Work Text:
We keep tryin' to talk about us
Slow motion, I'm watchin' our love
I'll be your quiet afternoon crush
Be your violent overnight rush
Make you crazy over my touch
But it's just a supercut of us
SUPERCUT, LORDE.
✴︎
What they don’t tell you about going pro is that it’s a lonely path.
You eat ramen in a solo booth alone, you go to sleep back in your small apartment, you make it a habit to keep to yourself when walking down the shady alleyways of Shibuya, and you hold your breath until you make it back to the open. You get home, announce your existence to nobody in particular, fall asleep on your futon, and do it all over again. Again, again, and again. Practice makes progress, you think. The journey to perfection is a quiet one. It’s the result of your journey that’s loud. You get to boast about it. You get to say, “it was easy,” or “it was hard, but I’m here now, and that’s all that matters.”
The thing about it is that: it’s an uphill, linear journey. You haven’t run back down without falling. You can’t run back down without falling. You don’t have time for girls, or fun, or a bigger apartment, or a brightly lighted sidewalk. You don’t have time for dwelling on the past, you don’t have time for dark-haired girls with their cosmic colored eyes.
You can’t fall.
But of course, you fall. Hinomori Shiho falls. How absolutely fucking tragic. But, of course, you know what that means. It means: the truth is, you had already fallen a long time ago.
✴︎
Today’s a livehouse day. You’re playing with a couple girls who are older than you. You know their names, and they’re happy to have you playing with them. Iori is the name of the vocalist. She pushes you in a good way. Once, she had whispered to you, while you two were both separated by the individual ramen booth screens. Her voice cut through the wood. “You remind me of myself when I was younger,” she’d said. You had argued back, saying she was only a couple years older than you. Iori had just laughed.
You’re backstage with them now. The lights are down low, and the murmur of the crowd makes you nervous: in a good way, of course. There’s only a couple minutes left. There’s noise everywhere, but it’s okay. Since middle school and onwards, you had convinced yourself that you thrived in chaos. And now, that winning feeling sets in your bones. It hadn’t, before, but fake it ‘till you make it, right?
You’re backstage. It’s so incredibly warm.
Iori beckons you forth with her hands. “It’s time,” you think.
But before you can go, a hand drags you back.
“SHIHO!” Fucking Hoshino Ichika says loudly to you. She doesn’t yell, because it’s a quiet, slightly confined space, and she has manners. It’s been years, but you don’t need to ask for a name for confirmation. You know it’s Ichika. You know her like how you know the veins on your palms that trace up to the pads of your fingers. Iori’s hand is waiting for you. Ichika’s fingers are wrapped around your wrist, pulling you back.
You don’t know what to do.
You want to laugh. You want to cry. What can you do? Here it is, here she is, almost eighteen years of your past formalized into a real, living, person.
You had thought you had run uphill enough. You had thought you had reached a point in your life where you could look down, peer into your past, and think, “that was fucking terrible, wasn’t it?”
Instead, you say:
“Oh.”
✴︎
She had looked crestfallen when you had first seen her, after years and years of running. Was it your reaction? Or was it just you?
Either way, you suppose it doesn’t matter, because after your show, Hoshino Ichika makes sure to meet you. Clumsily, nervously, you reach for your pocket, and shakily hand her one of your half-assed business card with your number on it.
“Call me,” you say. She looks disappointed, you think. You don’t think, “she is disappointed,” because you really don’t know what her disappointed face looks like anymore. It’s been a while.
✴︎
You text each other. You don’t ask about the others, Saki and Honami. She doesn’t talk about them either.
Growing apart is a funny thing. You want to reach out. Your hands don’t. They can’t. Your dependable hands, that you have been trying to grow a career out of, won’t move, at such a crucial time. “Move, move, fucking move,” you think.
So. You text each other. It’s casual. Couple texts here and there. You’re sort of interested, but you’re also scared. You think about it all the time. Ruminate about it, even. It distracts you. Ichika’s been distracting. Your heart, your brain, your deft fingers: she’s haunting every crevice of yourself. You mess up during practice. Iori side-eyes you. “You need to get your act together,” you think to yourself. “You’re not fourteen anymore.”
