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I wanted to say commitment,
And so I was committed,
And so I did commit
Crimes against the immaculate
~James Galvin, X
“This might be a little complicated, so make sure to listen carefully, all right?
Here’s what you do: you get off the train — the 16:09 one that’s never late — and cross the tracks without trampling a single grasshopper. You turn left next to the waste bin — this is as good a time as any to dispose of the candy wrappers you’ve been stuffing down your pockets for the past two hours — and then you take a right turn next to the anthill.
Ah.
What do you do if the anthill’s no longer there?
But it will be there. You have my word.
Past the anthill, you take the dirt road and walk it for ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the length of your legs, the consistency of the dirt, and the measure of your eagerness. Eventually, you turn left to follow a hairline-thin footpath but make sure not to miss it! Ten minutes or fifteen, never mind; you’ll know that’s it when the first butterfly sits on your nose. A heads-up: the footpath winds to the point of redundancy and you might find yourself sighing in annoyance three twists and turns in. This, here, is why you remembered not to bring a suitcase with wheels, or did you forget?
Make sure to be mindful of the beetles, too. They might gleam like jewels, but you were born a stargazer and the brightest of them all is about to set, so it’d be understandable if you missed an insect in favor of admiring the sun. Understandable but inexcusable: we mustn’t always tiptoe for fear of stepping on things but six o’clock is the hour when all toil ends here and lemonade gets poured into glasses — from then onwards, everything that continues its labor is sacred.
(It’s not that I’ve forgotten the sunflowers. It’s just that I’m still a little apprehensive about you, so I’m saving them for later.)
Another thing, too. If you watch where you’re going — if you glance down to make sure you’re not trampling any beetles and then left and right to wave at anybody who’s yet to wade their way home — then, by the time you remember to look up at the house, you’ll have already arrived.
I used to be embarrassed about the front steps — how they’re worn down the middle where the soft wood gave and then kept yielding under too many people’s feet — but I take pride in it now.
So many people loved us enough to cross the fields one beetle at a time and now, you.”
*
When they’re seven and three quarters, they start playing the ‘would you rather’ game. The sunflowers are in bloom, the storks are back, and it goes something like this:
Would you rather discover a new species of bird or be one?
Would you rather drink pee once or never eat onigiri again?
Would you rather the moon exploded, or Earth?
Would you rather burn alive or drown?
Would you rather I died, or you?
Would you rather lose an arm or a leg?
Would you rather get rid of sunsets or sunrises?
Would you rather eat a beetle or kiss a girl?
Would you rather have to do the dishes every day for the rest of our days and forever after or kiss a boy?
Would you rather have a hard-boiled egg or an omelet?
Would you rather die of a broken heart or a rash?
They’re twenty-two and three quarters when Atsumu calls Osamu and says:
“I’ll take the rash, thanks.”
*
They’ve been on the same team for three weeks and Sakusa’s wrists have defied physics and refused to break approximately 137 times when Atsumu places his hands flat on the floor next to him, bends until his nose is pressed to his knees, and risks it.
“Omi-Omi,” he says, trying not to overthink his upside-down smile. “Would you rather kiss me or Bokkun?”
“Neither.”
“No, you have to pick,” Atsumu protests. “It’s a hypothetical situation.”
“Hypothetically,” Sakusa sighs, “I would rather go a week without washing my hands than kiss either of you.”
“So, me then,” Atsumu grins. “Thanks! I like you, too.”
Sakusa stretches his arms over his head, shirt riding up. He has moles there, too, where the waistband of his underwear must be nipping red marks into his skin. Atsumu stares but staring will never be enough with him: his eyes might feast all they want but without touch it’s like saying you’ve been somewhere just because you’ve unfolded a map.
“Would you rather kiss me or be put inside an industrial meat grinder?” Atsumu asks, leaning one inch closer.
Sakusa levels him with a pitying look and leans one inch away. “Either is unlikely to happen.”
“Hypothetically,” Atsumu reminds him.
“Meat grinder, then,” Sakusa says simply. “By the way, your serves were shit today.”
*
“Oh, you might come in January?
Well, in January all the beetles are asleep, all the grasses are meek, and, sometimes, the landmarks are covered with snow.
It’s all right. I get it. I, too, once found sunflowers intimidating.”
*
Atsumu gets to be a cartographer only once.
Sakusa has a set of rituals to follow and Atsumu is impatient to participate, but not impatient enough to forget to appreciate the privilege of being a bystander: first, the doormat is adjusted, second, mouthwash is gurgled, next, the shoes are lined up, then, the socks are taken off and rolled into a ball. The curtains get drawn, the potted fern gets watered, and the tea gets offered.
