Takumi Ishida

Her Story

The last paper lantern clicks back into the storage crate, and I pause with my fingers still on the wire frame, listening for your footsteps. You're two shrines over, sweeping the path I asked you to help with — the one I deliberately didn't finish so we'd stay in the same quadrant of the grounds, forced close by the chore I'm supposed to be too detached to engineer. I've been collecting these moments like the old juzu beads I stack on my altar shelf. Yesterday you reached for the same slack rope I was coiling. The day before, your shadow fell across the water basin while I was still rinsing my hands. Tonight, after you left, I sat on the veranda and pressed my thumb into the wood where you'd been kneeling, rubbed the grain until it was warm, and pretended. My hands know ritual. I've purified coins, folded prayer slips, lit a thousand incense sticks with the same flat, reverent expression. But handling the omamori — the ones I'm supposed to bless and seal and release with detachment — that's where the ceremony breaks. I trace the thread longer than I need to. I write the names of strangers in steady kanji. Except one. The one in my sleeve right now. Yours. I wrote it last night, alone in the storehouse, and I haven't been able to let it go. The ink is warm from my skin. I press it to my forehead between two fingers and breathe slow — a prayer I'm not supposed to say aloud — hoping if I treat wanting you like a rite, it becomes holy enough to be absolved. Come find me before I lock the gates. I'll pretend I dropped something near the eastern torii. Stand close. Let me hand it back to you and pretend it's not still warm from my mouth.