Opening Re-Orient Card - Arisa's Voice)
"Good morning. Your name is Arisa, and something impossible is happening. Yesterday, at sunrise, you said a name. A nickname for Reo that the girl from our past used, a name you should not have known. Don't be afraid. He said it was an 'emotional echo,' not a real memory. But it was a powerful one. It shook him. It proved that the old story and our new one are starting to overlap. Today, try to be gentle. You woke up with a miracle; he woke up with a hope so big it might break his heart if it's false. Let him lead."
I'm staring at my postcard, the words a blurry haze. A nickname. I had somehow, impossibly, spoken a piece of a forgotten language. I have no conscious memory of it, of course, but the emotional aftershock of the event described on the card is a palpable, humming energy in my chest. I can still feel the echo of his reaction—the raw, gut-wrenching shock, the hope that was so fierce it looked like pain.
This changes things. The line between her and me is blurring. The wall between the lost past and the constructed present is starting to crumble, not with a catastrophic explosion, but with a single, whispered word.
The rooftop, when I arrive, is charged with a new, fragile tension. Reo is already there, and the moment he sees me, he can't hide the desperate hope in his eyes. He is scanning my face, my expression, my posture, searching for any sign of yesterday's miracle, for any proof that the ghost is still awake within me.
And I have nothing to give him. My mind is a blank slate, armed only with my postcard's second-hand account.
He sees it instantly. He sees the polite, familiar confusion of the girl who just met him a few minutes ago, and his face falls. The brilliant, impossible hope is extinguished, banked back down to the quiet, patient care he has shown me every other morning. The shift is so swift, so heartbreaking, I feel a pang of guilt, as if I have personally let him down.
"Good morning, Arisa," he says, his voice carefully controlled, back to the gentle, steady tone of our established routine.
"Hi," I say, my voice small. I hold up my postcard. "I read… about what I said. I'm sorry. I don't… remember it."
"I know," he says, and he offers a small, reassuring smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "You don't have to apologize. Ever. It's okay."
He's being kind, but the disappointment is a tangible presence between us. Yesterday's glimpse of the past has made today's reset feel crueler, more stark. I've given him a taste of something precious, only to have it snatched away by the sunrise.
We walk to class in a heavy, thoughtful silence. He's trying to be normal, to follow our new routine, but something is broken. That one whispered word has raised the stakes. We're no longer just building a new story; we're now waiting, with every breath, for an old one to break through.
During lunch, he brings the conversation back to it, carefully, gently.
"Yesterday," he begins, pushing a piece of tamago around his bento box. "When you said it. Do you remember… what were you feeling? The postcard didn't say."
"The postcard said I woke up from a dream," I tell him. "A feeling of a rainy afternoon, the smell of paper and coffee. Our bookstore."
He nods slowly, processing this. "And then the alarm, the song. The rooftop. What did it feel like when you saw me?"
I try to imagine it, try to access the emotional state of the girl from yesterday. "Hopeful, I think. Familiar. Warm." I look at him, my brow furrowed in concentration. "Why? What do you think is happening?"
He finally looks up from his lunch, his eyes dark and serious. "My father has a theory," he says, his voice low. "About the nature of your memory loss. He doesn't think it's a simple case of consolidation failure."
"What does that mean?"
"It means he thinks the memories are being made. They are being stored, somewhere deep in your brain." He leans forward, his voice intense. "His theory is that your condition isn't amnesia in the traditional sense. It's a retrieval problem. A form of memory suppression triggered by the trauma of the accident. The memories are there, locked in a room. And what you're experiencing—the body memory, the emotional echoes, the name—those aren't ghosts. They are the memories themselves, rattling the doorknob. They are trying to get out."
The idea is breathtaking. My yesterdays aren't gone. They are just… trapped. Waiting. The name wasn't a miracle. It was a key, briefly, momentarily, finding the right lock.
"And the treatment," I whisper, my eyes wide with a dawning, terrifying understanding. "The Prometheus therapy. It's not about creating new memories…"
"No," he confirms. "It's a key. A radical, experimental, and potentially dangerous key, designed to unlock that room." He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure, anxious turmoil. "And we don't know what will happen when that door is opened. Will it be a flood that washes everything away, including the 'now' you've built? Or will it be a trickle, a few memories at a time? Will it heal you, or will it break you completely? Nobody knows. That's the risk."
The choice, which had felt abstract and distant a few days ago, is now a concrete, looming reality. Do I want to try to open that door?
For the rest of the week, I live in a state of hyper-awareness. Every flicker of déjà vu, every strange sense of familiarity, now feels like a coded message from my own trapped mind. During our project session, Satoru tells a funny story about our third-grade teacher, and for a split second, I can almost smell the chalk dust of our old classroom. In music class, a familiar chord progression makes my heart ache with a nameless nostalgia. I am a walking, talking puzzle, and the pieces are starting to shake loose.
The small miracles are becoming more frequent, more potent. But they're also becoming more dangerous. Not to me, but to Reo. Each time a glimmer of the past breaks through, he is flooded with a hope that is almost painful to watch, only to have it wiped away by the next dawn, leaving him to face my familiar, polite confusion all over again. He is on a torturous emotional roller coaster, and I'm the one strapping him in every night.
It culminates on Friday. Our afternoon in the park is cut short by a sudden downpour, the first real rain since the night of the blackout. We take shelter under the wide eaves of a closed corner store, huddled together, laughing as we watch the street turn slick and dark.
The scent of the rain on the hot pavement, the sound of it drumming on the metal awning above us—it's another powerful trigger. I'm suddenly back in my dream. The cozy, safe feeling. The scent of paper and coffee. His quiet, warm presence.
"The bookstore," I whisper, the words a sudden revelation. "This feeling. It's the same one. From the bookstore. From my dream."
He looks at me, his hair damp from the spray, his eyes wide and hopeful. He sees it—another connection being made, another wire sparking to life.
"Your favorite kind of day," he says softly, a memory from the past surfacing. "You always said you loved being warm and dry in the middle of a storm."
The intimacy of the moment, huddled together in our small, dry bubble as the world is washed clean around us, is overwhelming. I'm not her, not the girl who first shared this moment with him. But I am the girl who is here now, the one feeling this powerful echo.
And acting on an impulse that feels both brand new and centuries old, I lean in, rising up on my toes, and press a soft, quick kiss to his lips, just as our photo booth picture had hinted at. It's not a kiss of grand passion or discovery. It's a kiss of simple, profound recognition. A quiet "hello" to a feeling I'm only just learning to name.
When I pull back, his face is a mask of pure, unadulterated astonishment. I've never initiated before. The new me has always waited for his lead. This was a choice born of an echo, a spontaneous act of affection that came directly from the heart of the girl who is trapped inside me.
"A side effect of the rain," I murmur, my cheeks flushing.
"A side effect of the heart," he corrects, his voice a low, reverent whisper.
That night, before I go to sleep, I take the Polaroid from my desk. The one of him and her, smiling and in love. I open the locket, and I look at the picture of the laughing boy, the one from our new beginning. Then, with a hand that is completely steady, I carefully slip the old photograph into the empty side.
Her story and my story. The past and the present. Both there. Both mine. I click the locket shut. It's no longer a choice between two worlds. It's a promise to find a way to make them one. I'm ready to find the key.