Yoru No Uta

 Chapter 1

 

 By: somnambulated

 thefreeair@aol.com

 

 He goes along just as a water lily

 Gentle on the surface of his thoughts his body floats

 Un-weighed down by passion or intensity

 Yet unaware of the depth upon which he coasts

 And he finds a home in me

 For what misfortune sows, he knows my touch will reap

 All my armor falling down, in a pile at my feet,

 And my winter giving way to warm, as I’m singing him to sleep…

 

 

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 If she squinted, the white banner hanging over the school’s front doors was almost invisible to the flying snow. Tomoeda Winter Festival was grafted across it in amateurishly-neat teal print beside some hand-painted snowflakes.

 

 This was one of Tomoyo’s favorite times, when the early weeks in December all felt like Christmas Eve, and everyone around her was jumbled with anticipation for Winter Break amidst festival preparations and the last-minute-rush to buy Christmas presents. 

 

 The hallways were cluttered between classes. Students and teachers carrying boards, pushing racks of costumes, dropping and gathering scripts, painting paper signs taped along the walls for a fast dry. Everything was a blur of color and sound. And she was there, thriving as the rest of them did. She was lucky to make it past lunch without the paint from a banner or mural in her hair or on her cheek. 

 

 By five in the evening, though, most of this was gone. The hallways were dull gray, paint in bright assorted colors almost glowing through the pastel atmosphere from their places on the walls. The floors were clear, all the chairs in all the classrooms upturned on their desks. The only traces of the day that lingered were bright strips of un-sewed fabric jutting behind the black velvet curtain in the Drama room, or a forgotten manuscript on a desk. 

 

 And the only sound came from the un-lit music hall. He liked the light that came from the windows, he said; he didn’t know if the day was beginning or ending. If it was the moon, or just the sun buried under all of that gray snow. 

 

 He played most beautifully in those darker colors, wedged between pre-dawn and the rising of the moon. It was just the way he moved his fingertips over the piano keys that made the days end the way they did. Drizzling, lingering, easy as wind-chimes on an abandoned window. Something about the way her eyes saw the night would just be better than the days. It was a part of her now, sliding away like a lost memory in her sleep and spilling back into her blood likcloucloud each evening. 

 

 They’d been doing this for over a year now, since the first day of high school—she remembered—when he was playing Madame Butterfly. She’d already suspected that things would be different from elementary school and junior high, when she could steal away to the music room after everyone had gone home. 

 

 While he played, that first time, she was frozen in the doorway. Unaware even of herself, as though a spider’s web had tangled her there before she could struggle. Black folder of choir songs pulled to her chest like a prayer, she could not deny the strange and sudden interest drizzling over her skin. 

 

 He ascended and withdrew his notes gracefully before he had acknowledged her. His eyes were an ethereal brown, humming rhythms of violent drama through the irises; cool as a haunted evening. Strange and dizzying. So much so that she forgot herself and stared too long. His smile took her by surprise. 

 

 Noting the thing she held, he said, “So you sing? Lets hear it.” 

 

 Enter Etsuya, the boy she almost believed to be a poem. Just that and nothing more. He was not her love story—she was incapable of having one that could be told anyway. But he could have been—she thought—if it had been another place, another time. If she had been another girl. They were just there: untold, unromantic. He played and she sang. Late into the evening, while the halls were empty and the desks were upturned. 

 

 He was a different creature in the day, but his eyes never changed. They were dark, and they neither absorbed nor rctedcted sunlight. Tomoyo couldn’t remember the exact day—or month for that matter—when his arm started frequenting her shoulder, her hip, the edges of her hair. 

 

 But it was a the the same time she started leaning into his touch. 

 

 He made her disappear, she was hollow, she was wind. For hours, they dissolved into these worlds of piano strings post-crescendo—the melody coming down, almost banging but then turning into a linger; like the narrative of leaves sailing over a water’s surface. Pushing, pulsing wind. Their skin was the color of ashes—thin, the turn of knuckles traced beneath fingers that soared in all the same rhythms. And her voice, rising and dropping like a sigh when she sang, descending as the piano keys ended. He said, I love you. She smiled and took his hands in both of hers. You don’t, she said. 

 

 And he didn’t. She had already decided so.