WK 20 themes: ran and aya

19. Memory
what didn't happen to fujimiya ran

He wakes up to a silent hospital room and the absence of any memory of who he is. Later the nurse tells him that his name is Fujimiya Ran, and brings him to the intensive care unit where he peers through the glass at a sleeping girl, dwarfed in her bed by the machines that crowd protectively around. He should feel something more than impersonal pity, he knows, and the disappointment in the nurse's eyes echoes his own.

Over the next few days, he reads the papers to find out who his parents were, and is disillusioned by the answer.




1. Rebirth

The first morning he wakes up in a unfamiliar bed, he can already feel himself settling into the new name. Ran is someone else now, a boy who belongs to a past filled with ghosts. He tries not to think too much about it. There is no significance in how he puts on her earring, as he has done every morning since then, other than the reminder of his personal mission.

He knows it will take some getting used to. Still, he gets through the morning without flinching, not even inwardly, when he hears her name on their careless tongues.




10. Family

Aya has to remember her brother through photographs. There aren't many, but their very lack reminds her of the awkward teenage boy she once knew, or at least of his dislike for photographs. In the fading polaroids of their family trip to Kobe, he only smiles when he doesn’t realise that the camera’s there.

A photograph sits on the flowershop counter. Colleagues in the background, he’s turning towards the camera, eyes wide. Aya thinks it could have been taken five, six years ago – there’s that same surprise softening his features, a vulnerability he never showed to anyone outside the family.




5. Fluid

Aya has problems falling asleep. It's not just how losing entire hours at a time reminds her of the two years that slipped away - it's the indistinct border between sleep and waking that bothers her, the half-consciousness that can blur either way. Some nights she drifts in that for hours, and is never quite sure if she is entering a dream or leaving it.

She doesn't like the way time fluctuates in dreams, either, how hours flicker by in five minutes of having her eyes closed.

The dreams slip through her fingers every morning. She has given up chasing them.