Long ago I'd fallen in love with a strange man and ended up acting out one of the parts in a bizarre triangular relationship. He'd been a friend of the guy I was going out with now, and he'd had the aura of a man whom women love fleetingly but with explosive force. Actually, he was a slightly peculiar and rather boisterous sort of guy, something of a thug, I could see that now, but I'd been young at the time and of course I'd fallen for him. I didn't remember much about him anymore. We'd slept together any number of times, done it again and again, but we'd never gone out on the sort of dates where you get to spend time looking at each other, so I could hardly even remember his face.

For some reason I remembered only the nasty woman, Haru.

Apparently Haru and I had both fallen for the man at the same time. As time passed and the two of us kept running into each other at his house, we began little by little to get acquainted, and then toward the end things got so bad that it was almost as if the three of us were living together. Haru was three years older than me, and she worked part-time. I was in college.

Naturally we despised each other, cursed each other, and sometimes we'd even whip out our fists and get tangled up in all-out fights. Never in my life had I come so vividly close to another person, and never in my life had I resented anyone so much. Haru was all that stood in my way. I must have wished for her death a hundred times, and wished in earnest. Of course Haru probably wished for my death too.

Our two loves finally came to an abrupt end one day when the man, exhausted by the life we'd been living, ran off to some faraway place and didn't come back. My relationship with Haru ended then too. I went on living in the same town, but from what I'd heard through the grapevine, Haru had run off to Paris or someplace like that.

That was the last I'd heard of her.

I had no idea why all of a sudden I'd started remembering her, thinking of her almost fondly. I didn't particularly want to see her again, and I wasn't interested in knowing what she was doing. That period in my life had been so filled with passionate emotion that it had ended up spinning around and becoming nothing but a string of blank memories. Ultimately it hadn't made any profound impression on me at all.

Knowing her, it seemed likely that she'd have ended up as some kind of two-bit hustler, sponging off some artist in Paris, or maybe if she was lucky she'd have found some elderly patron and she'd be living off of him, very elegantly. That's the sort of woman she was. She was skinny as a bone, and her manner of talking was irritatingly frigid; her voice was deep, and she always wore black. She had thin lips, and there were always wrinkles carved into the space between her eyebrows, and she complained constantly. Yet when she smiled, she looked sort of like a child.