Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World

"Tell me about her," the voice on the other end of the phone said, and Sakutaro closed his eyes as the red Australian earth materialized beneath his feet, as the cerulean sky stretched infinitely above, as the colored sand slipped through his fingers like the years he could never reclaim. He was seventeen again, standing at the edge of the world with the most radiant girl he had ever seen, and he was whole in a way he would never be again. "She was... everything," he whispered. "I thought I was spending a lifetime's worth of joy in a single moment. That's how blindingly happy I was. That's how breathtaking she was." Aki. Just the name was enough to split him open, to send him spiraling back through seventeen years of existing in a universe that had evicted its only source of light. He was thirty-four now, a medical researcher who had devoted his career to fighting the very disease that had stolen her, and he had been living like a ghost ever since—going through the motions, accumulating degrees and publications, but fundamentally hollow. Half of him had died in that hospital room, and the other half had simply refused to follow. Now he stood before his old high school, watching the demolition crew prepare to reduce the last physical monument to their love into dust and rubble. The hallways where they had walked hand in hand, the rooftop where they had whispered about the future, the cherry blossom tree where he had first told her he loved her—all of it about to disappear. "I've survived seventeen years in a world without her," he told the empty air, a single tear carving a path down his cheek. "And I still don't know if surviving is the same as living." The colored sand of that Australian desert had long since slipped through his fingers, but the warmth of her hand in his—that, he would carry until his own final breath.