[BL] Would You Be Happy?

**November 22**

Would you be happy if I told you I bought a journal today?

I wasn’t looking for one. I went to Sachiko’s store this afternoon for the first time in weeks — I’d run out of coffee and at some point the lack of it must have registered, though I couldn’t tell you exactly when — and there it was on the middle shelf beside the envelopes and the birthday cards: a plain black notebook with a cheap cardboard cover, the kind that costs almost nothing and is sold because it is inoffensive and small. I stood in front of it for a while.

I bought it.

I’ve been trying to understand why for the past three hours, and I think the honest answer is this: speaking out loud stopped making sense sometime around the end of October. I tried it, in the beginning. I called Tetsuya once. I answered my sister’s messages for a while, the ones that came in clusters and then spaced out as people slowly understood that I was not going to be reachable in the way they needed me to be reachable. I even talked to you, out loud, in the house, in the first week. I would walk into a room and start saying something and then stop because the shape of the sentence required a response, and the house had nothing to give me. Silence where your voice would have been. It was worse than not speaking at all.

So. A journal. Addressed to you.

You will note that I’m aware of how this sounds. I’m thirty-five years old and I’m writing letters to a dead man in a notebook I bought at a harbor convenience store, and I know what that means, and I’m doing it anyway because the alternative is the silence, and I have had two months of the silence, and it is not getting better.

You always said I was stubborn. Here is your proof.

The house, Kanade. I’m going to try to describe the house because you’re not here to see it and someone should be keeping track of what’s happened to it, and apparently that someone is me.

The curtains in the main room are still closed. I haven’t opened them. I know — you would have an opinion about this, probably a quiet one, delivered while looking at something else, which was always how you had opinions you didn’t want to fight about. You liked the morning light in here. You were specific about it. I know you chose the window dimensions partially for the way autumn light came through them at a certain angle in the early afternoon, because you told me that, because you were an architect and also occasionally the most deliberate person I have ever known in my life.

I haven’t opened the curtains. Some light gets in around the edges. That’s all I’m allowing right now.

The windows are closed. I know you would have opened them by now — you had a philosophy about airflow in old houses, something about wood needing to breathe the same way people do, and I always pretended to follow the logic while mostly just trusting you to manage it. I haven’t opened them because the air inside still smells like you, or it did, and I have been rationing it. The bedroom is the worst. I can’t go in there. There are rooms where I can walk in and not smell you anymore and I am not ready to know which rooms those are, so I’m staying away from most of them.

Your coffee mug is still on the counter.

The one with the slight chip in the handle that you kept meaning to replace and never did. You made coffee with it the morning you left for Tokyo, which was the morning of September twenty-sixth, and you set it in the dish rack, and I moved it to the counter later while I was cleaning, and it has been there ever since.

I haven’t washed it.

I know. I know what that says about me. I am choosing not to analyze it right now.

I don’t know how long I’m going to keep writing in this. Maybe I’ll stop after tonight. Maybe it’ll feel worse to write it down than to leave it inside me. But you’re the person I’ve always thought of first when something happens — good or bad, confusing or clear, ordinary or not — and I don’t know how to redirect that impulse, and I don’t know that I should try to redirect it, and so tonight I am writing it down.

Here is something that happened today: I went to the store, and I came home, and I stood in the kitchen for a while looking at the counter, and I thought: *he’s not coming home tonight either.*

You’d think I would have stopped having that thought by now. It’s been fifty-six days.

I still have it every time I come in through the door.

**November 23**

11:42 PM.

I tried to work today. Two hours, maybe. I got through some code review, flagged a few things for the team, sent one email to Tetsuya that said approximately nothing useful but acknowledged that I had received his messages.

Then I sat in front of the screen for another forty minutes, and then I made tea, and then I sat with the tea until it was cold, and then I poured it out.

I can’t find the shape of a working day anymore. The routines we had — our routines, the ones that organized time — they don’t function without their second participant. I would work in the mornings. You would work on-site or from the study, depending on the project. We would break for lunch, sometimes together, sometimes separately depending on what we both had going. In the evenings I usually worked later; you would be in the main room, reading or drawing plans, and sometimes I would look up from the desk and see the light on and hear you in there and that was — I didn’t understand at the time that that was something, specifically, that I was receiving. I thought it was just ordinary life.

I understand now.

The evening is the worst part of the day. That particular hour when the harbor light goes grey-blue and the lamps come on and the house is at its quietest and there should be someone in the next room.

There is no one in the next room.

**November 24**

I couldn’t go into our bedroom today.

