YUTA'S COMET by firefly

For about as long as I can remember, my best friend, Yuta, was always that little bit shy. When I first met him on one of those frosty winter nights, it was at a park under the light of the moon and a gradient of orange-dark painting the sky. Despite the evening chills, (my hand becoming increasingly constricted by the unwavering cold), quite a number of children still hung off monkey-bars or firmed their feet right into the soil as they leapt off the ground, scrambling away in clumps, likely flailing their little arms in the air as they fell back into beds of lilacs. For a few of us slightly older folk though, we perhaps adopted a more reserved attitude, sitting below the shady shield provided by an evergreen oak tree. Hands were shuffling, cards were stacking; our young faces lighting up under the shadow of that tree, despite us having only acquainted ourselves with each other for the first time earlier that morning. 

“Aye, this reminds me of those gambling games I saw in The Godfather!”

“Well, they were playing poker, and we’re playing UNO, dude.”

For a moment that day, I was conflicted on our apparent insignificance in spite of my whole world, feeling I had only now just begun to live. But on that day, I remember slowly looking over to a brightly smiling Yuta, with a dim flash of glowing light filling the rolling hills of that park, as I jerked my head towards the sky with its gift from the universe. Our newly-found friendship may have been a momentary insignificance in the grand scheme of time and space—a passing of a comet—yet still beautiful, still cherished. In the words of Mark Twain, it was thought that whatever were to happen, we had come in together, and we certainly expected to go out together as well.

To be honest, these friendships—a gift from the universe—still mean something to me now. 

But things now are slightly more complicated.

***

You see, by now it has been around six years since we all initially met on that day under the stars, and most of us had moved to the same uneventful local high school by chance. And on one of those supposedly uneventful days in this so-called valley of knowledge, I traversed the path to Yuta’s locker, where he was moving isekai light novels from his backpack to his locker, in a peculiarly delicate way, though I couldn’t totally remember if it was his general mannerism at the time, or because of some newly-appeared red-brown marks on his wrist, which I hadn’t noticed before. Out of Yuta’s locker fell out a slightly-crumpled paper, a section from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with the words “dead” and “dull” highlighted in single strokes. 


  April is the cruellest month, breeding
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
  Memory and desire, stirring
  Dull roots with spring rain.


“Yuta, what’s this poem you’ve got?”

No response, and despite my attempts each time, Yuta left no residue of openness that I could have had any hope of scraping off. I left the annotated poem to the side for a moment, but trying to bring up any conversation was unfruitful. Conversing with Yuta nowadays generally just results in being a scaffold without its building, so when he outed a comment on his own initiative, it felt like I had just unlocked a stubborn door with a missing key.

“Do you want to go to that park again sometime?”

***

Yuta often escaped to an island of nostalgia, cut off and disconnected from the mainland of the present by an ever-rising ocean; the passage of time continuously weathering it further. Everyone, I bet, has their own nostalgia island, and for Yuta, it was our old park, which he often retreated to, just as the moon creeped out from hiding. At first, the two of us went here often, but Yuta is now the only person I know who often revisits this place. The park’s age was almost confrontational to my sense of remembrance: elderly trees, flaking paint surfaces and a constant restless pull-and-push motion by the unsettled wind.

Although it was only the early evening, the night cast a dark void over the park of our memories, with my vision suffocating as I stood knee-deep in an ancient relic I had forgotten I forged myself. But in attempting to stare into Yuta’s soul once more, to hopefully find something I could understand, it became clear he did not share my agony, with his pupils dancing aimlessly in dotted points of focus around the park.

“Yuta, it's late, what are we here for again?”

“To watch the comet.”

And so I waited, sitting down beside an ever-slightly older evergreen oak tree. It was just the two of us, and eventually that comet did come. It felt wrong, maybe futile, like trying to resuscitate a body that had died, missing most of its vital organs. At that moment, I wished this memory could be finally left for dead.

For better or for worse though, Yuta and I were still alive, and our memories refused to die.