I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to not go home, either. I sat in the main room of the empty lifeguard shack, the rickety walls acting as something of a buffer from the vicious winds blowing from out of the northeast and sighed. Beyond the open doorway the snow blew nearly horizontally, partially obscuring the raging ocean waves lashing the sand.

Beyond the fierce storm surge the dark ocean water roiled and churned like a living beast, driven into a frenzy by the storm still offshore but creeping closer to land fall. I hope Saki’s flight is able to leave ok, I thought. At least, I was pretty sure I hoped it would. I also didn’t want it to leave at all. I wrapped my arms closer to my sides and huddled deeper in my jacket, the cold wind swirling through the empty room rustled my hood restlessly and my breath hissed out in puffs of steam in the freezing temperatures.

Listening to the roaring of the water as it smashed onto the sand sent my heart pounding with fear. I shook as adrenaline rushed through me, but I stayed resolutely in place. Whether I was frozen in terror or determined to face my fears bravely I couldn’t really say, though I tended to believe it was most likely the former. Ever since the typhoon when I was little, the fear of being swallowed whole and vanishing without a trace beneath the seemingly bottomless depths of the ocean always played in the back of my mind when I stared out over the ocean.

The news reports of a pair of girls from the local college being swept out to sea which emerged after the typhoon had horrified me. What had gone through their minds as they struggled helplessly against the inexorable tides? What comforts had they found as the inevitable pull of the storm dragged them under? Or, as I hoped, had they simply been unconscious at the end, unaware and unafraid? I had nightmares for weeks afterward. Nightmares of bobbing helplessly among the storm-tossed swells, my body struggling, lungs burning and straining as the water closed over my head and the currents dragged me into the blackness.

I would wake screaming, my muscles aching with the strain of trying to save myself, my sheets drenched in sweat. Unlike most of my dreams and nightmares, those of drowning were visceral, vivid, and stayed with me for hours. I had done research and even spent five thousand yen I’d gotten for New Year’s talking with a wizened oneirocritic who shared a stall with the local fortune teller at the Northside mall.

She had told me dreaming of drowning meant the situation I found myself in seemed endless and I was unsure how to get out of it. At ten years old I had no idea what she meant, but in hindsight her interpretation seemed almost spot-on. The constant after school activities, between pageants, beauty salons, dance practice, training camps, and martial arts made my days long and difficult and I would fall asleep almost immediately at night with little time during the day I could call my own. Looking back, I supposed in a way, I was drowning.

Staring out at the sea and quivering with fear as the towering waves rose into the sullen sky before crashing against the sand, I supposed not much had changed. Six years later I was still drowning, only in different seas. Maybe I was being too melodramatic, but it seemed like I was in way over my head. Saki’s abrupt departure had kind of driven that realization home.

She was more than my friend. She was a comforting presence. Someone who I could laugh with and talk to. Someone who gave freely of herself and made me want to do the same in return. I loved her. I truly did. I wasn’t sure in what way, my heart was conflicted in that regard, but there was little doubt I did.

I had only known her a short amount of time, but I’d already come to depend on her as a beacon of reason in a maelstrom of strange and alien emotions and thoughts. A voice of reason against the fears my mind seemed pre-disposed to latch on to. Now she was gone, whisked away on a silver bird above the storm raging around and inside me. What was I going to do? Who could I talk to who wouldn’t think I was unclean?

Emi was all I had left, and she was dealing with her own existential crises at the moment with her parents and I would hate burdening her further with my own problems. Mizuki had, mercifully, taken herself out of consideration. There was no way I could talk to her about anything going on with me. Who was left? Only Aria, I supposed.

The issue, of course, was she was at the heart of the maelstrom, so there was no possibility of talking to her. I would have to, of course. I was, honestly, grateful she had been gone when I woke up this morning. Having a conversation with your girlfriend about why you began crying like a baby when she touched you, was not one I relished. I would have to, sooner rather than later, though. The longer I left things unsaid the harder it would be to talk to her at all.

She was wonderfully understanding at the time, far better than I could have ever imagined, but I still felt she deserved an explanation. I just wish I had a better one than “I was scared.” And what the hell was up with the “I took my own virginity” stuff? I shook my head and scowled. I was such a moron. Honestly, looking back at the whole situation made me cringe.

I really had no defense for acting like that. My only hope was Aria was pretty drunk and maybe she wouldn’t remember anything specific. I wasn’t sure how being drunk worked. I’d heard people blacked out, but she didn’t seem drunk enough for that sort of thing to have happened. More’s the pity. Still, I’d have to figure out how to best broach the subject of why I was an emotional wreck when I should have been thrilled.