**November 25**

I went back to Sachiko’s today. Not because I needed anything in particular. I think I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t this house, if only for twenty minutes.

She was behind the counter when I came in, same apron she’s worn every time we’ve walked through that door over the years. She looked up when she heard the entrance, and for just a moment — a very small moment — I saw her register who it was. Something moved across her face. Not pity, exactly. Something more considered than pity. She is a widow; I’ve always known that, but I’ve been thinking about it differently recently. She has lost someone too. I think people who have experienced that kind of loss can recognize it from across a room in a way other people can’t. Like a frequency only certain people are calibrated to hear.

She didn’t say anything. I was grateful for that.

I walked the aisles. I picked up coffee, a rice ball, a small can of something I intended to eat for dinner and couldn’t have identified an hour later. I stood in front of the refrigerated section for a while, looking at nothing in particular, aware of looking at nothing in particular and unable to stop. I thought about the cold air coming off the shelving and the particular low hum of the refrigeration units and I thought: *this is what dissociation feels like, probably.*

I moved on.

I stood in front of the drinks for too long. I pulled out two cans of barley tea. I stood there looking at them both. Then I put one back.

Sachiko bagged everything without looking up at my hands. If she noticed, she said nothing. She has always been good at silence.

“Cold today,” she said, when I was paying.

“Yes,” I said.

That was the whole of it. I walked home along the harbor road with my bag and the cold coming off the water and the fishing boats sitting low and still in the grey afternoon. The mountains behind the village still had their autumn color but it was fading now, going brown at the edges, the green draining out of things.

I don’t know why I’m writing down a trip to the convenience store. But something about how Sachiko said that — *cold today* — in a voice that was ordinary and careful at exactly the same time, made me feel briefly like a person who exists in the world. I’ve been having trouble feeling like that.

Two cans of barley tea. Then one.

I notice I’m writing about it without writing about it, which means it’s probably important.

**November 26**

I found one of your pencils today.

In the drawer beside the kitchen counter, the one where we keep — kept — the miscellaneous things that don’t have a better home: expired batteries, a few rubber bands, takeout menus from a restaurant in Miyazu that closed two years ago. I was looking for scissors and my hand found a pencil instead, the kind you used for preliminary sketches, a soft 2B, worn down to a stub with the eraser end slightly flattened from where you pressed it against your thumb when you were thinking.

I stood there with it in my hand for a long time.

It’s not significant, as objects go. It’s a pencil. You owned dozens of them; they turned up everywhere, in jacket pockets and between couch cushions and in the cup on the desk I’ve not touched since you last sat there. You were specific about pencils the way some people are specific about knives or tools: weight, softness, the quality of the mark they left. You had opinions about this that you expressed quietly and at length if I asked and sometimes if I didn’t ask.

I put it back in the drawer.

I didn’t throw it away and I didn’t keep it out somewhere visible, which I think is exactly right for where I am right now. I’m not ready to perform grief correctly. I don’t know what performing grief correctly would even look like. What I know is that I found a pencil that you held and put it back in the dark, and then I stood in the kitchen for a while, and then I went back to the desk.

There is a particular quality to grief that I wasn’t prepared for: how arbitrary it is. I was fine — by which I mean I was managing, I was existing — and then I opened a drawer for scissors, and now I’m sitting here at the kitchen table at eight in the evening writing about a pencil in a notebook you will never read.

The drawer is closed. The pencil is in it.

I didn’t find the scissors.

**November 27 — 2:08 AM**

I’ve been avoiding this particular section of paper for five days.

I keep telling myself there’s a better time to write it. A better state of mind. Some steadier version of me that will arrive when I’ve slept more and eaten more and spent less time lying on the couch listening to the harbor. I’ve been waiting for that version. He isn’t coming. So I’ll write it now, at two in the morning, in the kitchen, which is the room I can be in for the longest stretch without needing to leave.

Kanade.

You were in Tokyo for a client meeting. I knew you’d be late. You texted me at six in the evening — *leaving now, might be close* — and I remember reading that text and thinking something vague about dinner and whether you’d eaten, and then I went back to what I was doing, and I didn’t worry, because I didn’t worry about you, because I had never had a reason to worry about you in ten years.

I still have that text. I have every text. I have the voicemails. I can’t listen to the voicemails but I cannot delete them either, and I want to be very clear that I understand this is not healthy behavior and I am doing it anyway because some things simply cannot be asked of a person, and I am not prepared to be asked.