You sigh. “Carpe diem,” you tell yourself. You have never been able to say no to her.
✴︎
You two meet up. At your place, somehow. Somehow. She brings out the best in you. She brings out the worst in you. You haven’t seen her in years. But still, selfishly, you think that she talks to you like she has come back home to you. Home. Home. You have been looking for home for a long time.
Ichika knocks on your door. You let her in, and she smiles as she takes off her shoes. At age sixteen, you would have pushed her away, avoided her, ignored her. But now, in your twenties, you are mellowed out, and your self-isolation habit isn’t as bad as it used to be. You outgrew yourself. You put yourself in shoes that were too big so that, like your parents always used to say, so that you could eventually grow into them.
You and Ichika sit on the floor. You have yakisoba on the table, “I hope this is still your favorite,” and you have gyozas on the island of your kitchen. You resort to walking up to your pantry, while Ichika tries to fit herself into your house, your life.
You crack open a bottle. “I can’t do this sober,” you think, half-dejected, half-amused (at yourself). “Do you drink?”
Ichika smiles like she is coming home, laughs, and opens her tote bag to reveal a pack of soju. “Great minds think alike?”
✴︎
Once you finish one bottle of the yogurt flavored soju, you learn that once Ichika graduated highschool, she had flown right out of the country, to study in America.
“California. San Francisco,” she tells you. “Lots of water.” She tells you the highs and lows of California, and the foreignness of San Francisco.
Because you were never good at geography in junior high, you can’t really envision a complete San Francisco. You wonder if she remembers this about you. But she doesn’t ask about your junior high geography skills, so you don’t tell her about it. That old past, where everything seemed so serious, so infinite. Yet really, it was so small. A little part in your life. A good tragicomedy.
So: you nod, and you try to envision a perfect San Francisco with an Ichika in it. You think of a big, red, bridge, and a blue, blue, blue, body of water that envelopes the foundation of it. You then muster up the courage to cheekily say out loud; “San Francisco, huh. The home to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is actually red.”
Ichika laughs, a silent, quiet thing. It feels weird, playing this game of catchup with a childhood friend. Exchanging pleasantries, exchanging surface level chatter. But that’s what growing up is all about, you figure.
You ask how long she’s been back in Tokyo. Back home.
“Only a couple of weeks,” she says. You don’t ask her why she came back. She doesn’t tell. “It’s been a while since I’ve been back!”
She tells you everything about the trip. It was long, tiring, the person beside her hogged the armrest, she was hot, sweaty, “so fucking warm, I swear,” and she’ll tell you about the way she hadn’t gotten up once she sat down on the plane, how her jean shorts were clinging to her thighs.
Every time she speaks, you feel your early teenage self flair up in you, and slowly, you feel yourself falling, again. She’s so cute. Nothing’s changed since junior high. Everything’s changed since junior high.
You want to kiss her: maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it's a fourteen year old you possessing your brain.
She’s still talking about the trip. You listen eagerly, eager to learn about “The Bay”, eager to study the corner of Ichika’s mouth.
She tells you about what it felt like to live in San Francisco, what it felt like to rest herself on foreign turfs of grass, and look up in the sky, trying to look for stars at the Twin Peaks. She had gotten lucky, and light pollution had not defeated her. The sky was so big. She had felt so small. The grass brushed against her ankle and she had said it felt like being kissed by the Earth itself. You want to kiss her, you admit to yourself, stupidly.
She will recount all of her trips and those sensations to you, and you will listen half-heartedly, and spend the rest of dinnertime wishing you were the flannel wrapped around her hips.
✴︎
(Later, Ichika will lean into you, as if she were telling you a secret. “I had always thought that out of the two of us, maybe even the four of us, you were always the kindest.”)
✴︎
When you hear it, you try to hold back a laugh, but you fail. “Me? Kind? I was such a sad kid. Too blunt. Too sharp. Too forward.”
