I slipped through the passenger car of the train and into a seat near the end by the window. Tottori spread beyond out beneath the clear, sapphire sky past the windows of the train and thick wide panes of glass at the station. The buildings were drab and colorless. Apartments with evenly spaced, bland windows. Manufacturing buildings belched white smoke into the air. Clusters of skeletal trees reached skyward, seemingly gasping for breath and warmth while the concrete choked them, and the winter chill froze them.

Each building was familiar. Each wide boulevard and tiny side street I’d walked down dozens of times before. I had run past the squat concrete buildings and towering offices my whole life. The dull red shingles on the buildings downtown faced the sun passively, water-color paints to break up the nondescript sameness. The brush and tree covered hills in the distance had been my empire. I had declared myself queen of the hills as I ran after invisible enemies to my throne with Mizuki as my loyal first knight.  All of what I could see was familiar. It was the same as it always was, yet it felt so alien.

Tottori had not changed, of course. Tottori couldn’t change. It was stuck in a past stretching back thousands of years. A past of irrelevance. Hiding from the world, content to be nothing more or less than it ever had been. Too small and below notice to bother conquering or bombing or paying any heed to. No. The alien feeling I was drowning in was not the city. Tottori would never change, but I had.

“Tottori Hamakaze to Himeji. Tottori Hamakaze to Himeji.” The dull voice of the announcer called over the speakers outside the train. The car was nowhere near full. Several stragglers seeking to escape Tottori like myself, or tourists returning to points further south after realizing the sand dunes weren’t quite as amazing as they’d thought they should be. I pulled the juice I’d bought from the vending machine out of my nearly empty backpack and set it between my legs.

I had nothing left. Not that any of what I had before could have been deemed mine anyway. My notebooks and sketches and pencils and clothes and small desk and books were all still waiting for me in a room which was no longer mine on the first floor of a house I was no longer welcome in. I didn’t even have my phone any longer. My father had thrown it against the floor and shattered it into a thousand pieces when I’d stopped my mother from slapping me.

I had left my schoolbooks with Komari, and she promised to return them for me. I had no clothes except what I wore and only what money I had earned, and the cash Komari had insisted on giving me. She had also bought the ticket to Tokyo for me, so I still had more than enough to get by for a while even if I had issues finding Nanami. I knew where she worked but didn’t know where she lived or her phone number and didn’t have a phone to call her with even if I did, so it would be luck of the draw when I saw her, I supposed.

I wouldn’t be calling Emi after all, either, I sighed. I couldn’t even say I remembered her old number, let alone her new number. I supposed I was part of a fire and forget generation. Why bother remembering a number when it’s already in your phone and can be pulled up with a flick of your finger? I also wouldn’t be able to fulfill my promise to Saki and that’s what hurt me, even through my exhaustion, the most. Even if she did call, I could never answer.

Of course, I thought, it was probably best I didn’t answer even if I could at this point. Saki had her whole life ahead of her and even being friends with someone like me would put that in jeopardy. I had to face facts; I was persona non grata. Mizuki would probably be ok since she had a boyfriend, but the last thing I wanted for Saki was for her to end up like Emi. Banishment by association hardly seemed like a fair price to pay just for being someone’s friend. The reality was that being friends or, at this point even seen near me, would do no one any favors. I had broken the chains my family and this town had wrought and needed to pay the price. Anyone close to me would pay as well.

I had always known what was expected of me. I was to live a simple life which had already been planned out for me. I was to become a mother, then a grandmother and then die here in Tottori. I was to ask for nothing more than what was given and expect nothing more than I had earned. I was a tool. A means to an end and nothing more.

I had never been that little girl named after the mist. I had never been the little girl they had taught to talk and walk. I had always only been the doll who had cavorted on stage at the direction of my mother and the pageant judges. I was not important. I had no value except as assigned to me by others.

I had always known as much. I had hoped I was more, of course. No one wants to be less than the sum of their parts, but I had always known the truth. Maybe that was why I was so scared when strange feelings blossomed in my heart. Maybe that was why I was so terrified to love someone I had no business loving. The thing you fear, contrary to popular opinion, was not worse than what you know. At least when what would happen to my life was only fears in my mind, I had that faint shimmer of hope as well. That hope had been crushed.

