My Childhood Friend Is A Reincarnator (Part 1)

According to my childhood friend, “the sound of waves and other sounds of nature have a healing effect, and these days they call that kind of thing ASMR,” or so she tells me.

Ayu said all sorts of things back then, too. But maybe part of her, as well, had been reaching for that same kind of comfort.

◇◇◇

With the open sea before us, Ayu and I sat side by side on a small picnic sheet. The sheet she’d used for school outings since we were little was too narrow now for the two of us; lean even slightly and we’d be pressed together, that was how close we sat.

And yet, even this close… the childhood friend who’d just shown me an expression I’d never once seen from her now felt like someone off in some faraway place.

“Mmh… how should I even put this…”
“…Take your time. There’s no rush.”

I offered the words as gently as I could, but… honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face. Now that she was actually about to confide her troubles, I’d begun to worry whether I could take them in at all, whether I could give her any answer that might ease her heart.

Maybe she’d fallen for someone. Maybe she was moving away, and we’d be split apart. Or maybe she’d simply gotten sick of being friends with me and wanted to cut me off for good… something like that.

A moment ago I’d struck a cool pose and told Yuuka off, and yet… is it really okay that I’m the one she tells, and not Hina or Hotaru…? Even a thought like that crossed my mind.

“Gin, you see, I…”
“…Mm.”
“The truth is…”
“…”

My heart was hammering, my head spinning. My face was turned toward the sea, yet my eyes took none of it in.

After a pause, as if still wavering, Ayu finally spoke.

“…I have memories of a past life. Reincarnated into another world… you know the kind?”

The words came almost as a murmur, to herself.

“…”
“…”

A beat of silence. Amid the wash of the small waves, my mind had only just caught up with what Ayu said.

“…Huh?”

And inside it, there was nothing but confusion, total and overwhelming.

It matched none of the outcomes I’d braced for. This wasn’t just off from what I’d imagined; it was another dimension entirely. For a second I even wondered whether she was messing around to break the tension.

But…

“Ayu… come on, a joke like that…”

For the first time since we’d sat down on the sheet, I turned my eyes to Ayu’s face… and only then did I understand, and regret it.

“—!”

Her face was heavy with the sadness of not being believed, with the resignation that putting it into words had, after all, been for nothing. Seeing it, I understood: she’d meant every word, and I’d gotten my answer utterly, completely wrong.

“S-sorry, Gin!”
“Ayu…”
“You were seriously worried about me — worried enough to tail me the whole way out here — and…”
“I’m sorry…!”
“The truth is, I’ve been secretly writing a web novel, and I just got way too wrapped up in the protagonist I’m writing, and that’s—!”
“Ayu!!”

Not knowing what else to do, I pulled Ayu into a hug before I even realized it. I had no idea what the right answer to what she’d just told me would have been. But the answer I’d actually given had, beyond any doubt, been one that hurt her.

“I’m sorry…”
“…Why are you the one apologizing, Gin? You were genuinely worried about me — I’m the one who brushed it off with a dumb joke…”

God, this wasn’t working. Even holding her like this, I could feel Ayu’s heart drifting further and further away, the wall between us rising higher and higher.

“I’m really sorry…”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Gin… I’m the one at fault. I’m sorry, Gin.”

Ayu meant to chalk it all up to her own joking around and let the conversation end right there.

She’d gone to such lengths to bury this worry, and when she finally confided it, I’d squandered the moment; and only now, too late, with the regret already sunk in, did the better version come to me: ‘I should’ve said it like this.’ I truly hated that about myself, and it stung.

“I’m really sorry, Gin. To make it up to you, maybe I could get you a snack or somethi—”
“…Then, hey.”

I was really starting to loathe myself.

“Hm?”
“…So, um. The thing troubling you is that you got too attached to the protagonist of the novel you’re writing, right?”

I’d hurt her, and still I leaned on her, still clung to her.

“So then… tell me about them. Struggling with it all on your own won’t get you to a good answer any time soon, right?”

Clinging to her, I fell back on that pathetic, sorry excuse of a way to ask. It was so uncool I couldn’t stand myself.