Still, where had she gone after she left the party? A friend of her cousin’s, she said. Her cousin seemed to be at the heart of most of what she did and who she met, though the two hadn’t seemed particularly close when I’d met her at the shrine. I shook my head. No, there was no sense going down that rabbit hole at the moment. I’d have to set those thoughts aside until I cleared the laundry list of other crap piling up in my head. I supposed the first item to clear would have to be going home.

My fingers were getting numb, I was shivering constantly, and the waves were getting more violent and frightening as the storm center moved inexorably closer. I sighed and climbed to my feet, my muscles aching in the cold. I stretched my legs to get the blood flowing to them once again after sitting for too long on the sand and made my way back to the coast road, turning my back on the raging sea.

My body ached by the time the struggling, wheezing bus made its way to my stop. I had no idea how the thing even managed to drag itself along the route at this point. It was a relic of a long bye-gone era and should have been retired and sent to its final rest in a junkyard somewhere long before now. I watched for a moment as the bus’s lights shone through the lashing snow, one rear tire wobbling disturbingly like a top ready to fall. It was much like Tottori itself, I mused. Its continued existence seemed a waste of resources, yet with no real reason other than being old to discard it, the bus soldiered on.

I really hate this place, I sighed, hunching even deeper into my jacket as I struggled to keep my path straight against the wind which forced me sideways, then somehow managed to change direction and force me back the other way. I squinted my eyes against the snow and stumbled on, stamping my feet every so often in the fresh powder to keep them from becoming numb.

This little subdivision of the town was a prime example of why I hated Tottori, I mused. At some point long forgotten, enough people thought it would be a good idea to have a bedroom community close enough to town to let them commute yet far enough to avoid the “bustle”. What bustle they were referring to; I had no idea. Tottori may have been many things, but bustling was not one of them.

Still, the community organized itself and planned parks and playgrounds and all manner of things the average suburbanite desired. They spent so much time, money, and energy planning what they could do, they never stopped to ask whether or not they should do any of it. The “bedroom” community quickly became a dead community as people realized there was little benefit to living along an oceanfront which offered nothing but rocky, unpleasant beaches and the stink of fish. Most people moved back to Tottori and left the few families such as mine and Mizuki’s which remained with tracts of half-finished land where the parks and playgrounds would never be.

It was this flash of unwarranted and unrealized ambition which quickly faded into a return to the staid, conventional, and conservative norms that irritated me the most about the town. The brief flashes of giving hope things might change before settling back to the tried and true just felt cruel after a while. I remember how excited Mizuki and I had been when we first found out about the playground they were going to be building. We had sat under the tree in her yard and enthused about all the wonderful things we were going to do. None of which would ever come to fruition.

I staggered past the remains of the lower playground which we had based our hopes on. I scowled at the skeletal remains of the jungle gym, overturned shell of the merry-go-round half buried in the mud like a tortoise, and long abandoned swing set outlined in the wildly gyrating streetlight the dark storm had forced to come on even in the middle of the afternoon. The playground, like the bedroom community which had faded around it, was emblematic of a broader series of unintentional yet inevitable failures to move in any way but sideways or backward here in Tottori.

I learned to deal with my disappointments the same as every other child in Tottori; we buried them under a veneer of not caring. Eventually that veneer hardened, deepened, and solidified until it encased and consumed us. That reality, I think more than any other, frightened me the most. Once that happened, hope of anything more than eternal disappointment seemed to vanish and people tended to welcome the inevitability of nothing around or within them ever changing. A grim resignation I was not yet prepared to accept and hoped I never would.

I stepped through the front door and shook the snow from my hood, stamping my feet to try to return some warmth to them. Even buried in my boots my feet felt frozen. I supposed it was only natural given how cold it was. I pulled my jacket off and hung it on the hook by the door to dry and removed my boots. As I was sitting down to untie them, I heard several voices coming from the living room. Ugh, I thought miserably, looks like I wasn’t going to be able to just sneak into my room with my one avenue of escape blocked.

“Okaeri, Kasumi,” My mom called as I emerged from the entryway into the living room. I stopped dead and stared dumbfounded. Jun and Aria sat on the loveseat with an uncomfortable-looking Mio across from them on the chair while my mom sat on the sofa, turned around so I could see the broad, fake, smile on her face.

“T-Tadaima,” I mumbled, frozen in place.

“You should have let me know you were going to be late,” my mom’s ‘putting on airs’ grin beamed at me. She patted the sofa next to her. “Come sit by me.” The fanciest tea set my mom owned was sitting placidly on the table in the living room, steam drifting up invitingly from the four cups laid out. What the fuck was going on, here? I asked myself uneasily.