A game of associations

Once they exited the confinement of the hollow, quiet university, she lashed out at him in unrestrained fury, hands flaying out to smack him wherever she could reach. “You’re dead!” she swore in high-pitched screeches. “I’m going to make sure of that! How can you be so shameless?! If you don’t care about your future, don’t drag me down with you!”

Arihira didn’t seem swayed at all. He looked down at her with a scowl, before his slender hand wrapped around her wrist to stop her outburst. “Did I throw you under the bus? No. You chose to follow me on your own.” She froze, wide eyes staring at him with profound disbelief for his audacity.

“You’re a bad influence!” She insisted, but her voice dulled its edge, trembling like she couldn’t wield it anymore.

“Don’t let yourself be influenced, then! Are you dense like that?” With a sharp push, he released her and turned his back on her. “Tch.”

Panic struck her, as he walked away.

“Where are you going now?” She demanded, quickly falling into step behind him.

“Somewhere shady.”

The sun slowly glided along the sky from the east, casting long shadows along the pristine green lawn, where the two sat under the shade of a blossoming cherry tree, facing the western side of the faculty, where birds sang for them their soft melodies in the cloudless day without a disruption to startle them.

“We can wait it out, before going back.” Arihira grumbled, folding his arms behind his neck to act as a makeshift pillow. “Either way, we don’t have anything better to do.”

Suzume hugged her knees to her chest. Surges of adrenaline kept her nerves on edge. “Don’t talk to me.” A warning hiss, before a strike.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” She snapped again, turning her head to face him. “If aunt Tamao learns, I don’t want to imagine what…” She cut herself off. Her teeth dragged across her lower lip. Anxiety made her heart swell.

“Who’s aunt Tamao?”

“The woman, who adopted me and my brother… Kenta.”

“What about your parents?”

Her gaze trailed off.

Her brows furrowed, as she struggled to grasp something that felt just out of reach. “Parents?” she repeated like the word was a foreign entity in her mind. A word she learned from him. “I don’t… I don’t have any…”

He hummed in understanding. Or tried to.

“Haven’t you thought about searching for them?”

The question caught her off guard again. She shrugged her shoulders. “No… I never felt like I need to.”

“I guess you knew aunt Tamao since your childhood.” Arihira shifted, laying on his side and leaned his head on his hand.

“Yeah…” Her voice drawled quietly. “I guess I do. I mean… I don’t remember much from my childhood.” She looked away, toward the campus. “Actually, I don’t remember anything at all.”

Arihira’s silence turned into tension, which mixed with her anxious struggle to remember something to tell him and fill the quiet. His jacket rustled in the grass, as he shifted again to lay on his back.

“Nothing at all?” he repeated, almost to himself.

“I remember some kind of fragments… Like a deja-vu. But… I don’t know how much of it is real and how much I wish was real.”

“Like what?”

“I often think about a world, where the colors are dulled down by shadows and twilight. Only the moon glows, sometimes in silver, other times in red… I imagine a vast valley with a blanket of bright, luminescent flowers that dance around me and feel like silk, when they brush my skin. And the grass is so tall and soft, it feels like a bed… But I don’t think the darkness is suffocating or oppressive. It’s my comfort place, when I need to dissociate from this world.”

Her trail of thought broke and a flush of crimson embarrassment crept up her neck, when she heard Arihira huff in amusement. He nudged her ribs the way she did in class, making her startle and fall into the grass. “You should have been a poet, not a marine scientist.”

“Shut up!”

The teasing edge held no malice. They shared a laugh, bathed in the glow of sunlight. “Have you thought about searching for that place?”

“Are you insane?” She brushed him off with a scoff. “Searching for a place I imagined…”

“Maybe that’s one of the childhood memories that’s clawing to stay in your mind.”

Arihira leaned closer, an amused glint sparkling in his eyes. His voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, only for her to listen to.

“Maybe it’s sitting there in the back of your brain, waiting for you to find its origins.”

The two burst into a fit of giggles again.

“Are you going to tell me about how the world is only an illusion again?” She mocked. “And that I can manifest this little world of mine into existence?”

Flawless teeth flashed, as his lips curled into his devious, charming smirk. “Maybe.”

“You’re adamant this is all a simulation, aren’t you?”

“Well…” The boy trailed off, eyes sweeping the campus grounds, as if scanning for something only he could see. “A simulation will only work as long as you believe it’s not one. As long as you don’t see the flaws in it, you can live in this little bubble for as long as you can bear it.”

“What difference does seeing the flaws make? It just makes you mad that the world is crooked.”

Arihira didn’t answer right away. He thought for a long moment, before his amber eyes pierced her again. “Nothing, really. You’re right.” He looked away. “But it’s, at least, one step closer to building the reality that you want.” His gaze locked onto something on the ground only he could see, contemplating something only he knew. The border where the shade surrendered to sunlight.

“Okay,” she scoffed, hands held up in mock surrender. “From tomorrow I will imagine I am a millionaire and hope by the next day I will wake up in a penthouse.”

