A Small Stone

A single petal.
Yama-san, who had come to the sobriety meeting for the first time in a while, had lost his former rigidity.
He smelled of the second day of drinking.
I thought, he has come to say goodbye.

After being hospitalized for alcoholism, I was repeatedly told upon discharge to attend some kind of self-help group, such as group meetings.
I replied that it was impossible, because it was precisely because I was afraid of human relationships that I had needed alcohol.
Even so, the reason I was able to attend this sobriety meeting, which required taking a train, was because Yama-san was there.
On the first day of the meeting, as I walked past the smoking area behind the venue with my head down, Yama-san let me pass without even calling out to me.
Because I was so tense, the cigarettes in the pocket of my overcoat felt terribly tangled in my fingertips.
I had ended up buying them at a convenience store at the station where I got off to come to the venue.
I quietly stopped and looked back at the square, silver, desolate-looking rectangle of the smoking area.
I noticed that Yama-san, who had been standing there, suddenly moved to the left.
When I looked at his face, he was blankly following the smoke from his fingertips with his eyes.
When I went over to that small space where I had been called, I received a light and took a deep drag of the cigarette.
"It's too much to handle all at once, here and there, isn't it."
Yama-san bared his nicotine-stained teeth in a grin.
"Yeah."
In my self-introduction, I had muttered that I wanted to quit drinking and smoking.
Everyone nodded kindly, but I suppose it felt like, "Raising the bar that high, huh? You're certainly naive, but we'll watch over your spirit warmly."

It is a gathering of people who have faced alcohol to the extent that they attend a sobriety meeting.
Even so, they get tripped up.
Even if you are careful, even if you are disciplined, that is precisely why...
You trip over a small stone.
Yama-san should know that as well.
Just because he drank, he wouldn't easily become self-destructive.
That's what I thought, but the color of Yama-san's eyes made me anxious.
So on the way home, we sat together on the guardrail in front of a convenience store, holding cups of sake.
The cherry blossoms overhead were almost in full bloom due to the sudden rise in temperature, and occasionally they would fall, as if letting go of their petals one by one.

"You know, if you put a cherry blossom petal in sake and drink it. It's supposed to taste like cherry blossoms."
"I doubt it."
"I wonder if those kinds of illusionary effects don't work on us."
Three months since the day we both offered our sake to the gutter beside the convenience store.

Yama-san, now sober, said while following the path of smoke in the smoking area, "Maybe I'll quit smoking too."
Well, it saves money.

I'll take it easy.
In early summer, the shadow of a telephone pole standing next to the smoking area protects the two of us, full of flaws, from the sun.

You can just let go of alcohol again and again.

You can just confirm and savor every second of being sober.
Someday, you will meet a version of yourself that has forgotten how to drink, and that will become your strength.
Quietly let the bubbles of impatience that have suddenly surfaced pass by.

That in itself can become a meaning.

Theme: Petals

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