Berlin. Or maybe Vienna. The cities bled together. Gray stone. Cold rain. A conference room with bad lighting. Aoi presented. Her English was perfect. Flawless. They nodded. Asked smart questions. She gave smart answers.
After, dinner. A long table. White linen. Wine that cost more than her first bike. Laughter. Polite. She laughed too. The right pitch. Her face hurt from smiling.
She excused herself. Needed air. Needed silence.
The street was slick. Cobblestones shiny under orange streetlights. Rain. A fine, cold mist. It smelled wet. Old. Stone and diesel and something else. Maybe roasting chestnuts. Something foreign.
She walked. No coat. Just her suit jacket. The cold bit through. Good. Felt real.
She turned a corner. A narrow street. A bar spilling light onto the pavement. Music leaked out. A thumping bass. Then the song changed.
A piano. A single, clear voice.
Her feet stopped. Concrete. The world didn't blur. It sharpened. Every detail became a knife. The neon sign buzzing. A crack in the cobblestone. The wet trash smell from an alley. The cold air in her lungs.
It was the song. Their song. The one from the Discman. The one they'd shared a headphone to, on the roof, her finger on his wrist.
A memory. Not a thought. A bomb.
The taste of mint. Sharp. Sudden. Filling her mouth. Her throat. Not memory. Hallucination. A chemical ghost.
The smell of cold cigarettes. Not the ashtray smell of conferences. The raw, stolen smell of their shared smoke.
The feeling of gravel under her knees. The blue of that sky. The exact, desperate blue.
It all came back. Not as a story. As a tsunami. A physical wave. It hit her in the chest. Knocked the air out.
She made a sound. A gasp. A choke.
She stumbled. Put a hand on the wet stone wall. Cold and rough. Real.
The music played. From the bar. Unbelievably loud. It wasn't a background track. It was an excavation. Digging up a corpse she'd buried in a steel box.
She saw his face. Not the blurry photo. Not the imagined man. The boy. The one with the too-long hair and the jacket that smelled like home. The one who looked at her like she was the only source of light in a black world.
The promise. The stupid, beautiful, impossible promise. We go. Together.
She broke.
Not a single tear. A collapse. Her knees gave. She slid down the wall. Sat in the damp. On the filthy street. In her thousand-dollar suit.
Sobs tore out of her. Ugly. Guttural. Animal sounds. She couldn't stop. Her whole body shook. She curled in. Arms around her knees. A child's pose.
She cried for the girl on the roof. She cried for the boy who believed in a car. She cried for the twenty-seven years of gray. The perfect, sterile, suffocating gray.
She cried because she'd chosen the gray. And she'd won. And it felt like dying.
A passerby stopped. Muttered something in German. Asked if she was okay.
She couldn't speak. Just shook her head. Violently. Go away.
They left.
The song ended. Another began. Upbeat. Techno. A cruel joke.
The echo of it rang in her skull. A vibration. A frequency she'd spent a lifetime trying to forget.
She sat there. Until the shaking stopped. Until the tears were just cold tracks on her face. Until the mint taste faded, leaving only the sour wine on her tongue.
She stood up. Legs weak. She smoothed her skirt. A useless gesture. It was stained with street dirt.
She walked back to the hotel. Step by step. A robot.
The lobby was warm. Bright. Silent. She rode the elevator. Watched the numbers climb.
In her room, she took off the ruined clothes. Left them in a heap on the floor. She stood in the shower. Water too hot. Scrubbed her skin. Red.
She looked in the mirror. A stranger with hollow eyes. A successful ghost.
The echo had cleared the static. For one minute, on a foreign street, she'd heard the signal loud and clear. The signal of what she'd lost. What she'd given away.
It was gone now. Buried again. But the ground was disturbed. Something was dug up. Something was breathing.
She got into bed. The sheets were starched. Cold.
She stared at the ceiling. A different crack. In a different country.
The breakdown wasn't an end. It was a crack in her own foundation. A fault line. And somewhere, deep down, the plates were beginning to shift.