Chapter 90.

Rely on somebody else? It felt like it’d been ages since someone had asked me to do something like that. Was I actually slightly moved by her strange proposal?

“Why would you go so far for me? I don’t understand anything about you, we only just recently met, so why?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s love?”

“Yeah right. I don’t buy into that one bit. You must have some sort of hidden agenda.”

“You’re always so skeptical to believe that someone truly loves you.”

“It’s hard for the rational side of me to fully believe in something deluded and short-lived as love. Love comes and goes like the wind. One moment you think you love someone, the next you may end up fearing them. Other times, you delude yourself into believing you love someone when in reality you were simply caught up in the heat of the moment and jumped the gun. Feelings that lay dormant may reignite under certain extreme circumstances, but is that true love, or is it a fool’s love who only wishes to repeat the same mistakes of his past?”

“What are you trying to get all philosophical and serious about it for? If you always live in such a pessimistic and skeptical manner, with only overly depressing thoughts on your mind like that, you’ll never find any sort of happiness or salvation in your lifetime.”

“Does such a convenient thing like happiness and salvation truly exist in this world or the world I see right now?”

“Who knows? How do you expect me to know whether it really exists or not?”

“If you don’t even know, aren’t you just spouting nothing but hypocrisy?”

“It’s true that I may not know; however, even if I don’t know, there is one thing I can say for certain. If you only avert your eyes, look the other way, and always go in with the mindset that it doesn’t exist, will you ever be able to discover whether it really exists when you’re not looking properly to find it in the first place?”

When she countered me, I hung my head low in deep thought as I contemplated over her words. She had a point, if you didn’t look for it, you would surely never see it even if it was right in front of you the entire time.

Without realizing it, she’d successfully diverted my thoughts away from dying, towards a subject that left me rather puzzled.

“Val… by any chance, do you love me?”

“You’re really an idiot. Why are you asking such a stupid question?”

“I see.”

She didn’t directly answer with a yes or no. Thanks to the vague response, I failed to determine whether I was an idiot because she thought it was blatantly obvious that she loved me, or whether it was because she didn’t love me. 

I wouldn’t say I was particularly dense or anything, it’s just that I was extremely wary when it came to the word ‘love.’ Once bitten, twice shy; five times bitten, please just die. If there was an extension to the saying, I’m sure it would be along those lines.

But no matter how I racked my brains over it, it still made little to no sense to me how anyone our age would claim that they fell in love so quickly. We were practically strangers who hardly interacted with one another before I became an employee at her company.

“Anyway, what do you want to do with your last day before you lose your sense of hearing?”

“There isn’t really anything in particular I want to do, but if I really had to choose something… I’d like to memorize the path to work without relying on any of my senses.”

“Why would you want to do something like that? Even if you lose all your senses, we can still communicate. I can also just take you around anywhere you want to go. You don’t need to do everything on your own.”

“Even if I can rely on you, there could be times of emergency where I’m put in a situation where I’m not with you. It would be best to have some sort of contingency plan in a worst-case scenario like that, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“By the way, you just said we could communicate even if I lose all five of my senses, how exactly is that possible?”

“Of course we can.”

“How?”

“You can still talk to me even without your senses. You can ask me yes or no questions and I can move your hand in a direction to indicate yes, no, or neither. For yes I can move your hand to the right. For no, I can move it to the left. For neither, I can move your hand forward. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”

“I can receive answers from you, but I can never receive questions from you like that. Fully communicating with each other is still impossible like that.”

“It’s still better than nothing though. Also, if there is something I want you to know, I’ll move your hand up and down. You can then try to guess what it is I want to tell you.”

“That seems worse than a game of twenty questions.”

With a playful tone in her voice, she replied, “‘as they say, ‘just get gud...’ at reading a woman to avoid losing then.”

“Understanding the mysteries of a woman’s mind… don’t you think you’re setting the bar too high?” Especially when you considered how all my romantic interactions with women were all bats who fell off the major genera tree often referred to as shit crazy.

“Not at all.”

Out of nowhere, she called out my name loudly as if she were struck by some sort of revelation. “Dio! I just realized something, you’ve been going along with this, but I forgot you won’t be able to feel, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I forgot you wouldn’t be able to feel the directions I’m pulling your hand in, but you went along with it as if it would work anyway. You also mentioned how you lost your vision first, but could still see me in the beginning, right?”

“Yes, that's correct.”

“Then, the reason you agreed my idea would work was because of the fact you could still see your body, right? It’s just the world around you that you can’t see, am I correct in assuming that?”

“Yes.”

“Dio, this is a serious question. Do you know sign language?”

“Ye-”

Before I finished my confirmation, I froze up and immediately realized what she meant by her question.

“Val... you know sign language?”

“Yes, I do. It looks like you understand where I’m going with this.”

“You… you intend to use my hands to form sign language symbols just so we can communicate and understand each other?”

“Pretty smart, isn’t it?”

“But, that’s… too much of a burden on you, isn’t it? Every conversation we have, you intend to go through all that effort… for me?”

“Why not?”