Coffee in the clouds

I didn’t sleep much that night, in fact I don’t think I slept at all. All I could do was twiddle my thumbs in bed or pace back in the living room , holding the letter in my hands so I could read it over and over again when I felt my heart aching. The pale blue luminescence of night that whispered its way gently through the open window of my six mat slowly began to swirl and change.

The purple danced and swayed with the smallest orange particles of dawn, until the tired new day sun yawned across the horizon and welcomed Yokohama into its embrace. Today was the last Day Mr .Miura at my law firm had allotted me personal time off, and only under the condition that I completed my casework from home.

I had not even begun a single file. I tried again and again, but no matter how much I tried to focus I couldn’t even figure out where to start. Even if I DO start…It’s not as if I would be able to do a good job now, Arisu has turned my head into such a dizzy pile of mush, I’ve barely remembered to breathe. In the hazy morning light, I could just barely make out the shape of Mrs. Ichi’s colorful basket of fruits on the table, and for some reason it made me smile.

My six mat only had a small sliding door closet big enough to hold a few articles of clothing, and the door only slid properly one way so that the ladder leading up to the loft where I slept obstructed half of the doorway anyhow. The first thing I did when I moved out of my parent’s house in Yokosuka to Yokohama was buy myself a suit that was much too expensive, so that I could make a good impression on Mr. Miura. So much for that, I’d only ever worn the damn thing once. Now, it's just collecting dust…

“Ah, hell. Why not?” I reached around the ladder to my futon and stuck my arm into the closet, pulling off the little plastic red hanger I took from home to hang my suit on. It was A rich coffee colored brown Jacket with matching pants, a button up cream colored shirt, and an oil black tie and shoes to bring it all together. I stripped down and changed into the suit, looking at myself in the standing mirror I always kept propped up in the back of my living area.

“Hello, My name Is Ren Natsukashi, I’m here to represent both you and the Kane Miura law firm, it's a pleasure!” I held out my hand to my reflection and bowed as if to greet myself, the rhythmic click-clacking of the air conditioner behind me mocking me once again.

“Fyaooo...chk-chk-chk-chk-chk…fyaooo...chk-chk-chk-chk-chk… You think that’s what a Lawyer looks like? That's what a kid who stole his daddy’s suit from the closet and tried it on looks like.”

“Yeah! Well I!...” I stopped myself as I turned around to berate the empty room, shaking my head. “Get it together Ren, just get it together.” I grabbed my old golden zippo lighter, and my pack of seven star cigarettes off the shelf beside my door, as I opened it to leave I shivered. Even in the summertime, the wind over Tokyo Bay blew a chilly breeze through the streets every morning. I lit my cigarette and walked down the balcony corridor to Mrs. Ichi’s door and knocked. I waited a while and knocked again, and then again. Suddenly, I became worried.

“Oh God…what if she’s dead in there?! What if she’s been sitting there dead all night and I’m gonna be the one to find her cold corpse… M…Mrs. Ichi, I’m…”. I hesitated, gritting my teeth in hopes of mustering up some courage hidden deep within me. “I'M COMING IN!!!”

I twisted the handle and burst through the door with a loud thud, panting and wide eyed like some kind of maniac, probably.

“Oh, hello Ren-kun. Is something the matter? You could have knocked you know!” I sighed in relief as I was greeted by Mrs. Ichi’s wrinkled smiling face. She was in the back of the room putting some coffee grounds into a potted pepper plant.

“I did knock! More than once actu-...” I smiled back at her, watching her gentle hands pat down the dirt smoothly in the plant. “Don’t scare me like that, Ichi-san.” She stood up holding the little pepper plant in her hands, walking over to me with a strange look on her face. I glanced down at my hand realizing I had a lit cigarette still clasped between my fingers. “Oh, I’m sorry if I…”

“Nonsense, you’re just in time to head up to the roof and help me garden.” As she walked past me through the door, she snatched the cigarette from my hand and took a drag with a chuckle, walking up the stairs at the end of our balcony with the smoke in one hand and the pepper plant tucked under her other arm.

“Well I um… ah hell, why not?” I shrugged, shutting the door and following behind her. Had I really been living in this building 5 months and only now learned we had a rooftop garden?

“Whoa…” As we ascended two more small flights of stairs we reached the roof. The sky had become bright peachy orange, white plumes of clouds breaking up the vibrant display with splashes of pure white. Our building wasn’t very tall, but it was just tall enough to see the morning sun shimmering over Tokyo Bay, the distant shrill cries of a few seagulls ringing out as if they were Yokohama’s own alarm clock.

“It really is something, isn’t it? I’ve lived here the last eleven years of my life and I’ll never grow tired of it. The salty smell on the air, the view, and of course…all the plants!” Mrs. Ichi took excited and quick, yet small elderly steps across the rooftop, where at one end there were long wooden boxes filled with soil in rows, every variety one could want of fruits and vegetables all placed in happy little cubicles. “This one was sick and not taking to the soil, so I brought him inside and gave him some coffee beans to raise the PH content, and now he’s ready to join his friends again.”

Mrs. Ichi pursed the cigarette she’d stolen between her lips tightly as she dug her hands gently into the soil surrounding the pepper plant, lifting it out with careful precision before placing it safely into a hole beside a few cucumber plants. I walked up beside her, glancing at all the rows of plants, a bit awe stricken.

“I never knew you had a whole garden up here, Ichi-san.”