Atsumu refuses and Sakusa stares at him over the top of his disposable face mask.
“Fine,” he says before pulling it off. “Wash your hands.”
Sakusa’s soap smells like lavender and when Atsumu joins him in the bedroom, Sakusa is dragging the bed over the floor until it’s a safe ten inches away from the wall.
“I repainted a month ago,” he says by way of an explanation. “My next-door neighbor waters my plants when we’re away for games and he’s always around at this time so you’ll have to be quiet.”
The first thing Atsumu thought when he met Sakusa years ago was beautiful. The second was blunt.
Atsumu’s hands are sweating, and he’s just washed them. He risks it and sits on the edge of the bed. The world doesn’t end but, well, the night is still young or something. “What would you do if I told you I changed my mind about the tea?”
Sakusa stares at him like he’s lost his mind, which Atsumu did, an hour and a ‘let’s do this’ ago. Sakusa let them bully him into joining them for drinks, didn’t have a single one, and spent the whole evening burning holes into Atsumu’s back with his eyes. They had the safe sex discussion on the way and Atsumu remembers walking here but he remembers floating, too. He’s never been this sober but, dazed by all the (im)possibilities, he’s never been this drunk.
“I would make you tea,” Sakusa says, slowly, like he’s talking to an idiot. “I have milk, too.”
Atsumu stifles a laugh in Sakusa’s pillow and inhales the anonymous smell of detergent.
“How often do you wash your sheets, anyway?” he mumbles, squinting at the pillow in the hope of locating a black hair or at least an eyelash. Anything, no matter how small, would do.
“Every week and I will wash them after this,” Sakusa says. “It’s nothing personal.”
Sakusa’s ceiling is the blue of the sky back home and, later, Atsumu closes his eyes not to see it. Sakusa is too honest to lie so he must frequent meat grinders all the time. Still, there is something miserably inadequate about how the corner of Atsumu’s lips can accommodate Sakusa’s mouth only a little — only imperfectly.
I get it, he thinks bitterly. We’re not made for each other.
“No, wait,” Atsumu says when his shirt drops to the ground. He almost apologizes because the shirt must be the dirtiest thing in the apartment, Atsumu must be— “Hold on just a minute.”
He wraps his fingers — all lavender soap, nervous sweat, and inadequate restraint— around Sakusa’s wrist and tugs until Sakusa’s hand is inches from his face, curled but only a little, as though in preparation for something to be slotted into the space there. The angle where Sakusa’s carpal bones meet his radius is the same as the angle at which sunflowers droop whenever sun is late and Atsumu, who will have to put that discarded shirt back on and leave ten or twenty or forty minutes from now, presses the very tips of his fingers to the heart line of Sakusa’s palm and pushes as softly as he knows how.
“So you have a thing for my hands,” Sakusa observes dryly.
“So I have a thing for your hands,” Atsumu confirms before pressing his mouth to the center of Sakusa’s palm.
“This isn’t going as I expected,” Sakusa complains. “I should have let the bed be.”
Atsumu smiles against his skin and slowly drags the tip of his tongue up, to the soft fold of skin between Sakusa’s middle and ring finger.
“That’s disgusting,” Sakusa comments hoarsely. “Would you get on with it?”
Atsumu presses his lips to his ring finger, once, twice, up, up, all the way to the tip.
Sakusa makes a wounded noise.
“I think,” Atsumu whispers against his skin, “that you have a thing for my thing for your hands.”
And actually, it’s fifty minutes before he has to put his shirt back on and leave.
You try to stuff your heart inside a paper shredder, he texts Osamu on his way home. What breaks first, the heart, or the shredder?
You should come see me, Osamu texts back immediately. I have honey from someone who respects their bees.
*
The ‘would you rather’s range from completely ridiculous (“would you rather lose a tooth or inhale a shoelace?”) to alarmingly relevant (“would you rather lose three teeth or tell Grandpa that you’d rather kiss a boy than a girl?”), and, sometimes, they’re the only way of greeting each other that doesn’t seem artificial now that the two of them are no longer joined at the hip.
“Would you rather go back home to sun or to rain?”
“Can’t I have both?” Osamu laughs. “Would you rather not have met him at all than to have met and loved him?”
“Can’t I have neither?”
*
That first — and only, okay, yeah, sure, whatever — time, Atsumu is very careful not to leave a trace on anything. It’s no small feat for someone who grew up wiping jam off his mouth with his sleeves, collecting fruit ripe enough to split in the hammocks of his whitest T-shirts, insisted on a notch in the front door’s frame whenever he grew half an inch, got hair dye on everything but his hair the first time he’d bleached it, got a nosebleed and dripped red all over his mother’s favorite summer dress, and stained his hands yellow whenever sunflowers were in bloom.
