How We Met Again

Chapter 21: Departure!

The morning of the school camping trip, I woke up long before the crack of dawn, darkness still filling the narrow confines of our apartment. The wavy dappled pattern of the trees' shadows, cast through the window by the light of the few passing cars and the fluorescent glow of the streetlamps illuminating the night outside, swayed on the ceiling as the trees gently swayed in turn in the wind.

Try as I might, sleep eluded me, and it was with a frustrated sigh that I resigned myself to the bittersweet reality of consciousness.

In lieu of laying in bed for hours in pursuit of a hopeless task, I rose from my futon, careful to be as silent as possible so as to not wake my family members. Tiptoeing my way to the suitcase my father had taken to Tokyo weeks earlier, I unzipped it and inspected the contents, checking one last time that all of my necessities had been packed.

Toiletries? Check.

Cards? Check.

The new clothes my father had dragged me along to buy, thanks to his increased paycheque?

Much to my chagrin, check.

A few days prior, my father had forced me to go buy several new sets of clothes due to his insistence that it was, in some way, improper to wear the school uniform on a school camping trip. I had no idea what the hell the issue was, and I was extremely opposed to spending money on such frivolities -- but he had fervently insisted, and I'd had no choice. Raiha had come along as our resident fashionista, and I'd found myself decked out in black jeans, a navy blue buttoned shirt, and a fashionable (according to my sister) light-brown jacket with a faux-fur hood -- my "uniform" for the first day. While my father had originally insisted on buying more than just the three sets of clothes, I'd put my foot down at that number.

I had limits to what I would allow, after all.

Having convinced myself that everything I wanted to bring was indeed in the suitcase, I lay down on the tatami mats and stared at the ceiling, my arms crossed across my chest. The dappled shadows of the trees on the ceiling were fading as the amount of light coming through the small window gently increased, the pre-dawn haze diffusing the small amount of light beginning to refract over the horizon.

Restless, and not wanting to wake up my family members, I spontaneously decided to go for a walk.

Writing a quick note and pinning it to the fridge, I got dressed, threw on my new jacket and slipped out the front door. The cool November breeze made me shiver, though thankfully the coat kept most of the wind off. With the light strengthening by the minute, I began to wander, hoping that the gentle exercise would exorcise the nerves building up in my chest over the coming three days. I hadn't been on a school trip since... since...

A car whizzed by, startling me. I looked around, and realized that I had wandered off in a completely random direction. While I had a vague idea of where I was, I had no memory of actually walking there.

"Odd," I murmured to myself.

I continued to walk, my brain entirely uninvolved with the task of determining a final destination. My legs simply operated on autopilot. Eventually, I ascended a small hill, and found myself at a small park. With a jolt, I recognized it as the one to which I had wandered months prior, on a cool morning when I had similarly found myself suffering from insomnia.

I crossed the street, and went to sit on the swings. The sun was still not quite over the horizon to the east, and the silence with which I had so heavily identified on that day permeated the park, broken only occasionally by the sound of a car driving by.

Gently, I dug my heels into the soft dirt beneath my feet, and pushed backwards as far as I could. I slowly rose, and rose, and rose, until I was standing on the very tips of my toes. There was a brief moment when my muscles screamed, aching for release, and the connection between myself and the seat was merely a formality, bound only by tension rather than gravity.