I supposed I should feel sad, or hurt, or angry, or something. I supposed here at the end, I had something of a right to feel betrayed by Jun and Aria and Daishi and my parents and my school but sitting on a train alone sipping juice I felt…nothing. I had followed my heart and it had led me down a dark alley where I’d been ambushed by my own stupidity and carelessness and the reality the world was filled with predators.

I had trained my body to keep me safe. I had trained my muscles to protect me from harm, but no matter how strong I was, my heart had failed me in the end. It had been naïve and bothersome and proved it could not be trusted. It did, however, expose the lies I’d told myself my whole life. It had exposed my family and I for the people we truly were.

My mother had screamed at me, telling me I was no longer her daughter. My father told me how embarrassed and disappointed he was in me. They had lost a daughter and I had lost my parents and we were all better for it. But honestly, they had abandoned me when I refused to try to be Little Miss Tottori for a second time. I’d been an orphan for years. I just hadn’t been aware of it. As soon as I refused to be groomed to attract a man with being a beauty queen serving as my resume, I’d become a stranger.

When I stood up to the harassment of Jun and his friends rather than meekly accepting it as playful “boys will be boys” banter I had become a liability. While being gay had been the final crack in the bridge joining us together, the chasm had grown steadily for years. Now? I was free, I supposed. Free from my parents, free from my brother, free from the school and free from Tottori. I could make of my life what I wished in a manner, by and large, of my choosing.

The doors to the train snapped closed with a whoosh, the bustle of the city effectively locked out. A moment later the car bounced as the engine at the front wound up. I took another sip of juice before sighing. My eyes glanced away from the city toward the platform, and I thought, for a moment, I saw a shimmer of golden hair amongst the people gathering for the local trains. It wouldn’t be her, of course. And why would I care if it was? I shook my head at my own stupidity.

It seemed pretty obvious to me Aria had completed the trifecta of treachery. She had cheated on me with Daishi. Cheated on me with Jun. And then, probably to save herself and her reputation and to prevent herself from being exiled to somewhere else, she had sold me out to the rest of the school and provided the material necessary to Daishi to out me.

I should hate her, I guess, but I supposed in some ways I should also be thankful to her. Before she swept into my life like a typhoon my world had been limited to this stretch of barren coast. Now, because of the trail of wreckage left behind in her wake, she had knocked down the walls I and others had built within and around me and exposed a larger world beyond anything I’d ever imagined. A world without her but, similarly, a world which would have been impossible without her.

My winter with her had been one of chaos. One of pain and fear and, ultimately, change. But much like the skeletal trees reaching desperately toward the sun outside the train windows as it moved from the station, I could sense the warmth of spring coming and had hope I would bloom again away from the cold of Tottori.

I would never again make the same mistakes I had naively made. I would never again follow my heart down a dark alley, but I was grateful to her, nonetheless. Grateful for freeing me from what had entrapped me. Grateful for showing me who I was, however inadvertently it may have been. Grateful for those moments of warmth amid the cold winter wind. Yes, I thought. I should be grateful, and in a very real way, I was truly grateful to Aria. She was flawed, but no more than I was. She had taught me more than any book ever could and freed me in a way I’d never imagined possible just by being a part of my world for the short time she was there.

“Is there anything I can get you, Miss?” A voice said at my elbow. I dragged my eyes away from the scenery out the window to the face of the attendant smiling at me from the aisle.

“Ah! No I…actually, yes. Could I get a sandwich?” I smiled at her brightly. She was very pretty, I noted.

“Of course! We have ham, chicken, meatball, and egg salad for 500 yen,” she bowed slightly.

“Anything but meatball,” I chuckled. “I’ll take ham. Thank you.”

“One moment!” She enthused, bowing again, and moving off. I watched the gentle sway of her hips beneath the tight dark blue fabric of her skirt and sighed. Very pretty indeed. I shook my head and chuckled.

I turned my eyes back to the landscape now beginning to flash by outside the windows as the train built up speed. The familiar began to fade away, replaced by craggy hills and trees I didn’t recognize. I turned my head slightly to the shrinking buildings fading into the distance and sighed deeply once more.

“Goodbye and good riddance,” I murmured to myself, my fingers splayed on the cold glass in a brief wave before I settled back to watch the world change around me.