The meeting ran long. You were trying to get home for my birthday. September twenty-seventh. My thirty-fifth birthday, which we’d planned to spend quietly the way we spent most things, a good dinner here at the house, a bottle of wine you’d been keeping back, maybe a walk along the harbor road if the weather held. Nothing large. We didn’t need things to be large.

You were rushing.

I have thought about this — I have been unable to stop thinking about it — from every possible angle that a human mind can approach a fixed fact, and the fixed fact is: you were rushing because of my birthday, and if it had not been my birthday, you would not have been rushing.

If you had not been rushing, perhaps you would have taken the later train. Stayed the night in Tokyo and come back in the morning, which you had done before. Or left earlier in the day. Or left at any hour other than the one you left at.

I stop there every time.

I know I stop there because the sentence that follows is unbearable. And also because it accomplishes nothing — you are gone and the sentence cannot change that, and whatever configuration of choices and timing and roadway geometry contributed to the accident on the Maizuru Wakasa Expressway is now fixed in the past in a way that no amount of reconstruction will alter. I know this. I know it rationally, with the part of my brain that is still capable of rational processing.

The other part of my brain has been working on a different problem: how to stop believing that I am the reason you are dead.

I cannot resolve it. I’ve tried. I have turned it over and looked at it from the outside and I can see, clearly, that it is not a logical conclusion. That accidents happen. That no birthday is responsible for the circumstances that surround it. That you were an adult who made a choice about your own travel.

And then I think: if it had not been my birthday.

And I am back at the beginning.

You would have had something to say about this. You were very good at the particular skill of remaining patient with my circular thinking while also, eventually, making me feel slightly foolish for it — not unkindly, never unkindly, but in that way you had of just being so clear about things, so grounded in how things actually were rather than how I had convinced myself they were. You would have put your hand on my face and waited until I stopped talking and then said something short and completely correct.

You can’t do that anymore.

So I’m sitting here at two in the morning writing to someone who cannot read it, and what I’m writing is: I’m sorry.

I know that’s not a rational thing to say to you. I know the apologetic impulse is itself a symptom of the guilt rather than a resolution to it. I know you would find the apology slightly unnecessary and probably say so.

I’m sorry anyway.

I’m sorry because you were coming home for me, and I would give absolutely anything — every line of code I’ve ever written, every quiet evening in this house, every year I have left in me — to unmake the fact that you were hurrying.

That’s the honest version.

I’ve been writing around it for five days and that’s the honest version and now I’ve written it and it doesn’t feel better and I didn’t expect it to but there it is.

I’m going to try to sleep.

**November 28**

Slept until noon.

The fourth time in two months.

I ate something. I worked for two hours. I didn’t go into the bedroom.

This counts as a functional day, apparently.

**November 29**

Tetsuya has sent three emails since October.

I’ve responded to one of them. The second one was easier to ignore because it contained no direct question, only a careful update about the project status and a line at the end about not needing to rush anything. The third one arrived last week and I’ve been looking at it in my inbox the way you look at something you know you’re going to have to deal with and are not yet ready to deal with.

The project. Yes. We were mid-development on a fairly significant phase, and my team has been holding where they can but certain decisions require my sign-off and certain architecture questions are specific to the system I built, and I understand all of this, and I’ve been understanding it at a comfortable intellectual distance for approximately eight weeks.

I opened the project files this afternoon. I looked at them for a while. The structure is clean — it’s always clean, I’m meticulous about this — but there are branches that needed merging two months ago and a thread of comments from the UI developer asking questions nobody answered because I was not answering anything.

I closed the files.

You used to bring me tea when I worked late. Not always — you were never someone who hovered, you had your own projects, your own late evenings bent over plans with the reading lamp angled just right. But sometimes, when the house had been quiet for a while and the hour had gotten deep without me noticing, I’d become aware of movement in the kitchen, and then you’d appear at the desk and set something down next to my keyboard without interrupting. Mugicha, usually. Sometimes oolong. You never asked if I wanted it. You always knew.

I haven’t had tea in two months.

There’s tea in the cabinet. I know it’s there. I’ve opened that cabinet for other things.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

**November 30 — 3:43 AM**

The harbor is audible from every room in this house. You knew this, of course — you knew every acoustic property of this building the way I know every node in a system I built myself, intuitively and from the inside out. The sound isn’t loud. It sits just below the threshold of conscious notice, a low persistent presence that you only register when everything else has gone quiet: the particular movement of water against old wood, small boats adjusting against their ropes, the deep tidal pull that you can feel rather than hear.

