Frost and Flame

Separate Pages

Inside the room, after the door closed with a soft click, the darkness felt thicker, more personal. Instead of lying down on the bed and struggling against insomnia again, Sayaka sat at the small wooden desk near the wall, under the light of a small yellow reading lamp that cast a small circle of brightness on the wooden surface.

From inside her large work bag, she took out a dark blue leather notebook, its corners already worn. Lesson plans, meeting notes, shopping lists—her daily life in pages. With fingers trembling slightly (she blamed the cold), she opened it, its pages hissing with a familiar sound. She flipped until she found a blank page, at the back of the book, separated from all the others.

She took her favorite pen—the one with the fine tip and dense black ink—and under the warm light of the reading lamp, she began to write. Not as a teacher recording lesson plans, not as a mother writing a shopping list, but as a woman trying to release something that had been lodged in her throat, in her chest, in her soul for years.

—

Letter (Draft 1) — Found in Sayaka’s Notebook, Separate Page

Souta,

There are things I never said to you. Maybe because I was too proud, too afraid that the words would make me look weak. Maybe because I believed, in silence, that if something needed to be said, it should already have been clear. Or maybe because I was afraid that if I said it, it would become real—that by giving voice to my fears and regrets, I would give them the power to destroy me.

The night you left, the wind was blowing hard, too. Not snow, but winter rain—cold, cutting rain that struck the bedroom window with a sound like thrown gravel. I sat on the bed, hugging my knees, listening to you pack your suitcase in the living room. The sound of the zipper was the most painful sound I had ever heard. Every time you pulled it—zip, zip, zip—it felt like a wound being crudely stitched shut, like torn skin pulled together with the wrong thread.

I wanted to run out. I wanted to scream, “Don’t go! Stay! Let’s try again, let’s break everything and start over like in Sendai!” But my body felt like it was made of stone, of concrete, too heavy to move. And my mind, my mind that was usually always noisy with lists and plans and worries, suddenly went blank. There was only one sentence spinning around, a mantra of surrender: “Let him go. If he can go, let him.”

Was that a test for you? Maybe, unconsciously. And you passed. You left. You walked out the door with that suitcase and did not look back.

But what you did not know—what you could never know—was those thirty minutes after the front door closed with a sound that was too soft, I walked into our apartment corridor. I stood where you used to put your big winter boots, and I smelled—the smell of leather and rain and a little of the old-fashioned cologne you sometimes wore—from your jacket that was still left on the rack, hanging like shed skin. And I slid down onto the hardwood floor, my back cold against the wall, and for the first time since everything began to fall apart, since the first serious argument, since silence began to grow between us like moss, I cried.

Not dramatic or loud crying. Just silent, continuous tears, like the rain outside, running down my cheeks and dripping onto my nightshirt without sound. I cried until my eyes hurt and my breathing came in gasps.

And I realized something as I sat on the corridor floor: I was crying not because you left. I was crying because I let you go. Because somewhere along the course of our marriage, without realizing it, without bad intentions, I stopped fighting for “us.” I started fighting for Kaito alone, for our children, for the illusion of normality and stability—anything except “us.” And when you left, when you chose to leave, it only confirmed a belief that had been quietly growing like cancer inside me: that I was not worth fighting for. That “us” was not worth fighting for.

Now, years later, in this unfamiliar resort corridor, with a storm outside and silence between us, I stand beside you and wonder: are we just two wounded people who happened to meet in the middle of the same storm? Two travelers who happened to sharea temporary shelter? Or do we still have fragments of a map—torn, wet, incomplete—to find our way back to each other? Not to marriage, not to romantic love, but to something simpler and deeper: recognition? Understanding?

I don’t know. I may never know. But for the first time since you left, since we became “exes,” since we learned to live in broken sentences… I hope. I hope that map exists. I hope we can read it together, even if only to see where we got lost.

Sayaka.

—

She did not sign it. She did not write “With love,” “Dear,” or even “Regards.” She simply closed the notebook carefully, turned off the reading lamp, and let the darkness of the room swallow her completely.

Through the thin wooden wall separating their rooms, she could hear faint sounds—perhaps Souta finally returning to his room, perhaps a chair shifting, perhaps just this old building creaking and moving in the storm like a ship at sea.

She lay back down on the bed, this time on her back, staring at the dark ceiling, and let the tears flow quietly this time—not sobbing, not choking, just release. The ghost in the corridor, the ghost of their past, might never truly leave. It might always be there, waiting in the shadows, appearing in the silence of the night.

But tonight, for a moment, the ghost felt a little less frightening. A little more familiar. Because at least, she was not facing it alone. At least, she knew that in the next room, someone else was also awake, also remembering, also carrying his own ghosts.

—

And in room 312, Souta Kirishima stood in front of the small bathroom mirror, staring at the reflection of a strange man in the glass—a man with lines on his face he did not remember acquiring, with eyes that looked deeper and darker than they should. In his pocket, his fingers unconsciously brushed a small notebook filled with air-pressure diagrams and data tables. In the margin of the last page, in the small, neat handwriting he usually used for technical notes, was written:

A stagnant storm. A closed pressure system. No cold or warm front approaching to change the pattern. No visible exit in the current model. Or, all possible exits require the destruction of the system first—total dissolution before reorganization.

He closed his eyes, pressed his fingers to his eyelids, and what he saw behind them was not a weather map or graphs, but light blue paint stains on the laminated wooden floor of a small apartment in Sendai, and a young woman with her hair tied carelessly laughing as she tried to clean them with a rag that was already too wet, her blue-painted hand holding his clean one, and the world felt like the beginning of everything, not the end.

The two of them, separated by a wooden wall fifteen centimeters thick that felt like a continent, finally fell asleep just as dawn began to break, with a pale gray color slowly devouring the darkness, turning it from black to steel gray, then pearl gray. The storm outside continued, but it had changed again—the wind easing into a hiss, the snow falling more straight down, enveloping them in a swirling vacuum in which the past, the present, and possible futures collided and blended in a meaningful silence, waiting to be unraveled.