メロウレイン / Futtara Doshaburi Mellow Rain
Spring Scenery, Pale Scenery
Perhaps because soft earth and new shoots everywhere were ready to receive it beneath the first genuinely warm sunlight, even the sound of spring rain was gentle.
It seeped softly into the skin and ears of bodies that had been entwined until late at night, spreading in layer after layer of ripples.
Sei woke as the outermost ring seemed to fade.
“…Rain.”
A half-awake voice answered his murmur.
“It’s started.”
“What are we doing today?”
They had not made any particular plans. Even if they had, Hagiwara rarely cancelled something because of rain unless it was genuinely outdoorsy, and the chances of Sei and Hagiwara planning a proper outdoor activity were close to zero.
A warning-level downpour or a typhoon was different. Otherwise, Hagiwara’s attitude was simple. If it rained, take an umbrella. Stations and buildings had roofs. Clothes dried. Rain did not have to stop you. Which was funny, considering rain had once stopped the two of them long enough for everything between them to change.
Hagiwara said rain during work annoyed him far more. Getting caught in it after polishing his shoes that morning, for example. So he did not mind rainy days in his private life. Gradually, Sei had been pulled along by that attitude.
He no longer found carrying an umbrella and going out such a nuisance. He had learned to enjoy sitting on a train and idly watching drops trail down grey windows. Walking along main streets emptier than usual. Drinking quietly in a bar with large windows, as though they were sitting at the bottom of an aquarium.
An umbrella forced them to walk a little farther apart than usual, and sometimes that let Sei see a different angle of Hagiwara’s face. Once he realised there were things that belonged only to rainy days, rain stopped feeling depressing.
“Mm… Oh. Want to go see the cherry blossoms? The news yesterday said this weekend’s rain would knock most of them down. We could just wander around.”
“Fine. Where?”
They could travel to one of the famous spots farther away. Or they could do something easier, walk to a nearby park, or look over a school wall at the trees.
Hagiwara thought for a moment.
“Let’s go there.”
“Where?”
“That park we used to pass. We never went back after that one time.”
“I left my umbrella at work. Lend me one.”
“Plastic one okay?”
“Yeah.”
Sei had no idea how much time had to pass before something moved from “before” into “a long time ago”. But that spring when they had walked together, just before they truly knew each other, already felt distant enough to count as the past.
The rain neither strengthened nor weakened. It continued with the steady repetition of a simple practice piece.
“Wow. A lot of them have already fallen.”
Buds that had endured the cold so tightly finally opened wide enough to draw everyone’s eyes, only to begin weakening almost immediately. A breeze or a drop of rain was enough to send petals falling. Perhaps there was never really a period when blossoms simply stood proudly at their peak.
Full bloom was already the beginning of the end. And yet, through the gaps appearing between flowers, soft newborn green was already visible.
“Nakarai-san, do you still hate them?”
“Hm?”
“You said you hated cherry trees once they started getting leaves.”
“Oh…”
Sei stood directly beneath one of the trees and looked up. Countless droplets clung to the curved surface of his transparent umbrella, blurring the scene above him until the boundaries between flowers dissolved into the water.
“I did hate them. The blossoms that were left looked like they were clinging to something. It used to irritate me, like, it’s already over, give up.”
He paused.
“But obviously the flowers don’t care about any of that. They’re just passing through time. A flower can be there today and gone tomorrow. Whether that feels sad or refreshing is all something people project onto it.”
It was the resentment of a human being who had fallen outside the rules of simply living according to nature.
“…I don’t hate them now.”
“No?”
“Like you said before, it’s nice having both pink and fresh green together.”
“Did I say that?”
“You did. Why do you only forget your own words?”
“I was thinking that sounds too stupid for me.”
“You said it stupidly on purpose.”
Sei looked at him.
“I was acting like someone dangerous to approach, so you were deliberately casual with me.”
“Ah. Maybe. You were pretty dangerous back then, Nakarai-san. I thought you were someone I shouldn’t poke at.”
“You’re agreeing a bit too enthusiastically.”
“You said it yourself.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to agree that hard.”
“It wasn’t an insult.”
Hagiwara laughed, folded his own umbrella and ducked beneath Sei’s plastic one.
“Let me in.”
“It’s too narrow. You’ll get wet.”
“Don’t care.”
Their outer shoulders were left to the spring rain while the inner ones pressed tightly together beneath the small umbrella. They looked up at the blossoms. Back then, Sei could never have imagined a day like this.
“…Hagiwara.”
Rain fell into the pause after his whisper.
“You looked as if you didn’t struggle with anything. Full of life. Balanced, I suppose. Like if you put ten people in a room, all ten would find something about you to envy.”
He gave a small laugh.
“…Because I didn’t know anything about you.”
“Yeah. And I thought you were just difficult.”
“We were pretty selfish.”
“We were both too busy surviving our own problems. Though I did like ‘difficult’ Nakarai-san even then.”
“You liked me?”
“Not exactly like. More like… I couldn’t look away.”
“So I’m easier now?”
“You’re difficult sometimes. But you don’t have that same dangerous feeling anymore.”
Hagiwara looked up through the wet umbrella.
“That Nakarai-san from back then will never belong to me. I know that, honestly.”
“…Yeah.”
There were probably parts of Hagiwara that had been left with his previous lover too. The impatience and loneliness he had once kept neatly hidden behind the face of an easygoing colleague. They had not filled each other’s holes. The misshapen gaps remained exactly where they had been. Instead, the two of them had built something new together in a different place.
“Ah.”
A rain-beaten blossom fell intact onto the top of the umbrella. Sei instinctively reached for it, but his finger only pushed against the clear vinyl from underneath.
“You can’t get it.”
Hagiwara laughed.
“…I know.”
Things he could never reach.
Things he could never possess.
“Stop laughing.”
And the things he had gained, not as substitutes for those lost things.
Rain dripping from the edge of the umbrella tapped his shoulder as though laughing too. Sei closed his eyes, storing the unreachable flower somewhere behind his eyelids.
“…Want to stop by that art museum too?”
He asked only after their lips parted.
Hagiwara shook his head.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I feel like it’ll be abandoned now, like something out of an old story. I’m scared to find out.”
“Surely not.”
“I know.”
“…I kind of understand, though.”
As if what they had seen there had been a dream. As if the two of them, standing here now, were a dream too. Spring rain made reality feel slightly unreliable. So they pressed close, held hands and kept checking that the other one was real.
The next morning was brilliantly clear. They woke early and went for a walk while buying breakfast. Along the river, the rows of cherry trees that had hung heavily over the water had lost almost all their blossoms. Petals covered the river in pink.
People called it a flower raft, and looking at it, Sei could almost believe that if he lowered one foot carefully enough, he might be able to stand on it.
“Beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
The rain had washed the air clean too. The wind crossing the river was cool and clear. Countless petals trembled across the surface. It looked as though the river were mourning spring.
Sei could not shake the feeling that something was being carried away by the current towards a place where he would never be able to see it again.