“No, no,” Ichika frowns, “that's what I loved about you. I always wished I could speak like you did. With conviction. With self-assurance. When I first moved to San Fran, I was so timid. I had thought to myself, ‘Shiho would have been able to do this!’ so many times.”
“Yeah,” you say.
“Yeah,” she echoes. There’s a lull in your conversation.
“I guess should get going.”
“Yeah.”
“This was nice though!” She says, quickly, before you can interrupt her. “We should… do this again, sometimes. This was nice. This, us— it was—”
“Nice,” you finish for her. You both start laughing. It’s the alcohol, it’s the leftover yakisoba on your floor, it’s you, it’s her, it’s the Hatsune Miku keychain that’s fallen off her bag (both of you won’t realize it’s on your dining room floor until she leaves your apartment), it’s the fact that she has already managed to carve herself into your life after years of your persistence.
“I was a stupid kid,” you think. “So fucking stupid.”
You like to think you’ve gotten better. Now that she’s right in front of you, real and tangible, you really hope you have.
✴︎
This time, you take the initiative. You invite her to your other job, the one that she wasn’t able to find out about through Shizuku. Damn (bless) Shizuku for letting Ichika know where she’d work, letting Ichika ambush her in a fragile state.
✴︎
Whatever Ichika was expecting, clearly, it wasn’t this.
In the bar, people are smiling, wine glasses are clinking, and you’re smiling, bass in hand.
“You do JAZZ?” Is written all over Ichika’s face. Today, you’re not actually playing: you’re just filling in before Mio comes over. She’s just running a little late today, that’s all. The musicians here are different. That’s the good thing about this place: Shiho never has to worry about sheet music.
(It’s good for her: it makes her think. Instead of having to focus on her part, her sheet music, she has to think more outwards. She has to think about the singer, the audience, the timing of it all. She has to be constantly aware of her playing, constantly adjusting her playing to match the others.)
Ichika’s sitting on the table closest to the stage of the restaurant, on a curved red bar stool. You feel the strings of your bass vibrate against your fingertips. It’s like coming home. Ichika smiles at you. “I’m home,” you think. You don’t know her anymore, not well enough, but she’s been home since you were young, and while maybe everything about her (a house) has changed, home doesn’t change. Home is— you two. Home is— love. “I’m home,” you say with your eyes. Her gaze catches yours with an intense energy. There’s nothing more in the world you want right now then to run into her arms and apologize for everything.
“Don’t be a stranger. Let me make things right again. Let’s unlearn, then relearn, us, again,” you think, feeling deeply homesick, stricken with half-grief, half-love.
✴︎
You make good on your promise: it’s only for a little bit. Once the bell on the big red door of the jazz bar rings, and Mio walks in, you drop the bass and walk to Ichika.
“Ready for dinner?”
Ichika shakes her head. You nearly trip on the sidewalk, afraid you’ve messed it up again. Then: “I need to do some grocery shopping first. I’m low on bread.”
✴︎
Well, it can’t really be considered “grocery shopping” if you’re at the closest convenience store possible. You’d forgotten that Ichika’s idea of bread consists strictly of 7-Eleven buns. You’re browsing through the rack with her. Both of your hands reach for the yakisoba bun on instinct. Maybe you haven’t forgotten everything about her yet. She blushes, shy, when you don’t pull your hands away instantly. Maybe, some things have stayed the same. Eventually, you let go. You always pull away first. Ichika puts the bread in the basket.
“It’s a shame they only have one left,” she says. “But I guess that’s what I get for procrastinating on buying bread until night time.” She laughs.
You laugh with her.
✴︎
When you were a kid, it was easy to get swept up in the glory of it all. You were gluttonous, eager. You wanted big things: big lights, the limelight, interviews, articles, full houses.
Now, as you’re older, you want the smaller things. Buying a can of coffee while on your way to work. Signing your name on a kid’s shirt after the show ends. Waving hi to the regulars of the live house that recognize you in-line at the grocery store.
