After acquiring her 'thing', Nii looked relieved, as if a great burden had been lifted from her. She had begun to look even more liberated, freed, as if she was growing wings. And turning around, she looked at him and said:
「生まれてくれて、生きてくれて、生き延びてくれてありがとう。」
And she collapsed.
♫
Examining her closely, he soon realised that beneath her layers of clothes, besides barely weighing more than a little child, her body had been covered in abscesses. The doctors had marvelled at her tenacity to stay alive for so long and shown much interest in her corpse, but he'd refused them for a very practical reason.
“She’s on her way home.”
‘And I’m going to accompany her for the rest of the way.’
Finding a plane that would take him to Auckland hadn’t been as impossible as he first thought, though the urn had gotten him many suspicious looks. In the end, he had to sell his guitar to make the rest of the journey. But he didn't need it anymore, anyways. He could always find a new way to make music, a new music befitting a new world. The idea got him all fired up, the idea of a future.
♫
Her brother's city looked just as bad as all others, a heap of debris and remnants of former great buildings. But even amidst this, there was life. People had taken over the more usable-looking ruins, and even here, there was a systematic structure with which the community of survivors functioned and with which one could find the people they were looking for. The only reason anyone had these days to go anywhere was to find someone, after all.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
♫
Her brother was a frail man with an effeminate face. He most likely had been handsome at some point, but the weight of the years and the changing of the world had worn him out. His eyes were sunken in, though they bulged out for a short moment as they first met, and his brow was heavily wrinkled. He had aged beyond his years. Still, there was an air of kindness around him and wisdom to be found in his eyes of a kind that usually only comes with old age and barely even then.
"So she's finally managed to get me a souvenir after all these years. She'd always been the slow kind. Welcome home, sis."
♫
Where do we come from, where are we headed, and for what purpose? Why should we keep running through all the pain and all the suffering with no relief in sight?
That’s not what’s really important. There might be a charm found in chasing after questions we’re likely never to answer, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is how you use the life that was given to you, be it chasing great questions, buried gold or fame and wealth, as long as you live a life true to yourself, striving not to regret the choices you have made by tomorrow, even if they'd been empty ones.
Who had it been that had told him that? A conversation in the corner of a bar in Tokyo so many lives ago. He had just ended his first live performance after coming to the big city and felt utterly lost.
"I really liked your sound!" she had said. A girl with flaming red hair approached him right after he had left the stage. It had been an energetic phrase belying her blank face, devoid of any kind of emotion. They had shared a drink together afterwards, two lost souls in the city. She had seemed to be even more lost than him. Perhaps he had found comfort in that someone with eyes holding nothing could speak such words of hope.
It is funny how paths that seemingly align can make us feel so lonely, never to run into another, and that others that run so far apart should happen to cross each other many times.
We might all be different. We might all be running on different paths through life. But in the sense that we all wish for the latter, for our paths to cross, we’re all the same