But with Sakusa not leaving a trace is the only way to leave it so Atsumu doesn’t stain the sheets or accidentally knock the books stacked on the nightstand to the floor. He doesn’t rip off the doorknob on his way out and he adjusts the doormat once he steps off it.
“Right,” he says to himself as he softly closes the door behind him. He rolls up the hurriedly drawn map inside his head. The scale is all wrong and he’s missed a few rivers, mountain ranges, and flowers, but he’s probably got the gist of it: he will never be allowed to touch again but he has looked, seen, and remembered.
*
“One more thing: I’ve talked of sunsets but, in summer, you’d better be prepared for rain.”
*
Three weeks, twelve sleepless nights, twenty-two botched serves, and six ‘what’s wrong with you’s later, the “I love you” sneaks out against his will, like a teenager after curfew.
“You what now,” Sakusa says with poorly concealed horror. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s this running joke I have with Samu,” Atsumu snorts. “About heartbreak and rashes.”
*
Would you rather eat something vile but made with love or eat something worthy of a Michelin star but made by a stranger?
Would you rather be alone and clean or have company and be dirty?
If you break a sunflower stalk, does it even make a sound?
*
“You what now,” Sakusa says. “Why would you do that?”
And actually what Atsumu says in response is the truth:
“There are fields of sunflowers back home,” he sighs, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “They bloom in summer — they’ll be in bloom now — there’s a festival, it’s a whole thing. Most people think they’re lovely but there are the miserable few who don’t. I think I get it, though. Sunflowers are just too explicit, you know? Too big, too bright, too out there. It’s like, we get it, shut up, slow down a little.”
“Is this supposed to be a metaphor?” Sakusa says, unimpressed. “I don’t have an opinion on sunflowers, you know.”
“Well, this is your chance to form one, Omi-Omi,” Atsumu forces himself to laugh. “I’m biased but I’ll try to be as frank as possible, ‘kay? See, it’s the messiness of sunflowers that really gets me: how they can contain a thousand seeds each, how the petals stain everything yellow, and how, if you trample one, it’s this whole huge affair. If you step on a daisy, you don’t even notice, but if you step on a healthy sunflower, it’s kinda like murder, you know?”
“Are you trying to persuade me I should hate sunflowers?” Sakusa sighs. “Can we discuss what you said instead?”
“But there’s something else you should know,” Atsumu talks right over him because they are discussing what Atsumu said. “Birds are born with an internal compass and godlike intuition; they know when and where to fly, it’s there in their DNA, bones, feathers, what have you. They’re born fluent in reading maps, and they always know when it’s time to come back in spring, right? But sunflowers, Omi-kun! Sunflowers are learners.”
“Learners,” Sakusa repeats doubtfully.
“Heliotropism, right?” Atsumu smiles because he’ll cry later. “Young sunflowers’ faces follow the sun from sunrise to sunset, but the interesting thing is that, once they reach maturity, their internal clocks slow down and finally stop completely: from then on, they always face East.”
“Is that really so interesting?” Sakusa says, frowning at him.
“Isn’t it?” Atsumu says but what he actually means is don’t you see and I’m all grown up now and I’m sorry for making an East out of you and I’ve been in love with sixteen people so far, but I think it’ll take a while for me to fall in love for the seventeenth time.
“Do you have a fever?” Sakusa sighs. “If you have a fever, I’ll lose all the respect I have for you.”
“I don’t have a fever,” Atsumu says, taking a step back. “But don’t feel my forehead.”
“What was the purpose of telling me all this?” Sakusa says and he’s blunt, but Atsumu has loved that about him longer than he’s loved him for being beautiful. “I don’t love you and I couldn’t care less about sunflowers.”
Yeah. Atsumu’s good at self-sabotage like that.
“I wanted to see if it’d fix things.”
“And?”
And, five minutes later, Atsumu throws up on the side of the road on his way back home.
*
“Would you rather get drunk or get wasted?” Osamu asks when he calls Atsumu during his lunch break. Once, Atsumu would have smiled.
“I’d rather go home,” he complains with his forehead pressed to the seat of his toilet.
“You should,” Osamu says gently. “No volleyball for the sick.”
“I hate it when you’re nice to me,” Atsumu sighs. “Makes me wanna throw up.”
“You’ve already thrown up all you’ve eaten.”
Yeah. And then some.
*
He gets the email on the second day of his ‘sick leave’.