He graced her with a tender smile. Not the mocking smirk he teased her with. A soft, graceful look, which made him appear more innocent than he looked. A crack in the demeanor, which revealed a side of him he reserved only for moments like these. “Listen… even if this is all an illusion,” he lowered his voice to a soft rumble. “I could stay in it forever like this. With you.”

He looked away from her face to avoid seeing her reaction.

“When I was little,” he continued, absentmindedly staring at the clouds above, trailing along the sky. “When I couldn’t remember something, my brother used to make me play associations with him. It usually worked.”

“Associations?”

The mischievous smirk returned on his lips. “Yes. Instead of telling me outright what I forgot, he would tell me words to associate with it, so I don’t rely on anyone to remember things instead of me. He said people can twist and mold an ignorant mind, but if I train my brain to remember things, then my enemies will be one step behind and not twist my memories into lies, at least.”

“That’s…” Suzume shifted, shyly fidgeting with the pebbles and grass around her. “That’s so sweet.”

“Do you want to try it?” His eye glimmered with excitement he couldn’t conceal, when he glanced in her direction. She still blushed, still avoided his gaze. “We don’t have anything better to do, until our next class.”

“Why not?” Her expression finally lightened up with something other than embarrassment. “I haven’t played it since I was a kid.”

“Alright. I’ll start.” Arihira hummed in thought, scanning their perimeter. “Sky.”

“Blue.”

“Cloud.”

“Soft.”

“Stone.”

“Mountain.”

“Flower.”

“Meadow.”

“Comfort.”

“Shrine.”

“Wings.”

“Heron.”

Her stomach dropped in that moment. Invisible needles, carved with a faceless name, pierced her heart. Shards of a broken milky white puzzle surged into her mind, desperate in their search for a place to belong… to set the name onto a face she couldn’t remember. A voice she could almost remember. But the pieces slipped away before she could grasp them. Completion never came. How could anyone finish a puzzle in a single heartbeat before it vanished?

“Suzume?”

Arihira’s voice brought her back to reality. She realized she had hunched over in pain, gripping the fabric of her shirt at her chest, like it was a prison her heart wished to break free from. She looked at him again. His face bore a heavy sadness he tried to conceal behind indifference. Some sort of nostalgia she didn’t understand.

“I’m fine. Carry on…”

“Kunai.”

“Ninja.”

“Chain.”

“Blade!”

The whistle of a chain flying past her made her jolt. When she whirled around, there was nothing there. Not a sound or sight disturbed the morning peace around them. “Did you hear something?”

“Like what?” his eyebrows arched up.

“Nothing.” She shook her head, dismissing her thoughts. “Must have been the wind.”

“Should I keep going?”

“I think it’s my turn…”

“Fine.”

“Cat.”

“Menace.”

She burst into a fit of giggles. “Normal people would have said dog or mouse.”

“Do I look normal to you?”

“I guess not. Anyways, your next word is… Tree.”

“Hinoki.”

Only that she grows as old as the hinoki, which gazes into the reflection of the world we have created.

And choose her own fate from this day on, when I failed to give her a better one.

“Suzume, you’re dozing off…”

“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m thinking so much…”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing… something I probably heard in a movie…”

“What was it?”

“Nothing, just leave it.”

Comfortable silence settled in the space between them, calming and full of unsaid words and questions that tortured Suzume meanwhile. “You know why we used to play associations? Because he believed every word can trigger something you tied to it. And that way you remember significant things in your life.”

“Your brother sounds wise.”

“He was…” Arihira trailed off, like every word was a lead weight on his heart. “He was my best friend. The best man I knew.”

“What happened to him?”

“He betrayed me.”

Dead silence crashed between whatever comfort they managed to build between them. She didn’t even flinch, too afraid to shift his attention to her in this awkwardness. The vibration of her phone made her jolt up and Kenta’s name appeared on the screen with a large font. She held the phone at a distance, eyes squinted so she could focus on the name.

“Hello?”

“Suzume!” Kind, loyal Kenta’s bubbly voice greeted her from the other line. “How’s university? You haven’t called in days.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Suzume answered. “I’ve been busy lately with…” her gaze trailed off to Arihira, then to the university building. “With university.”

“You sound nervous. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just… I’m still getting used to this new scene. You know…”

“I should have come with you, but you insisted on going alone.” Kenta scolded, but without an ounce of a sharp edge in his tone. “It would have been easier if we were together.”

Suzume let out a quiet scoff. “I’ll be fine, Kenta. You worry too much. My next class is starting soon, but I’ll try to come see you and aunt Tamao this weekend, okay?”

“Stay safe and don’t talk to anyone. And stay away from suspicious people. Big cities are full of…”

He couldn’t finish his thought. Suzume hung up the phone and returned her attention to Arihira, who shifted his gaze back to the edge of the shadows with a strange, all-knowing smirk.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“I’m just thinking about how funny physics can be sometimes. How shadows barely move.” He stood up before she could ask any more questions. But his eyes trailed over to check her expressions. “Come on. Let’s not be late for our second class.”