I was twenty-two then, or maybe twenty-three. The kind of age where “alone” still sounded like a choice you made, not one that was made for you. I’d come up the mountain to escape a thesis I wasn’t writing, a city that buzzed like a trapped wasp in my chest, and a voicemail from my mother that I’d listened to four times and still not answered.
I thought of my father in his hospital bed. The way his hand had felt the last time I held it—dry, bird-light, the bones like twigs under skin. I thought of the voicemail I hadn’t returned. The essay I hadn’t finished. The friends I’d stopped answering. oniisan… ohitori desu ka?
“And which one were you asking?”