If you need groceries or medicine, I can leave those by your front door, though I’m guessing by now you’ll have asked someone else.
He composes the following email draft in response through a pounding migraine:
Omi-knu bcause Iwill never send this ive decided to apologize for all hte things I haven’t but would have done if you’d allowed me to stay:
I’m sorry for spilling juice exac tly where you’d step in your socks without looking. I’m sorry about the wet tiles in the bathroom and the drytoast in the monring. I’m sorry about the sunflower oil that trickled down my fingers and made everything greeasy. I’m sorry for being too much to handle and for forgettingto moisturize my hands after I’ve disinfectd them. I’m sorry for scaring your neighbor away and I’m sorry for breaking your favorite mug and I’m sory for stepping on the shards and I’m sorry for bleeding all over the kitc hen tiles and I’m sorry for feding the stray cat on the balcony and I’m sorry for putting the shampoo on the wrong shelf and I’m sorry for asding too much salt to my attempt at dinner and im sorry for burning my attempt at dinner in the firstpla ce.
He receives the following email in the middle of the night:
I think you sent this by accident. Are you sure you don’t need medicine?
He sends the reply one sleepless morning and two aspirins later:
No, thank you. I’ve decided to go home for a while.
*
He gets to tell Sakusa about home a little before their fifty minutes is up. It happens in the brief interval before he puts on his left sock and his right.
“Home is gorgeous in summer, but it rains a lot, and we live at the end of a dirt path so you can just imagine,” he laughs. “You’d probably hate it there, especially after the rain — all that mud, Omi! — but we always loved it. It was rubber boots weather but if you left the house in normal shoes and it rained after… Honestly, you were better off just taking the shoes off where the asphalt ends and getting back home barefoot. We used to do it, too, Samu and I: we’d tuck our socks inside our shoes, tie them to our belt loops by the laces, and wade through all that mud full of leaves and drowning bugs. Sometimes, when we’d get home, Ma would prepare a basin for us to wash our legs in before she’d let us step foot inside but if it was pouring, she’d take mercy on us and let us in. We’d walk to the bathroom on our hands to keep the floors clean and once — mind you, just once! — I lost my balance and planted a very muddy footprint on one of the walls. Ma, who’d heard us coming, rushed into the hall to meet us and we both stopped breathing, expecting her to yell, but she blinked at the footprint and started laughing instead. She cleaned it later but — mothers, eh? — only after three days.”
Sakusa stares at him for a long while and then picks up Atsumu’s shirt. He starts folding it, but he stops after two seconds and awkwardly hands it over instead.
Atsumu is not good at clues but this one even he’s too sharp to miss.
*
Atsumu,
I ate at your brother’s restaurant today. I stopped by after practice, and he came out to greet me. He wiped the table for me even though it was clean, which I appreciated enough to realize why you were so careful not to let us meet properly. I can see why you’d think I’d like him better, which does not necessarily mean that I do.
As you probably know, there is a dish on the menu named after you. Atsu, or hot: I ordered it, expecting it to be spicy, but it was mild and cloying instead. If you burned dinner, I probably wouldn’t eat it, but I’d at least try it.
‘Atsumu’, your brother said with a smile that both was and wasn’t just like yours. ‘To encourage others to eat’.
Sunflowers are not the only learners. I’ve been taught so many things about hunger.
*
These are my fields and pastures, Atsumu thinks as he drags himself home. This anthill has been here forever and here’s a grasshopper I won’t trample.
When asked, Osamu will name three types of medicine as a cure to heartbreak: Tamba Sasayama Beef, cough syrup, and Hyōgo. As of the last five minutes, Atsumu has tried them all, but he should probably give it a while. He’ll be home a dirt road, a butterfly, and a footpath from now and his mother, who knows to expect him, will be waiting on the doorstep, which is why he won’t look up till the very last moment — won’t look up until he’s actually there.
The footpath is trickier to locate with every passing year and Atsumu tries not to let the guilt get to him. Now that he and Osamu have left home, the number of feet busy reestablishing its trajectory one storm aftermath after another has diminished, but they are here whenever they can. By the time he finds the starved path, the fields are empty of people. The tools have been put away, the lemonade has been poured, and the sun has done its bit, too: the sunflowers are sending it off as it irritates the skin of the sky on its way down and the post-rain mud is still soft but, here and there, it’s already started to crust.
Atsumu takes his shoes off anyway. He tucks his socks inside, ties the shoes to his belt loop by the laces, rolls up the legs of his jeans, and wriggles his toes as they sink in mud.
