Song of a Thousand Memories

Static Between Us

Asakura Jo

The lanterns had barely cooled before silence moved in like winter.

After the festival, campus smelled faintly of ash and sugar and the same careless light that had been everywhere. For some people, it was over in a day — a memory folded away with the paper cups and the fox keychain tied to a bag. For me, it felt like an open wound that wouldn't stop bleeding.

I kept replaying the little pieces of that night because my head was a stubborn jukebox. His words at the yakisoba stand. The fox keychain in his hand. The way he looked away when I didn't answer. "Forget it." The way he left, like he had chosen to go and I had no say in it.

At first I told myself I was overreacting. Of course I was. We'd never been anything official. We weren't even... labelable. Harua had always been an irritant and a provoker and an accidental compass in my day. Not someone to get hung up on. Not someone to build expectations around. Not someone I should miss the way I did.

But words are slippery. Feelings are worse.

Monday morning, the campus felt smaller. Maybe it was because I was smaller in it. I walked the same route I always walked, tried to make the steps feel automatic. It didn't work. My feet betrayed me by searching the crowd every time the path curved, like a stupid animal sniffing the air for a scent it didn't want to find.

When I saw him — laughing with people at the courtyard fountain, jacket slung over his shoulders, the fox keychain glinting when he gestured — I felt a physical ache like someone had pounded my sternum with a heavy, dull thing.

My first impulse was to look away, to pretend I hadn't seen him at all. That's what I told myself I wanted. Space. Distance. Clean lines. No messy, ambiguous in-between.

I kept walking.

But the ache didn't quiet. It moved, instead, into a low hum behind my ribs that made it hard to breathe normally. My chest kept expecting to find his shoulder at my side, and there was only the hollow echo of absence.

By Wednesday, the quiet turned restless.

I tried rational things: study, run, leave campus earlier than usual. I read a book with no interest, doodled with no intention of finishing anything. The sketchbook lived in my bag like contraband. When I pulled it out, my hand drew him before my brain decided the subject.

Lines. Curves. The lift of his chin when he listened. The slope of his neck, a shadow. I ruined page after page by erasing what I'd done and starting again. The image returned as if by law.

"What are you doing?" Jonathan's voice sliced through the fog.

I blinked at him across the table in the common room. He had that half-grin he always reserved for anything that could become a story. "Just sketching," I said, too dry.

"Of course. Who?" Jonathan waggled his eyebrows and I felt my face flame.

"Just lines," I lied because admitting it aloud made it worse. Saying his name would have been a door opening I wasn't ready to step through. To say Harua's name out loud felt like loosening the last knot on a noose.

"Right," Jonathan said, not buying it for a second. Then, more gently: "You okay, man? You've been—off."

I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to tell him how the silence between me and Harua had dug trenches inside my chest, how each casual step Harua took away from me felt like a verdict. But I didn't. I downed the coffee that tasted like regret and tried to be boring. It worked for maybe ten minutes.

Thursday evening, the campus library was quieter than usual. The world outside had gone dim early, the kind of dusk that makes you think of unfinished things. I found a table near the tall windows and set my bag down as if I was anchoring myself there.