To Be Okay With Someone

Late afternoon.

The crowd had thinned enough that I could hear my own thoughts again.

My thoughts were:

Feet.

My feet.

Ouch.

My feet.

There was also a secondary track running underneath, quieter, that I was actively refusing to engage with. 

It was the track that had been running since "not just watches." 

It had been there all afternoon, underneath the narrating, staring at Yuta's hands, and the question-wrangling and the crowd management. 

It's like a song you can't unhear once you've heard it. 

I was not listening to it. 

I was thinking about my feet instead, which was significantly safer and also more immediately relevant.

Yuta had been doing the explain-demonstrate-receive-reset cycle for six hours and showed zero signs of needing to sit down or eat or be a human who has physical limitations. 

I had been narrating and question-wrangling and at one point explaining to a child that yes, the watch is alive, no, not like a dog, yes it will still run if you're not watching it, no it doesn't need to be fed, and we'd gone around this loop three times before his mother finally intervened. 

She apologized. I told her it was fine. 

Because it really was fine. 

He was curious. Curiosity is good. 

I respect it. 

I was just very tired.

At some point during the afternoon I had also eaten exactly half of an onigiri someone had handed me and then set down and forgotten, explained the difference between quartz and mechanical movements to a man who turned out to already know the difference and just wanted to see if I did, and made sustained eye contact with a pigeon on the windowsill for longer than was strictly necessary.

The point is I was tired.

The point is my feet were communicating their grievances directly to my spinal cord.

Shred by shred, my nerves were giving out.

The point is I was leaning against the table at an angle that was probably not great for the structural integrity of either the table or my spine, and I had stopped caring about this approximately forty minutes ago.

And then Uchimura appeared.

Two cups.

Tea apparently.

He set one in front of Yuta.

He set one in front of me.

He walked away.

That's it. No explanation. No eye contact. He just did it and left, the way you might release a balloon and not watch where it goes. 

No acknowledgement that this was a thing he had done. 

No waiting to see if we noticed. 

Just the cups, and then the retreating back, and then a profound nothing.

Yuta and I looked at the cups.

Then at each other.

Then at the cups.

"That was," I started.

"Yeah," Yuta said.

"He brought—"

"Tea."

"Uchimura."

"Yes."

"Jotaro Uchimura."

"That's him."

"Who made me do handwritten flyers as punishment for existing near him."

"The same guy, yes."

I picked up my cup. I looked at it. I looked at the direction he had walked off in, which was the direction of someone who had done a normal thing and not a bizarre and unexpected act of human consideration. 

I looked at the cup again.

"I'm going to smell it," I said.

"Please don't," Yuta said.

"I'm going to smell it anyway."

"Azusa."

"I'm doing it."

I smelled the tea.

It smelled like tea.

Good tea, actually. Not vending machine tea. 

Not the kind that comes in a plastic bottle and tastes like the memory of tea. 

The kind someone had to make a specific choice to acquire, which meant Uchimura had at some point today looked at us across a room and thought: they have been standing for a long time. 

And then done something about it. Without telling anyone. Without making it a thing.

Yuta sipped his and didn't immediately experience any symptoms, so I sipped mine.

It was really good.

I sat with that for a moment.

"He likely noticed we'd been standing all day," Yuta said.

"Don't defend him."

"I'm not defending him. I'm noting it."

"Same thing right now."

"It's not."

"It is a little."

I rolled my eyes.

Yuta let out a chuckle while cooling down his teacup.

He thought about this with the same careful attention he gives everything, which I was also not thinking about.

"Maybe a little," he said.

I peered over at the bit where Uchimura had exited through. 

At his retreating competence. 

At the very good tea in my hand. 

At the fact that the flyers had looked good, and the booth had run without incident, and somehow three people who had no business working together had managed to pull off something that functioned. 

Soomething that ended up working. 

A thing that people had actually stopped for.

"He's not entirely terrible," I said. Very quietly. Like saying it too loud would somehow alert him and he'd materialize to witness it and the whole thing would become unbearable.

"No," Yuta agreed.

"You cannot tell him."

"Understood."

"I'll deny it."

"Obviously."

"Under oath. In a court of law."

"Very reasonable." Yuta nodded once.

I drank my tea. Outside, the festival was winding down. 

The banners were catching the late light. 

Many a family began heading home with things they'd bought, with faces that meant they'd had a good day — the kind of satisfied tiredness of people who'd been somewhere and done something and it had been worth it.

"Good day," Yuta said, which — I realized — was exactly what I'd been thinking, just two seconds ahead of me.

I kept doing that. 

Arriving somewhere and finding him already there.

"Yeah," I said.

"You did well." He said.

"We did well." I poked him.

He considered this the way he considers things — fully, without rushing it.

"Yeah," he said. "We did."

Something about that — the we — landed in a specific place and stayed there.

I looked at the last two flyers, still pinned to the display. His drawings. My letters. The same page. A thing that hadn't existed before us and now did.

"Did any of this feel weird to you?" I said. "Like — at any point. Be honest."

"No."

"Not even a little?"

"No."

Twice? 

I shook away the word.

"Because I feel like it should have. By objective standards. We were thrown together by a teacher and a guy who was retaliating against me for existing, and somehow we just — it worked. That's not how things usually go."

"How do things usually go?"

I thought about it. About the contingency plans. About green having no column. About the fact that I had prepared extensively for every version of this day that ended badly and had not prepared at all for this one.

"Worse," I said.

He nodded like that made sense.

"Does it have to be strange if it works?" he asked.

I looked at the flyers again.

"I guess not," I said.

"It strikes me as good," he said. "That's all."

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

"Okay," I said.

And for once — for the first time maybe — that word worked for me too. 

It didn't feel like a jar. 

Not even a door closing.

 Just a thing that was true, sitting there quietly, not asking to be anything else.

It felt good to be okay with someone.

Especially if that someone is Yuta.

We finished our tea.

It went cold but somehow my chest felt warm anyway.

Oh lord, look at me getting all sappy.