Mitsuha’s gone.

Night is here.

I’m back in my own body, three years in the future.

I look at my right hand. There’s no braided cord on my wrist now. On my palm, there’s just one thin, short, half-drawn line. I touch it gently.

“…I was going to tell you…,” I mutter quietly to the line. “No matter where in the world you are, I’ll find you again. I swear.”

Up in the sky, the comet’s nowhere to be seen, and a few stars are beginning to twinkle.

“Your name is Mitsuha.”

I close my eyes, making sure of my memories, turning them into something I can count on.

“It’s okay. I remember!”

Confidence deepening, I open my eyes again. There’s a white half-moon in the distant horizon.

“Mitsuha, Mitsuha… Mitsuha, Misua, Misua. Your name is Misua!”

I’m yelling her name at the half-moon.

“Your name is…!”

Abruptly, the outline of the word I meant to utter blurs.

I quickly snatch up the pen and write the first letter of her name on my palm… Or I try to.

“……!”

After a single line, my hand stops. The tip of the pen starts to tremble. I want to make it stop shaking and grip it tight. I try stabbing it in like a needle, to carve a name that won’t disappear. The pen won’t budge a fraction of an inch. My lips move.

“…Who are you?”

The pen falls from my hand.

They’re vanishing. Your name. Your memories.

“Why did I come here?”

I want to tether them to me somehow, to scrape the fragments of memory together, so I say them aloud.

“Her… I came to see her! I came to save her! I wanted her to live!”

It’s disappearing. Something so precious to me is disappearing.

“Who are you? Who are you, who are you, who are you…?”

Slipping away. Even the emotions I know I felt are leaving me.

“Somebody important, somebody I can’t forget, somebody I didn’t want to forget!”

Everything’s vanishing, sorrow and love alike. I don’t even know why I’m crying now. My emotions are disintegrating, crumbling like a sand castle.

“Who are you, who are you, who…?”

After the sand has completely eroded, just one thing remains. I know it’s loneliness. In that moment, I understand. From now on, this feeling will be all that stays with me. I’ll hold nothing but loneliness, a burden someone’s forced me to take.

Fine, I think defiantly. Even if the world is cruel, even if all I have is loneliness, I’ll still live with everything I’ve got. Even if this emotion is all I have, I’ll keep struggling. Even if we’re separated, even if we never meet again, I’ll fight. As if I’d ever resign myself to this! The powerful, fleeting resolution feels as though I’m picking a fight with the gods. Very soon, I’ll forget even the fact that I’ve forgotten something.

And so, making that single emotion my foothold, I demand of the night sky one last time: