"My Phantom"

This is a true story, one I’ve never shared with anyone before. Even though many years have passed since then, every single moment is still alive. I spent that summer with another version of myself, or rather what I mean is:, I spent the days with my phantom. Just the two of us, in the world.

It was an early summer day, a humid afternoon, windless, and quiet. My body was sweaty, and the sun was in the highest place in the sky. I was walking around my hometown, for the first time in a decade, having a sort of strange experience. Suddenly, the road came to a dead end at a quaint house. I was so drawn to it for some reason. The sunlight poured down slowly and cast shadows of my shape on the front door. For a while, I just watched it swaying, but then finally, decided to take a step inside.

Looking back years later, I wonder if the experience of that summer happened in some other dimension, a place where my life exists before I’ve lived it, and where it goes afterward. None of it ever seemed real, but surely exists somewhere. Everything was blurred, but it was perfect, and perhaps even beyond perfect. She was alone, and I was too. We were both alone, and thus so together. The two of us are still in the lost time of the place that was no place. That time has now gone forever, but yet sometimes it seems to never have even happened.

Chitose Kuroishi

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