If you drown too long in a dream, do you lose the ability to feel reality?
Yukinoshita Yukino waters a rubber potted plant with a green plastic bottle and draws a red line across the calendar. She's lost count how many times she's performed this meaningless ritual; she only knows it's a habit she picked up after that curly-haired young man left and has kept ever since.
Since he left, the sense of time has blurred.
Yukino arranges her days into neat, deliberate order: studying and working, socializing with family and classmates, regular hospital checkups, and reserving one weekend day to go to the cinema for replays of older films. In the dark of the theater, the screen flashes stories from different eras and different countries — through the film the viewer can, for a few hours, take in the lives and emotions of people they'll never meet. That, perhaps, is the charm of cinema.
She slowly begins to understand why he loved movies.
"Little Yukino, you're getting more like him every day," her sister says one day, watching her with a wry smile. Only then does Yukino feel a faint pull back from the unreality she's been living in.
"She's started leafing through magazines and newspapers, watching old films she used to never touch, letting my adorable little sister waste away for him… ha. Maybe that was his revenge all along." Haruno chuckles. After all, he had said he'd get even if you made him angry.
Knowing how Haruno used her — and that she wanted something from him — made it impossible for Yukino ever to forget the curly-haired man. That memory became a permanent gap between the sisters — perhaps his small malice was the price of his revenge.
"You brought him to see me at first because you wanted him to help me, didn't you?" Yukino asks, taking the whistle from the lamp, wiping it with a handkerchief and setting it back carefully.
Haruno, leaning in the doorway, shrugs and smiles despite being called out.
"Yeah. I'll admit it: from the start I wanted something from him. I had every right to be displeased with him. So his 'revenge' worked." There's more beneath Haruno's wry smile. She still remembers the sight of her sister on the hospital bed, quietly reading a magazine while that curly-haired young man tended to her every need. If only her two most important people could stay within reach forever — though, of course, one is always prioritized over the other.
"He knew, over me, you meant more to him. So losing him forever became my punishment."
Yukino doesn't want to dwell on the implications. After he left, time flew so fast her memory blurred; she can't even tell whether her new habits — the films, the magazines — were inspired by him or were always parts of herself. She spends whole afternoons in bookstores, flipping through oddly titled but compelling short-story collections, hunting for that familiar tone between the lines. On weekends she buries herself in the cinema, watching one poorly attended re-release after another, looking through the screen at the lives of other people.
Romantic films are the genre she has the least tolerance for, and the most unavoidable. Through them she glimpses so many facets of love: lovers who must part for their careers and wish each other well; couples who fall in love on a foreign train and meet again ten years later as strangers; a humble bookstore owner who falls for a once-famous actress; a solitary high-school boy who meets a bright girl with a terminal illness and suffers the pain of parting. Cinema, in a way, lays out one possible map of human fate.
So perhaps her life, up to now, is just one extension of that possibility.
"…Huh?"
Before she knows it, sitting in the cinema, Yukino finds herself suddenly in tears. The emotion crashes over her like a tide; even the self-proclaimed cool, clever Yukino can't hold it back. Many departures don't feel real at first. But when, later, in some quiet stretch of time, she recalls everything to do with him and realizes he's gone, the suppressed feelings overwhelm her.
On the screen, flashbacks show the couple's former life together, and those images pry open her memories.
— the one who used to prank her viciously,
— the one who seemed irresponsible but was always reliable at the crucial moment,
— the one who brought laughter into the oppressive household,
— the one who broke her out of the hospital just to glimpse a passing comet,
— the one who promised to wake her from that nightmare.
She will never see him again.
"…?"
The tears won't stop. No matter how often she wipes them away, her eyes brim again. This aching, soul-deep pain is a first.
But the man who moved her so violently is gone now. Why did it have to end like this?
On the screen the male lead sits at a piano, seeing the heroine arrive with someone new. He looks dim, then plays the tune from their first meeting — a montage of "what-ifs," like a life that might have been. If she could go back, would things unfold differently? After all, everything up to now was only one "possibility."
Wiping her face, something guides Yukino — she stands, leaves the empty theater, and every step forward carries one thought:
Find him again, in some other life. She wants to see him with a healthy body, an ordinary relationship, a calm life. She wants another chance.
She pushes through the theater doors. The sunlight blinds and strips away her senses. When the glare softens, she realizes she's in her familiar ceiling's presence.
She wakes in her bed and surveys her familiar-but-strange room. Everything is as it should be — textbooks neatly stacked, the ticking alarm clock, the Sōbu High uniform hanging on a rack — but small things are off: the bedside lamp is bare and the calendar by the door shows no red lines.
"…?"
Her fingers rub the calendar to convince herself the dates are blank. She rifles through the desk but finds no whistle. Bit by bit, a thought forms: she has returned from that nightmare of a future-simulation.
Awakening should bring relief, but Yukino sits dazed on her bed, only dragging herself out the door when she's nearly late. After too long inside that dream, reality feels strangely unreal. The torturing pain is gone; the smothering family pressure isn't so taut now; the hopelessness has thinned — life is alive again.
She has returned to the life she wanted. But —
"Ex-boyfriend? Haha. If you'd ever dated someone, wouldn't I know? Yukino — why ask that now? Missing your big sis?" Haruno teases on the phone.
"…Nothing, just thinking," Yukino answers, then pockets the silence and goes to class. She daydreams through the lesson, searching for that familiar silhouette: alumni lists, class photos, teachers' idle memories — all turns up nothing.
The emptiness and regret swell inside her. This is the reality Yukino wished for, the one without him in it. In the real world there's no such thing as "true love" written in fate; people are individuals interacting with individuals. Love is a fiction — like vampires or dragons in a film — onto which humans project romance and meaning. The man who existed only in a simulation is like a movie character: unforgettable but unreachable.
"You'll wake from this dream," his whispered line still lingers in her ears as if spoken yesterday; yet it feels like centuries have passed. "We… we'll meet again." Liars. He drifted away like a mint in soda: fizzed up, vanished, leaving bubbles she has to clean up.
Maybe they were meant to part from the start. It hardly matters now; she can hardly recall what he looked like anymore.
No point fretting. He was just a braggart, a teller of tall tales — unreliable, lightweight, unstable. Even if he never existed in this world, there is nothing to be done about that.
Fine. That's the situation she must accept. Whether meeting him or losing him, both had meaning. Carrying all the memory forward is all she can do.
Yukino buries her feelings, forces herself through the day's classes with her usual meticulousness — at least, that's how she believes she behaves. Distracted and hollow, she goes to the clubroom she founded, flips through a bunko paperback and waits quietly for the new member Ms. Hiratsuka mentioned.
It's probably that boy Hikigaya mentioned, she thinks: the scene might replay itself. Only when she reads or watches films does her mind find a few minutes of peace — thanks to whom, she can't say.
It's time to wake from the nightmare and return to life. If he could see her now, he'd probably gripe that she's taking too long to straighten up.
For Yukino, the process will take a long time.
Her swirl of thoughts continues until the clubroom door opens.
"Yo, Yukino! Come meet your first club member!" Hiratsuka calls, and the girl looks up without any emotion.
"…?"
Her pupils constrict when the boy enters. The student Hiratsuka led in is slighter and fresher-faced than the man in Yukino's memory, but the feeling is the same.
"Introducing: this kid is Narumi Tōru. Same grade as Yukinoshita. You two should get along… Huh? Yukinoshita?"
Hiratsuka's puzzled voice snaps her back. Unaware of it, a tear slips from Yukino's eye.
"…?"
A warm, clear drop brightens the page of the bunko paperback beside the title "Song of the Pyramid."