Aiko hadn’t meant to see him again.

After their strange conversation under the cherry tree, she assumed he’d disappear — like most travelers did — swept off by trains and time and a world that kept moving forward.

But there he was.

The next morning, sitting cross-legged on the back patio of her grandmother’s café, notebook in hand, pen moving slowly like it was searching for the right words to break a spell.

“You’re the poet?” she asked, stepping out with a tray of tea. Her voice carried more suspicion than she intended.

Sora looked up and smiled. “I was hoping you’d be the one bringing it out.”

She set the tray down between them. “You didn’t say you were staying in Hanamura.”

“You didn’t ask.”

He took the cup in both hands and inhaled the steam, his eyes fluttering shut like he was listening to something only he could hear.

“You’re not from here,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.”
“Why Hanamura?”
He looked at her then, gaze sharp beneath the morning light.
“Let’s just say... I’m chasing a story.”

Vague. Too vague.
Aiko narrowed her eyes. “What kind of story?”

Sora set the cup down carefully and flipped open his notebook. The page he landed on was filled with ink — poetry, if you could call it that. Scribbled lines, crossed-out thoughts, fragments of something bigger.

“A story about lost things,” he said, not looking at her. “People. Promises. Time. Whatever the wind takes, really.”

She hated how that made her chest ache.

“You always speak like that?” she muttered. “Like you’re trying to be mysterious on purpose?”

“Does it work?”

Aiko rolled her eyes, but her lips twitched — the beginning of a smile she wasn’t ready to admit.

That afternoon, she watched him from the café window.

He didn’t seem like a stranger anymore. Not exactly. He greeted the old women who brought rice cakes to the shrine. He listened patiently to Grandma Keiko’s stories from “before the war,” even the ones with three endings. He spent his mornings writing under the cherry trees, his evenings walking the quiet back roads like a man retracing steps he hadn’t yet taken.

But he still hadn’t told her why he was here.

And when she asked again — as they watched the stars from the café’s rooftop that night — he only said:

“Maybe I’m here to help someone find what they lost.”

She looked at him carefully then.

Not at his face — but at the space around him.
That feeling she couldn’t name.
That gravity.
That... familiarity.

And then, without thinking, she asked, “Have we met before?”

A pause. Just long enough to notice.

“…What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t know. You just feel…” Like a memory I forgot to carry.
She didn’t finish the sentence.

Sora turned his gaze back to the stars.

“Some souls just recognize each other, Aiko. Even if the rest of the world forgets.”

Chapter 2: The Man Who Writes in Shadows

Join the Discussion