Chance Meeting in Dogenzaka

Trigger warning: This story involves a character who died from overdose.

Heather lived most of her adult life in Japan, so she wasn’t overly fazed by the summer heat and crowds of early August. She simply approached the crosswalk as she did any time of year through her daily commute and pulled out her phone to multitask while she waited, albeit inwardly more miserably.

Half-heartedly, the foreign language teacher jotted down notes for her next secondary school lesson plan on her phone. The idea came increasingly quickly: Obon is the season of the ghost. Like Halloween, both holidays are considered when the veils are thin between where we are now and where we go after we die. Unlike American Halloween, Obon is filled with ancestor worship which makes it more like Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

She paused to shift the cooling gel ring around her neck. It had grown tepid but still provided some glimmer of relief. The heat of summer was dangerous in the land of the rising sun, after all. Death lingered closer in the old days, and she silently thanked technology for the portable solutions that allowed her to make her daily walk home much more comfortable.

Her surprise overtook her when she looked up and thought she saw a dead man on the corner of Shibuya Scramble.

Logically, it was impossible. The young man, almost half her age now, was silently decomposing on the other side of the world. Their inner demons chased them both hard when they were disillusioned kids on the cusp of adulthood. Heather struggled to find herself before settling into academia, and Steve had jumped into drugs. One night too long, one fix too many, one misjudgment in potency ended all possibility for him to find his own personal after. There was no chance for them to bemoan stupid mistakes they could laugh about later.

Somehow, there he was, the same as she remembered—heavy metal t-shirt and combat boots even in the heat of summer. He waited for the blue light to cross the massive intersection alongside the crowd. For a moment of disbelief, she wondered if perhaps the heat had gotten to her afterall.

It was the end of the type of day people swim through; the humidity was so high, and the temperatures were skyrocketing into broken records once again. The concrete jungle of Tokyo provided no relief despite the shade of the skyscrapers.

Somehow, as the lights began blinking into constellations across the high rises, day faded into an almost pleasantly balmy evening. She could almost imagine opening up the windows rather than blasting the air conditioner, if you could only catch a breeze.

There was something supernatural at work; that much was obvious as Heather studied the familiar figure across the crowded street corner. Maybe it was that special magic sprung from synchronicity. A mutual friend mentioned him out of the blue when a comic book movie adaptation he would have loved was killing it at the box-office. Godspeed You! Black Emperor was on her headphones, a band she listened to over and over again during the dark grief of losing him.

A breeze broke over the crowd, and for a split second the frantic energy of Shibuya crossing gave way to a hushed, palpable relief. Just as suddenly, the light changed and broke the spell, signaling it was safe to cross.

As Steve flowed along with the crowd, her curiosity turned into the impulsive need to reach him. Even in desperation Heather knew if she followed, she would likely be disappointed. The flare of logic she had clung to only moments before now immensely annoyed her, and she surged forward, possessed with a confidence she so rarely expressed in her day to day. There was a certainty within her that she would free the distressed bird beating wings against her chest if she could somehow just tell him how much she fucking misses him.

The walkways of Shibuya Crossing are a myriad of angles where multiple streets meet. It became clear to Heather that the trajectories were wrong; to catch him she’d have to cross multiple intersections. The crowd was a thinly veiled riot of tourists in the way posing for selfies, half-drunk revelers starting the weekend early, and locals traversing their commute. There wasn’t much hope she’d manage to cross the sea of people before losing him around the corner or before the lights changed.

Heather began to lose heart, unsure how to keep up, chasing a ghost. But her memories came flooding back and urged her forward, each echo more precious than the last: a shared joint in her mother’s backyard, singing freely; a longwinded conversation about the merits of 28 Days Later; a shoulder to lean on discussing the oddness and smallness of how poor a fit suburban upbringing was for the both of them in the dead of night.

She wouldn’t notice then, but that was the magic. The best times between them were summer nights. The combination of sweat and restlessness and calling back to youth. They were always reaching for something they couldn't quite name and missing something they longed for but never really had. Over a decade later Heather had found her answer half a world away. She needed to tell him. She could lay him to rest in her mind if she could.

The crowd became no less difficult, but for the wallflower, niceties became an afterthought. Mumbled apologies in English and Japanese were distracted as she pushed forward with an urgency she couldn’t placate with logic. The enemy became time. Like time, like mistakes you cant take back, like the burden that you cant win every fight, Heather knew at this rate she was going to lose him. Again. And that ache was loss made fresh.

She caved as the pedestrian walk beeped its final warning before turning red. Even though the sound couldn’t possibly reach across the chaos of the hub station, she cried out his name, "Steve!" Heather shouted as though the word itself could carry her whole message because it had to. In that moment it was all she had.

A part of her already lamented failure while another part of her fell into a fantasy where there was some timeline out in the vastness of possibility that her voice would reach him, not only across the scramble but before he OD’ed. She fiercely imagined for that moment she could save Steve from time, from her personal reality, and from her increasingly faulty memory that distance brought. She ignored the looks of the crowd as she shouted even though it was useless because he is dead, and she’d never get to share another dumb meme with him or marvel that they made it out of Detroit. Because he didn't make it out and never would and the inherent injustice of that kept Heather up at night sometimes.

Even though the entire scenario was impossible, an onlooker ancestor spirit of Obon watched. The wizened man took pity on the poor gaijin struck with such wholesome longing. The kindly elder in a yukata tapped Steve’s shoulder. The younger man startled at the touch and looked back. The man gestured back towards Heather, and Steve turned his attention to her. The smile that made Heather love him flitted across his face. She was struck by both the unfairness that it was too rare in life and too precious to forget. He nodded once, and she knew that he knew exactly what she needed to say.

She watched his arm raise in a wide wave across the square.

Tears blurred her vision until she could do nothing but blink.

And then he was gone.

But the gratitude remained.