Episode 2 — i Squared

The moment you put an ideal into words, it collapses with a sound. The image of her I carry in my memory — her face, her playing, the warmth of her hand — the instant I set it down in text, it becomes something ordinary. Something anyone might have written.

Writing fiction is nothing more than blindly chasing an ideal that refuses to be tamed, and having your own mediocrity thrust in your face, over and over again.

Even so, I keep at it — clawing forward, piling up the wreckage piece by piece, praying that I can get even a little closer to something perfect — and I keep striking the keys.

That aching, chest-tightening feeling. It had been a long time. However much it hurt, the feeling set my heart beating faster without my permission, and I found myself almost able to breathe normally again, for the first time in what felt like years.

So I somehow wrestled the piece into shape, however ungainly, and gently placed the final full stop. I let out a breath and pushed back from the screen I’d been hunched over, face nearly pressed to it.

Then: copy from the writing app, paste into the posting site, check the preview for typos. Some people let their drafts sit for days before revising, but in my case the minor details will bother me forever if I wait, and I’ll never get it together — so I’ve always posted on the momentum of just having written it.

I went through that long-missed routine as if confirming it was still there, took one deep breath, and softly clicked Post.

Episode published. The words danced across the screen. Even that small phrase felt like something from another life.

I’ve started writing again — continuing the serial I’d stopped at a hundred episodes in middle school. I wrote today’s music room, with her image projected onto it, into the story.

It sounds like something out of a dream, but the story I’d kept writing all along was about girls who played piano. A hardworking protagonist who loves piano more than anything, and a beautiful heroine hailed as a genius, both of them growing through competition and companionship. A straightforward story, not particularly original, not especially clever — and yet I’d kept writing it, because I found it beautiful.

It was, in part, the crystallised longing of a child who’d wanted piano lessons and never got them. And in part, the reaching of someone who knew, deep down, that a certain kind of beauty was forever beyond her own grasp.

And the girl I met in the music room today embodied exactly that ideal beauty I’d been trying to write — the one I’d been yearning toward. She was the living image of the heroine I’d been carrying around inside my head.

The old me had been striking keys for years, trying to render scenes of beauty like that, trying to put flowing music into words. And today, taken in completely by something as cheap as fate, I threw away a resolution I’d made without a second thought — and found myself writing a story I’d told myself I would never write again.

The title of that novel: I Dedicate This Final Note to You.

A title that felt kind of cool to my middle school self. The fact that it still feels kind of cool to me now probably means my taste hasn’t developed at all.

There was no deep meaning behind the title — which made it all the more mortifying when my one and only commenter said: I’m sure the title must have a wonderful meaning behind it. I thought my face would catch fire.

Thank you so much for your comment! As for the meaning — I feel it would be a little graceless of me to spell it out myself….

I remember typing that reply. A completely off-the-cuff lie. I was a terrible author, treating even the words of my one precious reader with that kind of dishonesty.

And now — would that reader, who had commented on every single update, read the continuation? Would they even notice a new episode had appeared?

Just thinking about it made me restless. Rationally, I know: a story that went dark for a whole month without warning is the kind of thing people forget. And yet I couldn’t help but hope.

I refreshed the posting site page for no reason. Read back over my own work. I’ve learned, somewhere across all my years of wanting things, that the thing you’re waiting for doesn’t come while you’re busy wanting it. So I’d decided: bath first, get properly ready for bed, and then check one last time —

A light bloomed like a small flame. The red notification dot lit up. I pressed the little bell icon on reflex.

Shiko-sensei, it’s been so long. I’ve been waiting and waiting for the next chapter…! This novel is the only reason I’m still going. This new episode, the prose was beautiful, so beautiful, it was everything. Whenever I read your work I always think — I want to be someone like this — that’s why I love it so much. I’ll be cheering you on from here.

That was what the screen showed me. A comment from my one and only reader, “Otonashi-san.”

That it had arrived — that of course it had arrived — made me happy in a way that didn’t suit me at all. It sank in, belatedly: it’s started again. I was able to start again. I’m glad I wrote. In one stroke, that thought overturned the whole month’s worth of internal justifications I’d built up for quitting.

And then I thought of her — the girl who had made me write again — and felt the wish rise in me to touch that beauty over and over, as many times as it took.

I want to see her again tomorrow.