I still remember. It was my first day at the kindergarten and I was feeling very nervous. Most of the day I hid myself in the corner of the playroom and cringed away from other kids. The entire room seemed as if was gradually expanding in front of me, which made me terrified and miserable.
I kept looking at the floor vacantly, doodling on an imaginary paper. Some time later, a set of small feet stepped into my view. Moving my eyes slowly up, I saw a pretty girl with a pert smile looking down at me. With a slight hesitation, the girl asked me to join her in the playground. I looked into her brown eyes, nodded shyly and took Nana’s small hand.
From then on I quickly adjusted into the new environment and started learning the local dialect. I made a few new friends, including the neighbourhood boy called Hiroshi. He was a good friend to both of us, but not part of 'us'.
Nana and I became inseparable as we grew up. We were closer than sisters, taking a bath together, sharing a bed, and she was my only and most trusted confidante.
10 years later, we were still best friends, but not innocent little girls anymore. After coming back from the local creek I suddenly couldn’t fathom the uneasiness that Nana's ordinary question triggered in me.
- Was she teasing me?
I had no way of knowing, but the way she touched me made my body tingle. That slow, gentle way she let her fingers play on my skin was to me appeared deliberate.
Maybe it was nothing. I always adored Nana and maybe this intangible chemistry was part of our closeness.
Still, a question lingered in my mind.
- Has anything changed between us?
It was that night Dad announced that our family was moving to Yokohama within a month. What - within a month?
It was a bolt from the blue and way too much a shock for me to take in at once. I felt stifled and numb as if I was gradually drowning under the dark, cold water.
My new school and our residence were already organised by the time he told me the news. I couldn’t blame him for evading the topic for so long, for everyone knew that second year of Junior-high was an important preparation time for the high-school entrance exam.
I grew increasingly moody and petulant as the day got closer to my departure. Nana was visibly disturbed and upset by my uncharacteristic crankiness and asked for the explanation that I couldn't provide.
The pain couldn’t be summed up by those three words “I miss you”.
It was killing me.
***
Ever since I left Fukuoka, I kept myself occupied with my study and work, without having any clear future plan. I just let the time pass and hoped that the haunting memory would go away eventually. It didn’t.For twenty years I tried to wiggle away from the ghost from the past.
I had a job in a publishing company and lived in the coolest part of Tokyo, hanging around with so-called creative crowd, going out with rich, good-looking corporate guys and taking this nonchalant attitude to protect myself from getting too close to one person.
Weekends’ dates became my duties. Over the years I was taken to Tokyo Disneyland for a date for fuck sake, a gorgeous hotel on Christmas Eve and some ‘boo’-ring Hollywood movies that I detested. And I was an infamous speak-as-I-find bitch. Inevitably my boyfriend went out of my sight one after another, leaving the look as if to say you-are-so-insatiable.
- You don’t know me. I can be satisfied with anything with the right person. I thought, and each time, the old memory came back fresh and tormented me.
My heart whispered as it repeated the sepia-tainted vision of the pebbly road to my old house, the cleavage between the hills and the masculine mountains sitting beyond the wheat fields, and Nana.
***
Around four o'clock in the morning, I open my eyes from a short, restless sleep. The deep blue surface of the sea is gradually turning celestial white as the sun rises. I am mesmerised. For ages my heart had been so hard and dry that it had long-forgotten to be touched or moved by anything, but now it is starting to remember, it is opening up and all my senses are coming alive.
I keep watching.
There is no sound, other than my heart beating and my breathing in and out quietly and yet steadily, and the rhythm synchronises with the vibration of the train taking me back to the past.
*** To Be Continued ***
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