“…”
“…Yeah. You’re right. Then… will you listen?”

And Ayu gently wrapped her arms back around my uncool self.

◇◇◇

Neither of us quite the one to pull away first, we let go of each other and, together, looked out at the sea again. Somehow, we still couldn’t quite meet each other’s eyes.

Just then Ayu, knees hugged to her chest, began to speak, murmuring in halting little bursts.

“…That person, see, was born with a really weak body — the kind who was always in and out of the hospital.”
“…”
“But… even though they were frail, and couldn’t do the things they wanted to do or try for themselves the way they’d have liked, in exchange… no, more than that, they were blessed with the people around them. Everyone was warm; they stayed close and cheered that person on — really, truly good people.”
“…Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it.”
“Ahaha… yeah. I really do think so.”

Ayu answered my words with a dry little laugh, one that looked back on some distant memory with a kind of fondness.

“So that person thought this, too… ‘Here these wonderful people are, making me so happy, and I can’t give a single thing back — it’s so frustrating, so galling.’”
“…Mm.”
“And then, around the time that person turned sixteen, or maybe seventeen… the doctors did everything they could, but in the end it came down to this: without a heart transplant, there was nothing more to be done.”
“…”
“So of course they figured, ‘Ah… so I gave it my best shot, but it wasn’t enough after all… I really am going to die now, huh’… or so it seems, anyway.”

When I glanced over beside me, Ayu was gazing out past the sea, the same as ever. She looked as though she were biting back resignation, swallowing hard around the fact that some things just couldn’t be helped.

“…So that person… is that how they ended up dying?”
“…Well, see, that’s not how it went.”
“Huh…”
“While everyone around cheered them on and they stuck it out through the life-prolonging treatment… right when things were finally getting dire — wouldn’t you know it, a donor turned up! Yaaay, clap-clap~!”
“Oh…”
“By then they’d all but given up, so it was a total shock. Blessed with the people around them, blessed with a donor too — I’m so lucky I could just die, me! …ah, right, this is the novel.”
“Yeah, yeah… I mean, the whole point of getting the transplant is so you don’t die, genius.”
“My friends over there said the exact same thing… one of them even got mad at me — ‘That’s in poor taste!’”

I tried picturing it for a moment: Ayu rattling something like that off at her usual pitch, and some faceless stranger I’d never met getting angry at her for being so tasteless. If I’d been in that stranger’s place… yeah, if it were Ayu, who might be about to die, saying something like that, I’d probably get mad too.

It was a tasteless thing to imagine, and yet it struck me as a little funny all the same.

“Then it’s a happy ending, isn’t it. That person, who’d always been so frail, gets an ordinary heart and can live a more ordinary life than before, right?”

Someone who until then had never gotten to live as they pleased, cheered on and held up by the kind people around them, rewarded at the last, going on to live out the rest of their life. A happy ending no one would think to doubt.

But when Ayu heard me wonder it aloud… she gave a reaction the very opposite of what I’d assumed, one that made her lower her eyes.

“I— …that person, too, thought exactly that. ‘I’ve been supported by so many people all this time; so I’ll spend the life ahead of me giving back to them, everything I possibly can. And if I do, maybe the one who gave me this heart will be glad it’s being put to good use.’ …But…”
“But…?”
“…”

Ayu got that far and then hung her head, as though the feeling of that moment had come flooding back and left her shut down, at a loss for what to do.

“Ayu, if it’s too painful, you don’t have to—”
“…No, I’ll say it… because it only exists inside my head. If I don’t say it, it’ll never reach you, Gin.”

Ayu looked up at the sky and drew a deep breath. As ever, her gaze never once turned toward me.

“…The surgery came off without a hitch, I threw myself into rehab, somehow even managed to graduate — correspondence high school — and then, just as I was getting ready to go to the same university as a friend a few years younger than me… I died in a traffic accident. …Me.”

The words came out in a mutter, made to sound, with effort, like they were nothing at all. But Ayu’s right palm was gripping her own left upper arm, hard, as though to blame it for something.