“Not just me, but you too. And everyone else in the building. It's for all of us. All I ask is that you take whatever you need, but plant something in return as well.

I furrowed my brows and frowned a little, wishing that I’d contributed somehow. “Don’t worry, you kept me company today, so this pepper plant is something from the both of us. That means you can help yourself whenever you like Ren… But I don’t think you came barging through my door at 6:15 in the morning because you needed more vegetables, am I right?”

“No, it's not that it's something…Something more…” I could not find a way to articulate what I was thinking, and felt myself on the verge of crying again. Without a word Mrs. Ichi walked around the wooden planters that had been silently but gratefully basking in the sunlight, she gestured for me to follow. As we turned the corner of the last row, a small wooden table with a chessboard on top and two old lawn chairs came into view. Ichi-san had already sat herself down in one and was once again beaming at me with her little smile, occasionally puffing away at the cigarette in her stubby fingers. She was in a little purple sweater and a long plaid skirt, a cute straw gardening hat adorning her head, the edges of her salt and pepper colored hair sticking out around the sides of its brim. She sat up, reaching over to the other seat and patted it as if to usher me over, as I approached and sat down she handed what was left of my cigarette back to me and silently grinned. I meekly simpered back, wanting to make her laugh.

“You really think an old grandma should be smoking like this?” I chuckled and took a long drawn out drag, puffing it upwards into the cool morning sky.

“Do you really think it looks professional for a new apprentice of law to be puffing away, either?” She smiled so wide her eyes looked entirely closed, a hearty laugh in her chest only being contained by her closed lips.

“You’ve got me there…” I snuffed out the cigarette on the wall beside us, the air of happy peacefulness suddenly departing the rooftop, being carried off with the wind as my own laughing turned into a stoic glare on the horizon.

“What is it, Ren?” Mrs. Ichi’s old eyes were perhaps one of the only people in my life I could tell looked upon me with genuine care and affection, and I didn’t even know why. I’d only said hello to her every morning when I first moved in…I might have brought up her mail once or twice because I knew she occasionally had trouble walking. But nothing that would merit the motherly look she was giving me now.

“If I told you…I’d have to start from the beginning, and if I start from the beginning, we’d be here all day.” My lips trembled a bit and rubbed my eyes, the first formations of tears beginning to well at their corners.

“Ren, I’m an old woman. My children are grown, even my grandchildren are grown. Nobody comes around to see me anymore, I have nothing in this world but whatever time God decides I have left. If I spend the rest of that time hearing what troubles have been weighing you down, it’d be the best way I could possibly use it.” Her face was serious. Not for a moment did she stutter or stammer, and she looked upon me with such compassionate conviction that I could not even pretend I doubted her.

Just then, Ichi-san reached into a pocket on the inside of her little purple sweater and pulled out a thermos. She took the metal lid and poured it full of piping hot, oily black coffee. She handed it over to me before leaning back to relax, taking a sip straight from the thermos herself. I stared down into the cup resting in my fingers. They didn’t even look like my own hands. It's as if they belonged to an apparition that was stuck somewhere else. As I glared into the dark coffee, I could see the peachy orange sky and long curling clouds reflected in its deep onyx depths. Whether I acknowledged them or not, they would be there, always swaying in the breeze. Whether I had sought her out this morning or not, Ichi-san would have been waiting here on this rooftop until I was ready. Was it really so wrong to do what I was about to do?

“Is this really okay?” I tried to hold them in, but the tears flowed down my face autonomously, as if they simply could not stay within my eyes any longer.

“It's more than okay, Ren-kun. If you need to start from the beginning, I’ll be here to listen for as long as it takes.” I stopped and thought for a moment. When exactly was the beginning?

“Well it all started halfway through my last year in school… when Arisu transferred to our school.” I gulped, just saying her name out loud nearly made me retch and vomit again.

“Mmm…Mmhm, go on. Tell me everything.” Ichi-san settled back in her chair like a child waiting for a bedtime story. She looked even more like a child since she was so short her feet barely touched the ground when she sat back.

“I… I remember it was the morning after our midterm exams. I’d studied for hours on end for over a month so that I’d be the highest scoring member in the school. I was so anxious I couldn’t sleep that night…” My heart thumped, even remembering it after all this time I could still feel that anxious yearning to know my score that day. “I got up extra early and decided to walk to school instead of taking the train like usual, I even called my best friend Sentaro…”

I had managed to not think about him until now. His name left such a sting in my heart and on my tongue that for a moment I considered stopping right then and there, running back to my room and shutting myself away forever.

“And then what happened, Ren-kun?” Ichi-san’s voice was so mellow and soft that I was able to relax and recollect myself.

“That… that right there is what started it all. If I hadn’t gotten up early that morning and forced Sentaro to come with me, none of it might have happened.” I’d never thought of it like that before. Something as simple as deciding to go to school a little earlier just one day had changed the entirety of who I was as a person. It's funny how life works that way, isn’t it? We spend our whole lives worrying and trying desperately to change things out of our control, and suddenly something seemingly insignificant happens and shakes us to our very core.

Ichi-san was staring quietly and intently now, but she didn’t say a word. She waited patiently for me to continue at my own pace, the thermos she was holding sent plumes of steam up to twist around in the air in front of her face. I knew exactly what happened next, but the only words I could hear in my head were the ones she’d sent me; the ones that brought us both onto this rooftop on a chilly summer morning.

“Ren, I really want to see you again.”

Is it really worth it to remember?