006 | Same Time Tomorrow
710 Words
She filled two and a half pages that night.
Which almost never happened. Most entries ran half a page, sometimes less. Enough to reconstruct the day, enough to give tomorrow-Nora what she needed.
But tonight she kept going.
She wrote about the gate and the arrangement and the three conditions. She wrote about the pen and what it meant and the way his voice went flat when he said it, not sad, just worn. She wrote about the park bench and the chips and the thing she'd told him and what he hadn't said in response and why that mattered more than if he had.
Then she stopped.
Read back through it.
Added one line at the bottom, underlined twice.
He said he'd be there early. In case you need a minute before you read it. He means it. Trust this.
She sat at her desk for a while after. Outside Tokyo was being Tokyo, traffic and trains and someone's TV through the wall. She had lived in this room long enough that she didn't hear it anymore. The journal said so.
She got up. Brushed her teeth. Turned off the light.
Lay in the dark and thought about tomorrow-Nora reading that last line.
Sleep came and took the day.
It always did.
In the morning she read it all and then read the underlined line and sat with it for longer than she should have.
He said he'd be there early.
She got dressed. Made tea. Actually finished it. Packed her bag and put the journal in last and took the train and stood at the window and watched Tokyo go past and tried not to think too much about what it meant that she was hoping, specifically and carefully, that the entry was right.
She got to the school block and slowed before she even reached the gate.
He was there.
Earlier than yesterday, earlier than most students, standing off to the side in the grey morning with his hands in his pockets and his breath coming out in small clouds because it was colder today than it had been.
He saw her coming and didn't wave, didn't move. Just looked at her the way he looked at things, steady and unhurried.
She walked up and stopped in front of him.
"You read it," he said.
"All of it."
"The underlined part."
"Three times."
He nodded. Said nothing. Which she was starting to understand was his version of saying something.
"You came early," she said.
"I said I would."
"I know." She looked at him. "I just." She stopped.
He waited.
"I didn't know if I'd written it right," she said. "The entry. Sometimes the words don't carry the feeling across. They just point at it." She paused. "I wasn't sure this morning if you'd actually be here or if I'd just written it the way I hoped it happened."
He looked at her for a moment.
"I'm here," he said.
Simple as that.
She looked at him standing in the cold morning outside her school, this boy she kept meeting for the first time, and felt something settle in her chest that she didn't want to examine too closely because she had a condition and a timeline and three conditions of her own and none of them left room for whatever this was becoming.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he said.
They walked through the gate together and she fell into step beside him and the morning opened up ahead of them, ordinary and loud and indifferent, and she thought about the entry she would write tonight and the morning that would come after it and the version of herself that would read it without remembering any of this, this exact moment, this exact feeling.
She hoped she'd get the words right.
She was still thinking about it when they reached the main building and he held the door and she walked through and he said her name, low, right behind her.
She turned.
He was holding something out.
The pen.
Just holding it out to her, flat across his palm, not saying anything.
She looked at it. Then at him. "Caiden."
"You said you write the details that feel true," he said. "Write that you held it."
- Writer