You told me once that you chose this location specifically for that. That you wanted to live somewhere you could always hear the water but never be overwhelmed by it. At the time I thought you were being romantic in your characteristically understated way — you were not sentimental about things that didn’t matter, but you were precise and intentional about things that did, and the distinction was always clear to people who knew you. I did not argue with it. I trusted you to know what you were doing, which turned out to be a reliable policy for most of our ten years.

I am beginning to understand what you meant.

It’s almost four in the morning. I’ve been awake for two hours after the briefest attempt at sleep I’ve made in weeks. I’m on the couch, which is where I’ve been sleeping — where I’ve been *not* sleeping — since September. The bedroom is at the end of the hallway. I can hear the harbor better from there; the window you angled for that exact reason means the sound is fuller, deeper, more present. The harbor and the open water and the mountains on the far side of the inlet. You knew how light moved through that room and you knew how sound moved through it and you made choices based on both, because that is the kind of architect you were — not someone who built structures but someone who built experiences of being inside structures, which is a distinction most people don’t think to make.

I cannot go into that room.

I know I should. Two months is a long time. I’m aware that sleeping on the couch is not a permanent solution and that avoiding our bedroom is not the same as processing the fact of your absence, and I’m also aware that I know this with perfect clarity and it has no practical effect on my ability to walk down the hallway and open that door. Understanding what you’re doing wrong and being able to stop doing it wrong are two entirely different things. I have a degree in systems architecture. I can see the failure point from outside the system and still not be able to fix it from inside.

The couch is fine. The couch has no associations I cannot manage.

I’ve been writing in this journal for nine days. November twenty-second through the thirtieth, with a skip on the twenty-sixth because I was not capable of writing on the twenty-sixth. Nine days of writing to someone who cannot read it, in a house that is too quiet and smells less like you than it did last month and will smell less like you again next month, and I am trying not to think about that progression too directly.

Here is what I want to say tonight, at nearly four in the morning with the harbor moving under the darkness outside:

You had a philosophy about homes. I’ve been thinking about it since you died and I’m going to write it down before I let myself sleep, or lie in the dark pretending to sleep, which is mostly what I do now. You told me once — we were driving back from a site visit somewhere in Tango, I think, late summer, a couple of years ago — that the purpose of a well-made house was not the house itself. The structure, the materials, the architecture — those were means rather than ends. The purpose was the life that happened inside it. A house that no one lives in, you said, is not really a house. It’s a building. Space and accumulated material. It only becomes itself when someone inhabits it. You said this with the specificity of someone who had thought about it for a long time, and then you drove and looked at the road, and I looked at the side of your face in the passenger window, and I didn’t say anything because it seemed like the kind of thing that didn’t need a response.

I’ve been thinking about that.

I’ve been thinking about whether this house, right now, with the curtains closed and the air sealed in and the rooms I can’t enter and the couch I’m sleeping on instead of the bedroom — I’ve been thinking about whether this is still a house in the sense you meant. Whether I have made it into something you would not have intended.

I think you would be patient with me for a while.

I also think, if I’m honest, that you would eventually lose patience. Gently. In your way. You would look at the closed curtains and the unwashed mug and the bedroom door at the end of the hall and you would say something quiet and completely accurate about the difference between honoring a loss and refusing to live.

I’m not there yet. I know I’m not there yet.

But I’m writing it down, which means some part of me is keeping track of where it is.

Nine entries, Kanade. Nine days of writing to a dead man because I don’t know what else to do with the silence.

The harbor sounds exactly the same as it did when you were here. The same frequency, the same depth, the same low persistence just below the threshold of conscious thought. It was that sound when you were asleep beside me and I was awake in the dark counting your breaths the way I do when I can’t sleep and don’t want to disturb you. It was that sound on the evenings we sat on the steps in summer with the water so close and so still it reflected the mountain perfectly. It is that sound now, at four in the morning, with the couch under me and the hall between me and that room and everything between me and everything else.

The water doesn’t know.

I keep thinking about that. The water moves. The season moves. The light continues to change in the rooms in the way you planned for it to change, and none of it knows. None of it is waiting. Nothing has stopped except me.

I’m going to try to sleep.

I’m going to keep writing in this.

Not because I believe it helps, or because I’ve decided anything about what it means to write to someone who cannot receive it. But because you would find it extremely irritating if I stopped after nine days and you would be right to find it irritating, and because somewhere in these nine days of entries there is the possibility that I’m beginning — slowly, badly, not in any way that looks like progress — to say something true.

I think that’s worth something.

Sleep. I’ll try.

The water sounds the same.