Velvet Ring - iwaoi

Part 2 chapter 2 - Through a magnifying glass

On the sixth morning I woke up a few minutes before the alarm on my phone would start ringing, breaking through the silence and announcing dawn. I was staring out the window in a sort of trance, at the meadow cropped close like bright green velvet and billowing into carpeted hills at the horizon.

I saw the Oikawa siblings, far below, gliding like a pair of ghosts on the lawn. They looked particularly angelic, their log hair wind-blown, both in white tennis sweaters and tennis shoes. The sun was low, burning gold through the trees, casting their shadows before them on the ground, long and distorted. They walked for a long time without saying anything. There was no noise but the crunch of their shoes on the gravel path and the whistle of wind in the pines.

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things - a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf - are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And that's what happened then, walking over the meadow to the house. It was like a painting too vivid to be real - every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky a sugary yellow, pink and blue it hurt me to look at it. It looked like achingly-sweet cotton candy that pains your teeth at every bite.

My alarm rang and they sank into the shadow dissipated by the sun gradually rising. I slacked to reach the screen with the very top of my fingertip to stop the ringing and trembled as I leaned over to reach my feet, stretching and preparing myself to get out of bed. My phone rang yet again, but this time it wasn't my morning alarm - it was a phone call.

"Hello?"

"Good morning, sir." I heard a mumbled shuffle of pages and a constant agitation around the person speaking. "Iwazumi Hajime?"

"Yes, that's me." I said as I was getting out of bed, the wrinkles on my shirt falling as I stood up. The floor felt cold - just what I needed to wake me up.

"We are calling you from the *...* hospital,"

I sank. This was a two-way path, one of the roads leading towards a deathly abyss - quite literally. I hold my breath waiting for the receptionist lady to continue her response because holding my breath would hold hostage all the thoughts that would've drowned me otherwise.

"Oikawa Toru... He woke up." The receptionist sighed in relief, as if her own words were pressuring her so hard that she learned how to breathe properly again after this conversation.

I got down on my knees so quickly that even she'd probably heard the loud thud coming through the phone call. I gasped deeply for air and exhaled in a faint relieved sigh.

"His family isn't here yet." She spoke in a reasonable and kind voice, in the way pleasant adults sometimes talk to console children. She probably worked in the kids department. "He said he wanted to see you first. Please come here quickly before we are obliged to call his family members, if you can't I'll-"

"I'll be there."

I got up as my concentration raised from my knees to my head (through my spine) as I stood up again - head last - facing in the end the window again. Now the sun was exposed and naked onto the sky that was gradually fading into a clear, magnified blue.

I stepped over the piles of stained and sweat-out clothes that I absolutely refused to pick up like a normal person; at this point remembering every step like a dance to not trip over the cluttered mess from my apartment seemed easier and more sensible than actually cleaning it. Every object touched by Toru from a week ago was left unbothered in it's designed place since then; except, of course, the things that I needed in my everyday life. But otherwise, I was willing to leave that sad jumble of objects meditate it's spot like in a museum. (This, I thought, was an uncommon way of grieving, just like Toru asked me to not mourn for him like an ordinary person). Anything, anything to get him back; or maybe it was also my excuse to not do anything out of laziness and a blank lack of energy.