Memories (Of Dreams and Demons)

Remember the Puzzle

Naoko and I sit together, waiting at an old train station for the last service to take me home.

Sometimes I forget what this town is called, its only recognition of existence a dusty fleck smudged on the stained brown piece of paper that is my map.

I imagine the old wooden sign that welcomes outsiders, puckered with rusty nails, reads Welcome to Argyle.

Argyle: an old country town packed neatly away between two bustling cities, not quite close enough to either to home anything worthwhile. Low rolling hills, often brown and lifeless from lack of rain, surround it.

More like Welcome to Hell, my young teenage mind glares in exaggeration. A deeper voice chuckles, then sighs, exasperated, as if my thought were foolishly naive.

What would the voice know? I glare.

"All this time we still lived relatively close to one another," Naoko's chirp interrupts mt brooding, "we just never ran into each other."

"I'm sorry," I begin, "if I knew.. I would have looked harder. If I.. believed.."

"It's fine, silly," she swings her feet freely beneath the seat, still so many pieces of her that playful child I remember, "it's just so interesting we were always so close!"

Rather than swing my own feet, inside I kick myself for not searching harder, I blush, "I guess so."

She smiles at the rays of light that creep over the station, from a sun slowly tucking itself in for bed, "I know so."

Naoko's feet swing faster and faster, and she looks about, sometimes lifting herself up, as if that would allow her gaze to see further. She pouts, growing increasingly patient.

"I don't want to wait any longer," she snaps, and turns to me, all smiles in contrast, "I have something to show you!"

She unzips her backpack in the space between us, pulling out an ageing box, "do you remember this?"

My eyes go wide, and I nod. It's the puzzle box we worked on as children all those years ago; an impossibly complex bundle of jigsaw pieces designed to be completed by those far beyond Naoko's years.

There must still be thousands of them, all waiting to be attached to the half a dozen or so completed sections she places between us.

"You've kept this the entire time?" I ask, my eyes bright. Naoko looks at me flatly with the box between her fingers, not wanting to reply with an obvious yes.

"Why?" I continue. That's better.

"Because it's ours, silly," Naoko's eyes sparkle, "see? I haven't even touched it until now. Well, I have a little. I tried a few times, but I couldn't do anything, so it's exactly how we left it."

"And now you've found me again," she beams brighter, "..I've wanted to keep doing it with you for so long."

"I would like that," I say softly.

Naoko looks at me intently.

"We need to get this done," she whispers, "the sooner we finish it..", she trails off.

"The sooner we finish it what?" I ask.

Naoko blushes.

First Naoko places the completed sections gently on the seat between us. These are the parts we began to solve as children, glued together at the end of every evening to save our progress. She then places little tied bundles besides these: collections of pieces we guess belong nearby because of their colour or pattern.