“It was an accident I could have prevented if I’d just paid a little more attention to what was around me. If I — the me from back then — hadn’t been so giddy, it never would have happened.”
“…”
“It’s almost funny, isn’t it. After making all those kind people pour so much of their time into me, being spoiled rotten, clinging to life so hard I even took someone else’s heart to keep going… and then, before even a few years had passed, to die in some plain, ordinary — and perfectly preventable, if I’d been careful — accident.”
“Ayu…”
“Showered with kindness the whole way through, and then, the moment I finally got my health, giving nothing back, accomplishing nothing, running away into death — a sneaky, underhanded person. That’s that person’s… that’s my past life.”

I couldn’t say a thing. However hard I tried to understand how she felt, I had nothing to measure it against but my own thin scrap of a life. What was it like, lying bedridden for years on end? What was it like, longing to repay a kindness and finding you could do nothing? What was it like, to die before you’d even begun, before you could take a single step toward what you’d meant to do? All of it felt like something out of a far-off world, and whatever I said would only ring as someone else’s affair. So I couldn’t say a thing.

“And a person like that… by some quirk of fate, got reborn still carrying the memories of that life. And, blessed with the people around them as ever, this time in a healthy body…”
“That’s a good thing, though, isn’t it.”
“Is it, though? A colossal fool who threw the feelings of the people who mattered to them right back in their faces, and wasted a precious heart on top of that, and died? …When they might just go and grind someone’s feelings underfoot all over again?”
“Then just go and see them, right? From the sound of it, your past life wasn’t in some far-off age or anything.”
“…So I looked into it, and it seems this world and that one are alike, but a little different? The place my hometown should be has a different name, and where my house used to stand, over here it’s apparently been farmland for as long as anyone can remember.”
“Which means…”
“It means there’s nothing left I can do for those people anymore… I’d sort of sensed it since the day I was born, but the time I looked it all up and it really sank in — that was rough…”

I sat there as mute as a little stone statue, getting out a single word at a time, and when I did manage more than that, only shallow ones. Was I really doing anything at all to lighten her heart?

Ayu, talking like this, looked pained somehow, and something inside me kept urging me on, hurry, say something, pressing at me to speak.

“…So you remembered your past life from the moment you were born?”
“Well, pretty much, yeah.”
“Then why’d you only start agonizing over it lately? If you’d always been this way, none of us would’ve fussed over you so much…”

Even as I said it, I thought to myself: god, I really am the worst. An excuse floated up, that I was just thrown by having something like this confided to me; but if so, then maybe this was exactly my true nature laid bare, and I hated myself a little for it.

“…When I was a baby, I only had this vague thought — like, ‘Huh, guess I’ve turned into a baby~ so this is that reincarnation deal~.’”
“That’s pretty breezy about it…”
“At first I could just enjoy it, no worries~… I could run around without getting winded right off, sing at the top of my lungs without choking, sleep soundly through the night…”
“…”
“But… as I got older, as this body grew up along with me… I started being able to remember my past life in fine detail, and it hit me: ‘Ah — the me I am now gets to just grow up like this.’”
“That’s…”
“A normal thing, right? But for the me of my past life, it wasn’t normal at all… and that’s when I stopped knowing anymore.”
“Knowing what?”
“Whether it’s really okay for me to just go on living like this… or if it comes to it, maybe I should, one more time, just d—”
“That’s NOT allowed!!”
“—Ngh…”

Before I knew it I’d cut her off and grabbed her by the shoulders. The Ayu in front of me today had a fragility I’d never seen from her before, and it felt as if, even while we sat here talking, she might just quietly flicker out and vanish at any moment.

“…I’m kidding. The hardness of living, and how precious it is — those I like to think I understand better than anyone.”
“…Even as a joke, don’t ever say that again.”
“…Sorry.”

What was I supposed to do?

For all the little life I’d lived, I had no idea what words could turn her to face forward. Even if I wanted to lay her regrets to rest, when the very world was a different one, there was nothing to be done.

Heedless of the shifting in our hearts, the natural world before us stayed forever unchanged, letting the sound of the waves ring on.