Forever is composed of nows Nov 12, 2020
“Live in the moment”, they said. Like it was something to strive for. As if, if you managed it, you’d attain happiness.
For the life of him, Yukito couldn’t understand what was both so challenging and so appealing about it.
Most of the time, he didn’t know what it was not to live in the moment.
Take his grandparents. In the here and now, they were absent, off on a trip. He knew they would be back, in a few days, or weeks; just like he knew they had been there, not that long ago, surely. He just couldn’t quite recall when.
Or take his life before he’d come to live in Tomoeda, before he’d met Touya. He’d gone to a different school, he’d had other friends, but somehow, when he tried to remember, when he really tried, it was like trying to hold sand in his hand.
All of those memories were like that: hazy, half-remembered dreams. He knew they had happened, of course. They were his life, after all. And yet…
All Yukito did was live in the moment. Truth be told, late at night, lying on his futon in an otherwise empty house, moonlight streaming through the windows, he felt like the moment was a box and he was trapped in it.
That was one reason he eagerly accepted every invitation to spend the night at Touya’s, on the flimsiest excuses.
It was different when he was with Touya. The moment wasn’t a box, but a bright, beautiful thing, and when Yukito was with him, with his family, he could look back on their memories together, and they were bright and vivid and real, and he could look forward to the future. A future where he and Touya could make plans, for next week or next year. A future upon which he could lay his hopes that someday this precious, unspoken thing between them would be named, and that they’d talk about the things that lived between the lingering touches and drawn-out looks.
When he was with Touya, Yukito wasn’t trapped in the moment. With Touya, at school or after, time opened up around them, and smiling was sincere and bone-deep. Lying at night in Touya’s room, so close Yukito could reach out and touch him, while they whispered and laughed in the dark, he never doubted his memories, his life, or himself.
When he was with Touya, Yukito could just be.