How We Met Again

Chapter 37: Spiralling (or, A Winter Apart)

Chapter 37:
Spiralling
(or, A Winter Apart)

The sky was depressingly absent of snow.

Instead, the grey clouds that loomed overhead, dark and murky as they rumbled through the sky, threatened but one thing: rain. Even as lights were being hung in the streets, and trees were being put up with their assorted festive decorations, the ground remained devoid of white, and the pavement was darkened by downpours.

Such was winter in Nagoya.

Returning home after the last day of school before the winter break, ashen grey was omnipotent; streets seemed to streak past me in smeared shades, colour desaturated by the drained light passing through the clouds far above my head. As it was, the sun was already on the verge of setting; soon, streetlights would turn on, a desperate attempt to lighten the pressing darkness.

To hold back the night.

Bzzt.

Pulling out my phone, I sighed at the newly-arrived email from Raiha -- a reminder of her earlier request that I stop by the store on my way home.

Something about needing eggs for a "secret project"... whatever that meant.

Pressing the back button on my phone, I exited out of the email. With a click, the screen returned to my list of conversations... and my eyes fell on the email chain that sat immediately under the one with Raiha.

Yotsuba.

After the day of the race, as the hours ticked down during the final few days of school, she'd seemed... distant. We'd still spoken as we normally did. All of the words were the same... but everything seemed off. There'd been a strange timbre to her voice, an unresolved harmonic, a layer that hadn't been there before... and I hadn't been sure how to handle it.

Maybe the one that's off is me? Maybe I'm overthinking everything.

Maybe I'm thinking about the wrong things.

As the glass doors of the grocery store slid open and I walked inside, I was lost in thought. My feet carried me to the correct aisle on their own, devoid of conscious direction from my brain. As I picked up the carton of eggs, my eyes were glazed. My focus was turned entirely inward.

Maybe I'm the one being strange.

I'd had lunch with Yotsuba earlier in the day... but that same sense of wrongness had been settled over us like a fine coating of dust. It had been as though we'd been locked in a two-step, but it had spontaneously grown discordant, each slightly out of sync with the other's movement; each trying to compensate for the change, but the compensation serving only to drive us both further out of step.

In between her laughter, hidden in the cracks of her smile, it had been there. I was sure of it. I'd sensed that there was something under the surface. Something that--

"Will you be needing a bag, sir?"

"No."

It's just one carton.

Emerging onto the street, a light drizzle had begun to fall. Inconsequential droplets, impacting and then ignored; powerless in their scarcity.

I pulled out my phone again, water splattering across the screen, blurring the words written there.

The response she'd sent me during lunch the day of the race. A simple thank you, nothing more. We hadn't emailed since then; radio silence, so to speak. Yet, beneath her message, growing more and more distorted by liquid pooling on the tilted glass, was text in red.