He almost slips and falls over three times as he follows the winding path. For the first time ever, he considers the decadence of all those twists and turns: there was nothing to avoid here, nothing to circumvent in an effort not to destroy it, and yet, generations ago, someone chose to walk a winding pattern into the fields instead of a straight line, as though to force all those who would follow to linger over everything that has grown here.
Atsumu has grown here: he’s of this place that has never yielded a rotten crop and he doubts the cough syrup will help but this just might because there has to be something good to him if this is where he comes from.
After its last indulgent bend, the footpath evens out and leads straight to their front door. It takes everything in Atsumu not to break out into a run because he can already smell his mother’s cooking and—
He looks up ten paces away from the front steps and almost trips face-first into the mud because Sakusa Kiyoomi is sitting there in honest-to-God rubber boots with a swooning sunflower in his lap, its center ripe with a thousand seeds.
*
Atsumu would rather: discover a new species of bird than be one, drink pee once than never eat onigiri again, have the Moon explode than Earth, burn alive than drown, die than have Osamu die first, lose an arm than a leg provided it’d be his left one, get rid of sunrises than sunsets, kiss a girl than eat a beetle, kiss a boy than have to do the dishes every day for the rest of his days and forever after, have an omelet than a hard-boiled egg, and, finally, die of a broken heart than a rash.
*
“If this was a movie,” Sakusa says, sizing him up with that unimpressed look of his, “your timing would be unforgivable.”
Atsumu is standing up to his ankles in mud wondering if he’s hallucinating. He’s seen the movies, too — although he’s surprised Sakusa, of all people, has — and he knows all about the romcom endings: there’s the chasing-someone-to-the-airport ending or the following-someone-home one and this must be the latter, but it can’t be.
“When you said you were going home, I assumed you meant right away,” Sakusa sighs when Atsumu continues gawking at him. “I caught the first train I could get on without having to run to the station.”
“Uh.”
“A detour to purchase the rubber boots was necessary,” Sakusa elucidates further. “I checked the weather reports from the past week.”
I listened when you told me about home.
I didn’t run to catch a train, but I hurried.
“Atsumu?” his mother calls from inside the house, where things will be frying and sizzling and browning. “Is that you?”
“I need to sit down,” Atsumu says and doesn’t move an inch.
*
Would you rather face heartbreak or mud?
*
“You said my timing would be unforgivable,” Atsumu says ten minutes of hugs and fussing and you boys wait out heres later. “Am I forgiven?”
“Is he forgiven,” Sakusa sighs, shaking his head. “About timing: I’d like to think I’m just a little late but I’m afraid I’ve been cruel.”
“Cruel,” Atsumu repeats numbly. They’re sitting out on the front steps together and Sakusa’s thigh is only an inch away from Atsumu’s own. “How have you been cruel?”
“It’s been meat grinder for me these past few weeks, Atsumu,” Sakusa says dejectedly before he buries his face in Atsumu’s shoulder. “Turns out I’d rather kiss you.”
Atsumu feels himself go very still. Something gives inside him, and he will never be the same again.
“No, don’t do that,” Sakusa complains against his skin. “I wouldn’t mind the wet tiles and the dry toast and the sunflower oil.”
“You so would mind,” Atsumu snorts.
“My next-door neighbor,” Sakusa goes on, unfazed, “would probably be happy for me.”
“I’m trying not to cry,” Atsumu apologizes. He knows he’s a concentrated earthquake, he can feel it. “Is the sunflower for me?”
“You grew up here,” Sakusa says slowly, tilting his head up to consider the sunset. “Are you going to walk on your hands?”
“Nah,” Atsumu sniffles. “Ma will probably fill up a washbasin.”
“Or I could carry you inside,” Sakusa says, slowly, devastatingly. “If you let me.”
“I’m filthy.”
“I’d rather carry you inside than—”
“—than be put in a meat grinder?”
“—than not,” Sakusa concludes, amused but in earnest.
In Atsumu’s thoughts, a future is sprouting slowly but surely. Later, he will take Sakusa by the hand — gloved or not, it’s all the same — and walk him around the gardens of his past one landmark at a time. These are my mother’s roses, he’ll say, and these are my father’s beans. You’re the storm that comes and rains on it all.
“I can’t tell for sure if I already love you, but I will, by the time the sunflowers are gone,” Sakusa says softly, tangling their fingers together — no gloves. “I can tell.”
By the time the sunflowers are gone. By the time what’s left of them will be covered in snow.
“I can’t believe you haven’t missed the footpath, Kiyoomi.”
“Atsumu,” he smiles. “I haven’t even missed the anthill.”
*
“See? I promised it’d be there, and I meant it.”