawn, heaving the work of two hundred pairs of callused hands back up onto the opalescent steaming plate.

The beginning to make a child’s paper boat for sending across a blue, nostalgic lake, the recipient on the other end – boat in hand – ready for shoving off when yours arrives wet and sopping and moments from crumbling under its own weight; a process to be repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, one year to the next: a loop predisposed behaviorally towards the unbreaking.

The wind whistles discordant as a breath sucked back into the mouth. One would be forgiven for believing the leaves falling upward into the trees, but only for a moment. The sky shifts from grey to blue, to gold before sinking to red, bruising to purple, taking on the green of stars and far off lights to mix into the black veil, before repeating the process a thousand times in the drawn-out space before his voice sounded again.

“And now, should we die, you can go to your grave content with having experienced a love confession!” The confessor, Arata, laughed haughtily in the shocked face of his partner – full of vigor and indignation. “No need to thank me! It’s just the kind of selfless friend I am.”

Kira started to laugh also, her mirth hissing out like hot air through a cracked window in winter, enough to stave off the night’s cold air, until the lamppost she’d been leaning on had its bulb explode in a shower of sparks and inconsequential motes of fine glass, spooking passersby.

Arata smiled in the face of the scene, his tied back hair catching the sudden wind and flowing like a dream caught in river’s flow, taking in the sight of Kira while the sparks fell about the onyx waterfall passing her shoulders, an image of angel’s wings unfurled from her back imagined in the lights.

“Okay, now it’s your turn,” he added. “Lay your best line on me.”

“I don’t think I’m cultured enough to follow up an act that corny.” One of Kira’s hands met the tears starting to form at the corners of her eye, brushing them away before the chill of winter froze them to her lashes, adding to the layer of snow at her feet.

“Come on, I know you’ve got some killer lines in you. Ten percent of my cut for one, what do you say?”

“Ten percent of how much?”

“Fifteen, and it’s, like, a ten-dollar-signs-in-a-row amount. Think of it as investment in your education.”

Kira’s eyes lit up at that. She bit her lip as lines rolled through for arranging into a properly dramatic confession to match Arata’s. Easy as lying. “Arata Ogata, won’t you wrap yourself in a cocoon with me, accept me as we become new beings together, burn our brains into one, escape as one magnificent creature from the soup of our bodies?” She leaned in closer, eyelashes fluttering. “Please?”

As his face turned brighter red than if it’d been slapped with a loaded paintbrush, she threw her head back cackling. “Okay, I’ll bite. That was pretty fun.”

“I’ll say.” Arata turned himself away. He could feel the flurries of snow melt upon contact with his burning face. “I wasn’t aware life as a butterfly had such intensity to it.”

“Because it doesn’t. The whole soup idea is a misconception about the caterpillar when inside its chrysalis. There’s still a bug. And before you get your hopes up: there’s only one.”

One last peal of laughter bubbled out from his lips. “Remind me later that I owe you twenty.”

“Trust me, I won’t let you forget.”

They returned their attention to the hustle and bustle beneath the overpass, to the candor of Shinjuku’s arteries thrumming with activity. In the lights of a thousand blinking advertisements Kira saw his self-satisfied smile. One touched her face as well. They had a dangerous job needing to be undertaken tonight, and the promise of bonus pay – and an admittedly fun exchange of japes – had done well to alleviate the jitters.

She envied Arata the bold maneuverings he’d been born to. Of course, he did allow her release at times to partake in his role by means of his character, and for that she was grateful.

She understood the ritual by now, that courting dance passed on from man to man through blood. Taking enough nervous yet calculated steps around an intimate question until it needed no asking, only a response from the one who sat watching themselves become encircled in that trapped, treaded path, waiting – as was christened with a term conceived by her former classmates – demurely.

She had decided long ago the tradition did not suit her.

In the plaza below where pine trees once stood decorated with tinsel and strings of lights amongst oversized, colorful Christmas iconography – the presents, sleighs, and a jolly, jiggling, white-bearded man from across the sea – people now milled on the streets, tourist and citizen, child to elder, enjoying the freedom from responsibility gifted liberally at night and especially now, with the end of the school term.

Cars and taxis travelled one way or the other while those same people waited to cross. On the horizon rose the new year.

It was the 29th of December. A time of change. A moment to choose, to give affection – if one thought worthy – and perhaps, also, to receive it.

If she’d been less distracted, Kira might have caught the flash of anticipation on Arata’s face for the night ahead, and the unlimited possibilities and surprises Shinjuku held for them both.

With these words, a story written before begins again.