The door closed behind me with a quiet click. Soft. Almost courteous. But beneath that gentleness lay something far more absolute. It was not merely the sound of wood meeting wood. It was the hush of a seal being pressed shut. A hush that carried across time. That echoed through every room I had once known, reverberating through the years I had tried so hard to forget. Years that now felt sealed not behind me, but inside me.
I crossed the threshold slowly, as though stepping into the worn skin of a memory too faded to fit. My steps were guided by instinct, but my heart hovered on the edge, uncertain. I felt like a ghost returning to a life that no longer recognized me. Invisible. Untethered. Some part of me, foolish and childlike, still hoped the walls might breathe. That they might sigh softly in welcome, whispering that I had been missed.
The air greeted me like a whisper left behind. It still carried the faintest trace of my mother's cooking. Sweet soy drifted through the dim hallway, gentle and nostalgic. The earthy scent of stewed root vegetables clung to the floorboards like memory itself. And there was miso too, faint and ghostlike, as if the house had preserved it out of habit. These fragments of scent, these fragile echoes of the past, should have comforted me.
But now they mingled with something else. Something colder. Something quiet.
Dust. Stillness. The heavy presence of time.
This place, these walls, this silence, they should have wrapped around me.
They should have felt like home.
But they did not.
Not anymore.
I stood there for a long and quiet moment, the strap of my travel bag digging gently into my shoulder. I carried it more out of habit than necessity. The house, at first glance, appeared unchanged. Same narrow hallway. Same soft creak beneath my shoes. But something was wrong. The angles felt unfamiliar. The air felt hollow. As if the house had shifted in my absence, just enough to become a stranger.
My eyes searched the dimness, scanning for movement. For the shadow of someone waiting. For a voice. For the light thud of bare feet against old wood. For laughter chasing down the hallway. For arms flung open.
That was the memory I had clung to all these years.
That was the myth I had refused to let go.
But the house greeted me only with silence.
Then faintly,there it was. The sound of footsteps. Bare. Unhurried. Each step hesitant, as if belonging to a memory relearning how to move.
I turned toward the sound.
And there she was.
Aoi.
She stood at the edge of the living room, just beyond the shadow of the hallway, poised on the border between past and present. A threshold within a threshold. The years had shaped her, etched something older into the lines of her face. The soft roundness I remembered was gone. Her features were finer now, touched by stillness. Not the stillness of calm, but of restraint. Of experience. Her hair fell freely around her shoulders, no longer bound in the playful pigtails I used to tug just to hear her shriek. It caught the pale light like something delicate, like something I no longer had the right to touch.
But her eyes, those were almost the same. That same deep shade of brown. Quiet. Watchful. But something had settled behind them. Something unreadable. She looked at me like someone who remembered too much and had learned never to speak of it.
She did not move closer.
Neither did I.
The space between us felt unmeasurable. Not by steps, but by years. By silences. By everything we had never said.
"Riku," she said.
Only that.
No breathless surprise. No rushing forward. No tears. Just my name, spoken as if it were a language she had not spoken in a long time. As if the word itself needed to be handled with care. As if it might break.
I tried to smile.
What emerged felt brittle. Unconvincing.
"Yeah," I said. "It's me."
As if saying it aloud could make it real.
But it didn't.
Not really.
The air between us felt thin, fragile. I was afraid that even a single word might break it apart. I wanted to fill the silence, to reach across that invisible distance, but nothing came that felt right. Nothing that could bear the weight of the years.
"You've grown up," I said.
It was true. But the words felt clumsy. Too small for everything I meant. Too dull for the ache behind them.
Aoi glanced down. Her fingers fidgeted at the hem of her skirt. Nervous. Guarded. Or maybe both. She nodded once, slow and deliberate, as if agreeing to something deeper than the words.
"Yeah," she said. "I guess I have."
And just like that, the weight of all the years we had not spoken settled between us. Dense. Unspoken. Unavoidable.
Her answer carried more than just time. It carried distance. Not the kind measured by cities or trains, but by the quiet erosion of closeness. By everything we had let slip through the spaces between phone calls. Between holidays missed. Between birthdays remembered too late.
I studied her then. The way she held herself. Straighter now. More composed. There was a quiet strength to it, a control that had not been there before. But beneath it, barely visible, was something else. A flicker of something unguarded. A shadow of the girl I used to know.
It was in the way she kept looking at me. In the way she almost smiled, but never quite did. A current ran through the stillness between us. Recognition, yes but something more.
Something uncertain.
Something dangerous.
I looked away. Cleared my throat. Tried to tame the wild flutter of my pulse.
"It's good to be back," I said.
But the words felt hollow. They fell from my lips like borrowed lines in someone else's story.
She nodded. Barely. Her eyes drifted past me, as if searching for another version of me in the shadows. The boy who had left. The brother who had not written enough. The one who had changed without asking permission.
The space between us remained untouched. Not just space. But absence. The kind only silence can create. The kind that swells over time until it becomes something else entirely.
"So, uh… how's school?" I asked.
It was a lifeline thrown too late. A question pulled from memory. Too shallow. Too easy.
She looked up. Then quickly away.
"It's fine," she said.
Too quickly.
Everything's fine.
But I did not believe her.
Just as she did not believe me.
I wanted to say something more. To reach for the thread that still tied us together, however frayed it had become. To pull us back from whatever edge we had drifted toward.
But I didn't.
Because beneath the years, beneath the awkwardness, beneath the absence, something else was waiting.
Something quieter.
Something neither of us had the courage to name.
Something unspoken.
And not yet ready to be faced.