[Short Story] What Remains After Love | Short-Short |

A voice calling out, Hana-san

Keronpa
(1500 characters)

Do you know what happens after the typical happy ending?
The princess and the prince lived happily ever after—so they say.
I know what comes after that.

When I submitted the divorce papers at the counter, I was taken aback by how anticlimactic it was.
On the way home, I found myself looking up at the sky.
Honestly, I felt light.
I even felt a sense of liberation that made me want to skip.

I will make my son happy.
A life carried by a single parent.
It wasn't a shackle, but a reason to live.

We met when we were both twenty.

He was dazzling.
I envied him.
I wanted to hold onto him.

I was a girl who fell in love, became a wife, and then a mother.
He remained exactly who he was the whole time.

I often wondered how long he would fail to act like a father.
Yet, it was his free-spirited nature that had attracted me to him in the first place.

Women are selfish.
To yearn for that lightness when in love,
only to find it burdensome after exchanging rings.

The very nature of him that I loved
eventually became the seed of my melancholy.

It transformed into a quiet erosion.
It wasn't just love that was being worn away.
I, too, was being whittled down little by little.

Even so, if he had only put our son first as a father,
—perhaps we could have continued playing house for a little longer.

I can't bear to live together anymore.
When I told him that, he paused for a moment,
and he simply replied, "I see."

Since he was a man with no attachment to money,
he even left the child support in a lump sum.
There was no conflict at all.

That, in turn, made the end feel all the more anticlimactic.

My son said,
"If my last name and school aren't changing, then it's fine."
Is that unflappable demeanor inherited from him?
"Then, make beef stew tomorrow."
That was a dish he had sealed away, claiming he didn't like it.
Perhaps my son was also liberated from playing house.
Or was that just my son's way of being considerate?

Now, two years after the divorce,
the anger and the disgust have gradually faded.
What remains is a strangely dry emotion.

What I remember is the back I saw at the very end.

Carelessly loading up his camping gear,
with a face that looked as if the same daily routine would continue tomorrow,
he spoke.

I think I'll go ride my motorcycle around Hokkaido for a while. It's somewhere I've always wanted to go.

After a brief pause, he asked if it would be alright to invite our son along on sea kayaking or trekking trips from time to time.

He didn't look back. His back looked so light, as if he belonged nowhere at all.

--Yes, he has always been this way.

The back I once watched leave with nothing but bitterness, I now remember from a slightly different distance.

He loved freedom and was not suited for marriage in the slightest. Perhaps he only matched my pace for a while because I was the one who wanted a conventional family.

When I stopped, he would sometimes stand silently by my side. Perhaps that, too, was his own clumsy way of being kind.

I didn't know back then how stifling it must have been for him to keep matching my pace.
I didn't know that back then.
So, things have simply returned to how they were.

He has returned, as he always was, to a life unbound.

My son calls me "
[[phN_open]]
Hana[[phN_close]]san."He has mimicked the way he called me since he was a small child.I have almost no memory of being called "Mom."

Hana-san.

Every time I turn around when called, my breath catches for a moment.
Even though it is my son standing there,
his smile looks just like his.

Fifteen years old.
In five more years, he will reach the age he was when we first met.
He calls my name in the same way, using the same title.

Even though time moves forward with cruel linearity,
I felt as if it were drawing a circle somewhere,
returning to the same place.

I think this child is the continuation of that love.

The love that ended,
has changed its form and is still here.