Hey Mortality (20 page)

As I wander
from Beppu Station, I feel without ideas, more than ever. I don’t really know why I came all this way. I don’t really know what I will find, if anything.

I walk around, until I eventually stumble into the cemetery that brought me here. It is a lot smaller than I imagined, despite the large population of elderly people here in Beppu to retire from life.

The sun is breaking through the clouds as I wander the rows of gravestones. Wooden sticks with beautifully written text tell me the names of the people that remain.

I eventually find a small map. Plot 241 is marked and is not so far away. My destination is beyond a large group of trees that house chirping birds, and where a murder of crows drift above, forming invisible outlines in the summer sky.

As I walk along the field of death, I don’t know how I am feeling. Only emptiness remains inside of me now. A shell of a man, abandoned because of lies and left to explore the world on my own. And, the world I found was far from pleasant.

I think again about her, why she did the things she did. Why she gave off the impression that she was lying, fuelled my suspicions, yet, left me no proof that anything was wrong. I wonder if anything really was. I wonder if all of that was in fact in my head.

Still, a burning hatred at the time consumed me, and it must have been with reason; a sense. But nobody can know for sure. Nobody now can tell me for sure, and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t anyway.

Instead, I am just as alone as I felt back then, just as alone as when I lost her, and just as alone as I will always be from now. Just a lost animal waiting to be found, but with no way of knowing how to better be discovered.

I eventually arrive in the vicinity of the plot that I came all this way to see, but instead, I see something else. Someone else. A small child, perhaps eight years old. A girl. She stands over the gravestone in a trance-like state, before slowly kneeling down. She is completely still for a moment; the stillness washes over her. I slowly begin to approach, and the snapping of a twig under my feet stirs her silence and brings with it her attention.

She turns to face me, and smiles, and her eyes, I notice her eyes. Deep brown. Deep-set. Ichiyō’s eyes, the same eyes as the ghost herself. Liar’s eyes, the same eyes I see every day in my thoughts. The same eyes, undoubtedly.

I try to say something but the words don’t come. I try to speak but my mouth doesn’t produce any sound. Completely muted, only silence forms. And, in this complete silence, the girl turns her head back toward the ground, and then, like the man at the temple, she too disappears; fades away like a ghost. And then she is gone.