The sky in the distance at the base of the mountains was scorching the horizon red with the earliest onset of the sunrise. I took a moment to watch it spread like a disease, slowly, and completely overtaking, as I leaned in the door frame of the engawa. I waited, to pique her anticipation of the gift I told her I had to give her, and to just experience more stillness. It had occurred to me that the peacefulness of my life was able to settle over me, and it terrified me as much as it did excite me. What was there to look forward to, I wondered, when there were no more fights. When happiness would become a common word on my tongue, and my love was fully spoken for. What then was there to live for? But what, I asked myself, was the worth of a life full of struggle.
"I expected to feel differently."
Atop the kimono boxes that were stacked in the shelves, I had hidden away a wooden box, high enough that I knew no would take notice. "We have lived together for a long time. Only your security is different." I retrieved the box, stretching with some effort reflected in my voice.
"My security and perhaps less shame."
"Only less shame if you had chosen a different man."
I placed the box with more care than necessary on the floor, kneeling with it. In habit, my fingers pressed together as I let my hands lay atop it a moment longer. I tried to extract the spirit from within the box, listen to any words of wisdom it might have wanted to pass on, but I was disappointed to find it silent. I would search another place, I thought. "Is this the gift you mentioned?"
She knelt beside me, supporting herself with one hip and allowing her legs to come out from under her. I felt it just an excuse to be closer to me. "I came upon some advice, before Hiroyuki-san passed. He knew things, somehow. He knew a great many things." I opened the lid of the box. Had there been a spirit inside, it would have spiraled the perimeter of us, but I could hardly picture it judging or hateful. "He gave this to me and told me that women often receive tea sets as a wedding gift. And he had nothing else to say about it."
Her fingertips danced across the surface of the painted black clay, nestled snugly in each perfectly fitting partition, five cups and a pot. The contrast of her skin against the blackness of the satin paint mesmerized me for a moment as I watched her take a cup into her hand, and she inspected it, a smile on her face. "You asked no questions?"
"What questions had I to ask?" The set was plain, simple, foreshadowing the life that would follow the pieces in the Okiya. The first tea set of purity that I had encountered, with no chips, no scratches, such a metaphor for starting over in a new season. "Hiroyuki-san had everything under control. Even the things that he knew nothing about."
"He knew."
The way speaking between us had become less exhausting somehow thrilled me. Expressing the thoughts in my head was more satisfying than having them extracted. It made her feel more human, whether that feeling was dangerous or not. "Did you tell him you intended to ask me?"
Her laugh. I remembered when I had heard it for the first time in the mountains, how it rang like an out of tune shamisen in my head. Every time I heard it since it had become more beautiful a sound. I thought I had been falling in love with her even while I still hated her, even before I knew what it meant to organically fall in love. "I didn't tell him. I didn't need to. Hiroyuki-san was close to death from the moment you met him, Seishin. People who are close to death like he was tend to be more in tune with both sides of life." He knew because he had been entitled to, she said. He had lived his life, and he had earned the privilege, and finally I knew something about living and earning myself.
"As well as he knew me, I think he never would have guessed I would agree."
"You know he still means to take your life."
And suddenly Hiroyuki-san was no longer the topic of conversation. The art of such a mundane way of speaking was so new to me. "I know."
"The reason you have all of this now is because of him."
"Don't give him credit for the spoils of my suffering."
"It is only because he brought you closer to death."
How many times in my life I had wished for death, I couldn't recall. I couldn't count. Too many. Too many times I remembered laying heavily upon the floor bleeding, wishing, waiting, but still somehow alive. I saw three seasons change in the height of my torment, and how quickly it went I realized, when my mind had been so occupied with simply surviving. My mind a bitter contrast to my desires perhaps told me how untrustworthy my thoughts really were all that time. With how hard I had fought, what a waste it would have been to miss the enjoyment on the other side.
"Then perhaps you are here to bring me closer to life."