To Be Enough (HiyoIku)

Chapter 3: Hiyori

A playground basked in the dusty blue of dusk.

A smattering of stars. A slightly chilly breeze.

A slide. A sandbox. Deserted.

The world of dream and memory was silent, except for a voice I'd come to covet.

"It's none of your business!"

"You don't know anything, Hiyori!"

"Sorry."

My eyes flew open, my body drenched in sweat.

I stared at the ceiling of my dorm, the first time in days to have slept in my bed.

I was basked in the bright morning sunshine – I'd forgotten to pull the curtains last night. As minutes passed, I felt my breathing calm, my heartbeat slow.

I reached for my phone and saw a text from Mom. It was short: "Transferred your living expenses. Remember to check bank account. Love you."

Years of living overseas have allowed certain habits to grow on my parents, and constant expression of love was one of them.

It was one of the very few things that assured me, other than the money, that my parents still remembered they had a child.

Ikuya's accusations were still ringing in my ears, a distant hum that pricked and pricked like an invisible needle. I scrolled up Mom's thread, and saw that the last time she texted me was precisely a month ago, reminding me about the bank transfer.

When I was still in the States, when we lived under the same roof, my parents and I had slightly more conversation. We'd have dinner together, once or twice a month, talking about their jobs and their projects and their co-workers and their bosses. Occasionally we'd talk about school and Ikuya. At home, we'd leave notes on the whiteboard at the foyer for each other, about someone coming in to fix the washer or some documents I needed parental signature of. For some reason, they left my pocket money in a biscuit tin in the kitchen cabinet instead of just giving me a card. Little things. Not exactly heart-to-heart conversations, but trivia that kept us in each other's lives, if only barely. Tied together awkwardly as a family.

After I returned to Japan, though, the time difference made it impossible for my busy parents to call.

I'm sure if I texted them, sent them photos of Japan or university or random food I enjoyed, they'd reply. Like how Ikuya would "OK" my texts, my parents would give me the same courtesy. But.

My phone pinged again, and I saw it was a text from Captain Hoshikawa, asking if I was going to enrol for the relay program in an incoming competition. He wanted to sort out the registration before the exams period next week.

"Let's swim more relays from now on, Hiyori," Ikuya had said, during our first and last relay. I still remember every word, every lilt, the cadence of his voice rising above the stadium's noise, beautiful against the gentle whoosh of the pool water.

It was strange, now that I thought about it, to regard that relay with Ikuya as my last. It was true we'd stayed away from relays because of Ikuya's issues, but now that Ikuya had recovered and participating once more in relays, there was no reason I couldn't swim with him anymore. We were in the same university swim club, we were one of the best in our leagues, we'd make a strong team. It didn't matter if we were friends or not, as long as we could work together in swimming. No one knew Ikuya's swimming better than I do, because no one watched him swim the way I did. Objectively speaking, relay was definitely workable.

But I could not deny the reluctance I felt. The giddy happiness of finally swimming relay with Ikuya had been buoyed by an overwhelming relief of not having to do it again. For some reason, it felt uncomfortable, like writing on a spiral notebook with my left hand. It didn't feel like I actively wanted to put myself in Ikuya's team, and it didn't feel like I deserved to. My mind was a jumbled mess of emotions I couldn't sort out then and it was still a tangled ball of issues I couldn't figure out today. I promised I'd give Ikuya distance when he needed distance, and companionship when he needed companionship, but it didn't seem right to throw relay into the discussion.

In the end, I just replied, "Let me think about it and let you know".

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With the nightmare, I'd woken up a lot earlier than I'd expected and was left with nothing to do. All of my assignments were more or less completed, and the few that needed some final touch-up could wait for tomorrow. I could have a little break today.

Almost out of habit, I took out my phone again to text Ikuya, but stopped myself before I pressed send.

The memory was too fresh, the issue about relay too close, for me to put up the appropriate friend-façade now.

My eyes roamed my room and I saw that my stacks of books, left untended to for weeks, had grown dusty. I didn't want to spend my day off cleaning, but the books reminded me that it had been ages since I went to the library for leisure.

A lifetime ago, I was a shy, awkward kid in a strange country, surrounded by strange-looking people speaking strange languages I couldn't comprehend. I'd clung to books the way I would've clung to a loving parent or sibling, navigating my way into a foreign culture by devouring the parts of it. I quickly became fluent in English, and the librarians of the local library eventually knew me by name, the quiet Asian kid who was always alone, who always read for hours on end. But I remained scared, uncomfortable in an environment I doubted would ever truly accept me.

Although I could hold conversations in English without problem, Japanese was still the language that rolled most naturally from my tongue. Ikuya, who initiated a conversation in our native tongue and who I quickly talked the most with, became the only reminder of a distant home I'd left behind. Ironically, after returning to Japan, Tokyo too felt alien, like an acquaintance whose looks were distorted by the time passed. The country I felt nostalgia for had become foreign. Maybe, like Ikuya, Japan had never truly belonged to me. I simply deluded myself into believing the unique intimacy I so craved. I wanted to belonged somewhere, but had chosen places which tolerated but did not welcome my presence.

The best way to escape reality is to escape your mind. I escaped the distance between Ikuya and I by interfering with his life even when I knew he never told me the full story. After the distance became unignorable, I escaped into my assignments, into the mess of colours and lines that I refused to construct into Ikuya's face. Now that work was almost done, I needed a new outlet.

Books were a good option, I reasoned. Submerging myself into someone else's reality, someone else's emotions would be a wonderful break.

Shimogami's library is a massive, beautiful, modern baby with sleek metal shelves and spacious work tables. Sunlight filtered in from the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, piano tunes playing softly in the background. I crossed a few students typing away furiously on their laptops, a few more pored over reference books propped open in front of them, to arrive at the fiction section.

I looked up the location of Dance Dance Dance, a book by Murakami Haruki I've been meaning to read, on my phone. Instead of reading guiltily alongside students working desperately to meet their deadlines, I decided to check out the book and read it in a nice café instead.

I'd had enough of vending machine and canned coffee for the past two weeks.