The Girl Said She Loved Him
It was a breezy spring day, after the cherry blossoms had fallen and the trees had begun turning green. The crowds that gathered by the pond at Inokashira Park for picnics and drinks had disappeared, and in their place, a comfortable silence.
He had asked her out because he was curious about her, the girl who made music and liked books. This was before she said she loved him, but after he hoped she might. They met at the station and wandered towards the park, just a boy and girl among hundreds of others.
The day invited slow conversation, and the two threw questions and answers back and forth like a ball they didn’t want to drop. It was as though dropping it might reveal the feelings that hovered between them; opaque and misty in conversation, but clear as the sky in an awkward moment of quiet.
——
He asked her about her music and she grew shy. It was a hobby, she said, but he knew this was not entirely correct. She did not get paid for it — this much was true — but she poured more time and care into her music than most others would a simple hobby.
He had heard her music — it was why he asked her out — and it spoke to him of feelings somehow beyond words. Feelings that could only be expressed in the rhythms and melodies that drifted from her piano. He wanted to dig into them, to explore them and understand them, but was also a little afraid of what he might find.
The girl said she was inspired by an invisible man she saw on the television. He seemed so sad, she said. So deeply lonely. The boy thought this was funny, but the girl did not say it like it was a joke.
——
She told him she had read his stories and that she liked them. She wondered why he did not publish them, or put them in a book. She asked him if they were true, to which he shrugged and smiled sheepishly.
“I write about the things I want to be true,” he said, “even when I think they never will be.”
She had enjoyed his stories — it was why she had come out — and they spoke to her of crystallized moments in time. Each word was like a fragment of that crystal, together painting a still-life picture of emotions captured in imaginary worlds.
But she was most intrigued by the contrast in his stories; how the beautiful moments were blanketed in the tragedy his characters so often faced. When she asked, he said it started when his uncle met a ghost at an onsen hotel, somewhere along the Shimabara peninsula. But he did not say it like the story was fictional, and she did not ask any further.
——
In a little cafe hidden on the first floor of a small apartment block, the boy and the girl ate buttered toast and sipped at black coffee. The boy nodded at a rickety bookshelf and said, “There’s a collection of Murakami books over there.”
“Oh?”
“Raymond Carver, too.”
“He’s famous?”
“They’re both worth reading,” he said. “Different, but the same, if that makes sense. I mean, if you ever run out of things to read, they’re good.”
The girl smiled.
“I’ll look for them when I visit the bookshop next,” she said. “You’ll have to give me some recommendations.”
The words rung with sincerity and honesty, as though something small had sparked between them. Something that might, in time, become a fire they could warm themselves around.
——
The two sat in silence for a time, soaking in the comfortable darkness of the small cafe. They were happy there, lost in the dance between the cafe music and their thoughts. When a new record started playing, the girl raised her head.
“The Bill Evans Trio,” she said.
“What?”
The girl motioned to the speakers in the corner.
“This is the Bill Evans Trio,” she said. “Do you know them?”
“I don’t, sorry.”
The girl listened for a moment and smiled.
“Sometimes it sounds like he’s not thinking. Like he’s simply playing what he feels.”
The boy tilted his head to listen more carefully. It was like he was trying to listen with more than just his ears; as though he hoped to attune his whole body to the sound waves drifting across the room.
“I think I know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like the melody travels a landscape of some kind. Like it’s the sound of a heart.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
And so they continued to sit quietly, and listen to the music, and when the song arrived at its conclusion, they got up to leave.
——
On the way back towards the station, they followed the sounds of play that echoed from afar, and came across a young schoolboy playing soccer with his friends. The boy saw something simple and easy in their play. It was as though the past ceased to exist, and tomorrow didn’t matter; there was only the intensity of the present moment, and it was all consuming.
The girl found herself drawn to a young schoolgirl nearby, who sketched a picture of the boats wandering lazily across the pond, and the couples who sat within them. She was lost in the world of her drawing, and it reminded the girl of her own favorite moments; when her headphones were on and the volume was up, and the music she played was not yet art and not yet creation, but simply a tool for the discovery of emotive expression.
The soccer ball brought the schoolgirl out of her dream state. It bounced across the park and stopped at her feet. She held it out for the schoolboy who had run up to collect it, and for the briefest instant, as their hands shared the weight of the ball between them, their eyes met and the world stopped spinning.
“Thank you,” the schoolboy said.
“You’re welcome,” said the schoolgirl.
It was the glimmer of a moment, like love before either of them knew what it was, caught in a simple exchange of words and glances.
The boy watched their eyes and their hands, and the energy in the space that existed between them. He wanted to burn the image into his mind; to later find a way to put words to it, and perhaps one day, send it shooting through the eyes of his readers and into their hearts.
The girl, too, watched closely. She let the feeling of the moment wash over her, like the watery mist from a crashing wave on a summer evening. She hoped that she might find a music to express this moment, and perhaps one day, send it through the ears of her listeners and into their hearts.
The boy and the girl continued quietly towards the station, as ideas and possibilities swirled in their minds.
——
At the station, the boy and the girl rode up the escalator, passed through the ticket gates, and walked up the stairs to the Chuo line platform. The boy was headed for Kunitachi, and the girl in the opposite direction, for Nakano.
The boy looked out at the train as it arrived. He searched for a particular set of words to say thanks, and tried to find a combination that might hint at how special the day felt, short though it may have been.
And it was here, lost in thoughts of how to say what sat in his heart, as the train arrived with the sound of screeching steel and the platform was enveloped in a blanket of noise, that she said it.
The girl said she loved him.
But she did not speak the words loud enough to be heard, and so the boy never heard them. He turned from the train to look at the girl and he said, “I guess this is me,” to which she said, “Thank you for today. I had fun.”
And something like a bridge between them in that moment, at a point where they could both still cross to the other side. Like the future was one they could still share if they chose to do so.
But the boy was on his train, and the girl’s was arriving, and the moment slipped away as the train doors closed, and words — both spoken and unspoken — hovered in the air, like ghostly stray cats abandoned on the platform, their homes now lost.
——
The boy and the girl did not meet again, but they would think about this day often, and it would pepper their creative work for many years to come. Both would search for reasons to explain the quiet hesitance that left them unable to reach out once more, and the lonely distance that grew between them that eventually felt impossible to cross.
And questions that could never be answered, like the whispers of regretful ghosts, would haunt them long into their ordinary lives; not quite happy and not quite sad, but simple, and easy, and pleasant enough.
Should I have said something? Should I have spoken louder?
But life went on for the boy and the girl, and the world kept spinning, and the day they shared became just another day, leaving only the ghost of a what-if romance on the Chuo line platform at Kichijoji station.
And they say that just after the cherry blossom season, if you listen closely to the train as it arrives at three, you can hear the whisper of a girl’s unheard words in the rumble of the train as it grinds to a stop on its way through to Tokyo.
— -
Music
(The Bill Evans Trio — The Two Lonely People)
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— Hengtee