I don't remember the exact day I first noticed Sora. That's the thing about people who end up mattering most to you. They don't arrive with any kind of announcement. They just appear, quietly, the way the first light of morning appears under a closed door before you've even decided to wake up. By the time you think to ask when it started, it has already been going on for a while. And everything before them feels a little paler by comparison.
We were eight years old when my family moved to Ogawa, a small town about forty minutes outside Nagano by train. It was April, which meant the sakura were already halfway through their falling, drifting down in loose slow spirals that settled on the moving boxes and on the roof of our new car and on my mother's hair while she stood outside talking to one of the neighbors. My father was inside trying to figure out where the gas shutoff valve was. I sat on the front step and watched the street because I was too young to be useful and too old to be entirely ignored.
That's when I saw her.
She was next door, standing in the narrow gap between our houses, looking up at the sky with her mouth slightly open the way children do when they are genuinely amazed by something and haven't learned yet to hide it. She had short hair and a yellow raincoat she was wearing for no obvious reason since it wasn't raining, and she was holding one arm out flat, palm up, waiting for the petals to land on it. She wasn't watching me at all. She was entirely focused on the petals, as if catching one cleanly was the most important task she had been given that day.
One landed on her sleeve. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked up and noticed me watching her, and instead of being embarrassed she just held her sleeve out toward me, displaying the petal the way you might show someone a small and interesting discovery.
I walked over.
That was the beginning of everything.
Her name was Sora. She lived next door with her parents and her grandfather, a quiet retired schoolteacher everyone called Ojii-san, who grew tomatoes in the small patch of garden behind their house and had a habit of leaving books in unexpected places around his home, on window ledges, on top of the refrigerator, balanced on the edge of the bathtub, as if ideas needed to be accessible at any moment. Their house smelled like cedar and green tea and old paper, and Sora had spent most of her eight years inside it drawing pictures that were too careful and too detailed for her age, pictures of the view from her bedroom window at different hours, pictures of her grandfather's hands, pictures of things she had seen once and wanted to keep.
She was the most curious person I had ever met.
She asked questions the way some people make small talk, easily, without thinking, without worrying whether the question was strange. What do you think snow sounds like to the fish in the river? Do you think the mountains look different from inside them than they do from out here? If you could only keep one memory from your whole life, how would you know which one to choose? She wasn't asking to fill time. There was always something genuine underneath the question, some small thing she was actually trying to figure out, and she asked it as if she fully expected you to take it seriously. It never occurred to her that you might not.
It had never occurred to me to take things that seriously before I met her. The kids at my old school in Tokyo had talked about games and television and who had the best pencil case. Sora talked like everything around her was a mystery worth investigating, like simply being alive in Ogawa on a Tuesday in April was something that deserved close attention. Being around her made the ordinary feel strangely worth examining.
I sat with her every chance I got.
We became friends the way only children do, suddenly and completely, without any of the hesitation or calculation that follows you into adulthood. The small wooden bridge over the stream that ran behind the row of houses on our street became our place. We went there after school and in the long slow summer evenings, sitting on the railing with our feet hanging over the water, watching the light change on the surface. In summer the water ran clear and quick and cold. In autumn it slowed and darkened and reflected the trees perfectly, so perfectly it looked like there was a second world underneath it, identical to this one but very still.
Sora always brought her sketchbook. She drew while I talked, looking up occasionally and then back down, her pencil moving in that easy distracted way she had, as if her hands had their own understanding of what they were supposed to do. She drew the bridge railing. She drew the curve of the stream below us. She drew me once, sitting with my knees up and my chin resting on them, looking at nothing in particular, and when she turned the sketchbook around to show me I felt the odd, slightly uncomfortable feeling of being seen more clearly than you expected.
Take it, she said, tearing the page out carefully and holding it toward me. So you remember what you looked like when you weren't thinking about anything.
I didn't know what to say. I was eight years old. I thought I would always look like that.
Summer arrived and stretched out the long way it does in small Japanese towns, slow and green and full of cicadas. Sora and I moved through it as if we were the only two people in it. We caught stag beetles in the wooded area behind Ojii-san's garden. We rode our bicycles down to the convenience store at the edge of town for cold mugicha and ice cream, and ate them sitting outside on the concrete step because neither of us wanted to go back inside yet. We made up stories about the people we saw walking past. A woman in a wide hat who always walked very fast and who Sora was convinced was a retired spy. An elderly man with a small dog who took exactly the same route every evening and who I thought must find that comforting, doing the same thing every day at the same time, knowing exactly what came next.
Sora said that sounded lonely, not comforting.
I said it depends on what you were used to.
She thought about that for a while. Then she said, maybe. But I think if everything is always the same you stop noticing it. And if you stop noticing things, what are you even doing?
I didn't have an answer to that. I often didn't have an answer to Sora's questions. That was part of what made them worth keeping.
When the new school year started in September, we discovered we were in the same class, which felt like a very specific kind of luck, the kind that seems small at the time and that you understand the value of only later. Our desks weren't next to each other but they were in the same row and sometimes when the afternoon light came through the windows at a low angle and the teacher was writing something long on the board I would look across and see her with her chin in her hand, watching the window instead of the blackboard, her eyes following something outside that I couldn't see from where I was sitting.
I always wanted to know what she was looking at.
We did homework together at the low table in Ojii-san's front room while he sat nearby reading and occasionally making observations about what we were studying in a way that was helpful without feeling like being taught. Sora was better at Japanese composition, and I was better at arithmetic, and we helped each other with those things in the uncomplicated way of people who have not yet learned that accepting help means owing something. Ojii-san brought us barley tea and sometimes a small plate of mikan, and he called us by a single name he had invented for us, Sota-chan, a blend of our names that made us sound like one thing instead of two.
I remember a particular evening in November when the cold had arrived properly for the first time that season and the mountains around Ogawa were white at the tops, and we were sitting at the bridge in our winter coats with the collars pulled up. Sora had her sketchbook, but she wasn't drawing. She was looking at the water, which was dark by that hour, reflecting the faint last color in the sky.
I asked her what she was thinking about.
She said, do you think this stays?
I said, what do you mean?
She was quiet for a moment. Then she made a small gesture with her hand that took in the stream, the sky, the sound of someone's television coming faintly from one of the houses nearby, the cold air, the two of us sitting there. This, she said. Do you think this stays?
I said yes. Of course it did. I said it easily and with complete certainty because I was nine years old and I had never yet been given a reason to answer differently.
She looked at me for a moment with an expression I didn't have the vocabulary for at the time. It wasn't quite sadness. It was something sitting near sadness, something adjacent to it, like a feeling that could already see grief from where it was standing and was simply waiting for it to arrive. Then she smiled and turned back to the water.
That was November of the year I was nine. I didn't understand it yet, but the drifting had already begun. It would be slow and quiet and almost invisible, the kind of change that doesn't happen on any one day, that happens the way seasons change, so gradually that each individual day seems the same as the one before it until one morning you step outside and the air is different and the light is different and the thing you were trying to hold onto is already somewhere behind you.
And you never thought to say goodbye to it while it was still there.