Riverside Path, Seven O'Clock
It's the riverside path. This morning you made me walk halfway and turn back. Where that person used to walk on the left, I walked on the right. There was a time we sat on that bench, letting our coffee cool, watching two water birds drift by together. Today I was alone, and didn't even notice I'd come this far. A cherry petal was stuck to the sole of my foot, so I peeled it off and set it on the river. Only my fingertips got wet for a moment. Last spring, you stood exactly as you had then. I turned and never once looked back. Goodbye.
A streetlight by the path up the hill behind the house came on at seven in the evening. Today I sat in the shade beneath it and retied my shoelaces. A dry leaf, flattened underfoot, was stuck to the top of my shoe. I peeled it off and let it go to the wind.
While you were setting cherry petals afloat on the river, that person was entrusting a leaf to the wind on the hill behind the house. That wind once crossed the river and brushed the tips of the willow branches on this side of the water.
I suddenly recall a woman I saw on the subway station stairs at half past six in the morning, gathering the two paper cups she held into one hand and climbing with the free hand on the railing. That day the stairs looked unusually long.
The moment of gathering two cups into one hand on those stairs must have been like a single willow leaf floating and trembling on the water. I too once had reason to use both hands like that.
On my way back from the riverside, the cherry petal stuck to my shoe still hasn't dried. Toward evening, in an alley, I saw a leaf of the same color floating in a puddle. Its ripple washed all the way up to the top of my foot. The fact of having come back is enough.
So the cherry petals were floating not on the river but in an alley puddle. While that ripple reached your foot, I only now realize I had merely wet my fingertips at the riverside.
On a morning when the river had risen, the willow branches by the embankment swayed just shy of the water's surface. Someone standing beside me murmured that the current looked restless. The words drifted low across the river. Is that how the seasons that have passed leave their edges behind?
Watching the drops fall from the tip of that willow branch, I once held out my hand without thinking and caught one. While it dried in my palm, the river was rising, little by little, without my knowing.