You want your hands laced with Ichika’s. You want the inconsistent dinner dates you two have been having to become steady. To become a tradition.
(Bravely, you also think that maybe— you want to meet up with the rest of the girls. For old times’ sake. For the love that used to be there. For the love that still resides around the walls of your sternum, for the love that had been a pillar of foundation for the love you have known.)
✴︎
You guys don’t always have alcohol whenever you meet up. In fact, today’s proof of that. Anyways. in your defense, the drinks just makes conversations— easier. But today, both of you aren’t getting drunk. You two are meeting up at a conveyor belt sushi place. You two order the entire fucking menu, you laugh, and you two argue over the bill. You end up paying, of course.
✴︎
It hits you on a Tuesday morning.
“Fuck,” you think, “we’ve really got to stop this.”
✴︎
You’re both drunk. You don’t remember what time it is, but you remember that you need to be up by eight in the morning— but who really cares? You have the girl that you wanted to kiss, consume, at the age of fourteen. Once, you loved her. And now? You think you still do. Maybe this was all you really ever wanted, aside from the fame, from the rush of adrenaline you get while performing.
Ichika’s talking now, about you getting a houseplant. You want to kiss her. “Your house could use some life!” She says, as drunk as you are, and you want to kiss her.
“Once,” you think, “we were bestfriends. Once,” you think, “I was in love with you, at the angsty age of fifteen years old. We were the protagonists of the world, together, me by your side. In another universe you’re playing the guitar beside me, and I stop plucking the strings of my bass to look at you, center stage, for just one quick second.” In your imagination, you steal a kiss, maybe. Selfishly, hedonistically, eagerly. You’d give her a short, quick, and chaste kiss, and she would just smile at you. “Come home to me,” you think, selfishly, even though you know you were the one who had left. It’s an old story to you, a friend, at this point, and you know that you’d leave a second time, if you had the chance to redo it. But still. You think: “come home. Tokyo. Shibuya. Us. You and I. Home. You know my heart best. You’re the only one still here who knows my heart best.”
But you don’t know Ichika like that anymore. It has been— so long. You loved an older version of her, and now, you love an amalgamation of her, pieces of her from ages seven, ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and now, at age twenty-something, because you had tried to hold onto the memories of your past while simultaneously running away from it.
But still: you let Ichika talk you into getting that damned houseplant. You two open up your computer, and you online order one from a website that she recommends.
Eventually, she gets up, and you know what she is going to say. But you don’t want her to say it. You don’t want her to go. But you let her go— because you don’t have the right to ask for that again. You can’t ask her to follow you into something so deep.
So: you two walk to the genkan together. Ichika slips her shoes on. Fuck. You still want to kiss her. Selfishly, you want her to stay. You want her, and you want the music: you can’t have one, but the thing is, you can’t have one without the other. Ichika is music and music is Ichika. So you try to reach for both, with your dependable hands.
But really, you don’t. What you really do, is help her get the door, like a good childhood friend. You exist to her in both of your pasts. But now, you realize, it’s time to isolate again. This was already more than enough.
Ichika looks at you.
You look back at her.
“I think I’m still in love with you,” she says, voice dripping with love, with grief, with humor. It’s like a bad joke. YOU’RE MISSING THE PUNCHLINE. Suddenly, it overwhelms you, the sheer amount of love you have for her, this girl, Hoshino Ichika, childhood friend, old crush, old friend, long history and all.
The houseplant. The first time she had reached out to you in adulthood, her fingers wrapped around the hands you had used to make a living for yourself. She had clung onto you too, when she was a kid. Truly, she never really let you leave— secretly, you two have always been connected, through a string of fate, maybe. You aren’t sure who was doing the pulling. The alcohol. The yakisoba bun. The jazz bar. You two, in its entirety. You see her in front of you, stupid flannel and messy hair. Her Hatsune Miku keychain is still on the floor of your kitchen. All you do is—
Let out a laugh; because how dare she beat you to the punch?