At seventeen, two birds landed on the library windowsill at dusk. He sketched their overlapping shadows on the back of a book with his pencil, while she tucked a four-leaf clover into a field guide to birds. The book sat on the return shelf for seven years. Only when she was sorting through old belongings before her wedding did she find the faded card inside, with one faint line in his handwriting on the back: “Today, I saw light on your eyelashes.”
On New Year’s Eve when they were twenty-four, thirty thousand lights came on beneath Tokyo Tower. He was taking time-lapse footage in his student apartment, while she was at her office in a city across the sea. In one fleeting moment, the arc of snowflakes in his camera and the raindrops on her window had exactly the same amplitude. It was the closest they would ever come, and neither of them knew it.
During the rainy season when they were thirty-two, her daughter found a tin box in the attic. Inside were 307 hand-painted sunsets, each marked on the back with coordinates and a temperature. The date on the last one was from a spring seven years earlier. Beside it, he had written: “There was no sunset today. But the color of her eyes is the sum of every dusk I have ever seen.”
Some lights, it turned out, take a lifetime of twilight to reach. And the regret between them was like a four-leaf clover sleeping in the library dust: whole, dry, and never to be turned up by anyone again.
