The last thing Haruki packed was the photo.
It had been sitting on his desk for three weeks, face-down beside a stack of transfer paperwork and half-empty coffee cups that had grown cold rings into the wood. He'd walked past it every morning, stepped around it every night, pretended it wasn't there while he folded clothes into boxes and wrapped books in newspaper.
Now, with his dorm room stripped bare and echoing, there was nowhere left to hide from it.
The afternoon light slanted through his window, casting long shadows across the floor where his life used to be. Outside, he could hear the distant sounds of campus—laughter drifting up from the quad, someone's music playing too loud, the screech of bicycle brakes. Normal sounds. Sounds that belonged to people who hadn't ruined everything.
Haruki sat on the edge of his mattress and finally turned the photo over.
Three faces smiled back at him from last spring's cherry blossom festival. Mirei in the middle, her hair catching the wind, one hand reaching toward the camera as if to pull the viewer into their circle. Takeshi on the left, mid-laugh at something Haruki had said just before the shutter clicked. And himself on the right, looking genuinely happy in a way that now felt like observing a stranger.
They'd been inseparable then. The kind of friends who shared everything—late-night convenience store runs, study sessions that devolved into philosophical debates, inside jokes that made no sense to anyone else. Mirei had been... well, she'd been more than a friend, even if neither of them had been brave enough to name it.
Until that night in June when Haruki finally found his courage, and everything fell apart.
*I should have kept quiet,* he thought, tracing the edge of the photo with his thumb. *Should have left things the way they were.*
But he hadn't. He'd spoken, and in speaking, he'd lost not just Mirei but the entire world they'd built together. Takeshi caught in the middle, choosing sides. Study groups that suddenly didn't include him. Messages left unread until they stopped coming altogether.
Three months of walking through campus like a ghost, seeing his former life continue without him from the corners of his vision.
His phone buzzed. A text from his mother: *Drive safely. New beginnings are gifts, Haruki.*
New beginnings. As if he could simply pack up his mistakes along with his clothes and leave them behind in this empty room.
Haruki slipped the photo into his jacket pocket, shouldered his last bag, and closed the door behind him without looking back.
The drive to his new university took four hours through autumn countryside, past rice fields turning gold and mountains painted in shades of rust and amber. He kept the radio off, letting the silence fill the car like a familiar weight. Occasionally, his hand would drift to his pocket, feeling the sharp corners of the photo through the fabric.
By the time he reached campus, the sun was setting, painting the unfamiliar buildings in soft orange light. Students moved in clusters across the walkways, animated and alive in ways that seemed foreign now. Haruki parked outside his new dorm and sat for a moment, watching them.
*No one knows me here,* he realized. It should have felt liberating. Instead, it felt like drowning in reverse—surfacing into a world where he had no weight, no substance, no history to anchor him.
He pulled out his phone and scrolled to Mirei's contact. His thumb hovered over her name for a long moment. Three months of silence between them. Three months of words unsaid and apologies unoffered.
*I'm sorry,* he typed, then deleted it.
*I miss you,* he wrote, then deleted that too.
*I hope you're happy,* he started, but the cursor blinked at him accusingly until he closed the message entirely.
Some conversations, he was learning, couldn't be finished with words.
Haruki pocketed his phone, grabbed his bag, and walked toward his new life, carrying the weight of his old one like stones in his chest. Behind him, the sky deepened to purple, and ahead, warm light spilled from dormitory windows where other people's stories were just beginning.
He didn't know then that in three days, he'd accidentally sign up for Professor Nyx Akizuki's Philosophy of Human Connection seminar. He didn't know that the sharp-tongued girl who'd steal his usual library seat would challenge everything he thought he understood about keeping his distance.
He only knew that he was tired of running from his own voice, even if he didn't yet know how to use it.
The photo in his pocket had weight. His footsteps on the unfamiliar path had purpose, even if he couldn't name it yet.
And somewhere in the space between what he'd lost and what he might find, Haruki Sakamoto took his first step toward learning that some stories end so others can begin.
The autumn wind picked up, scattering leaves across his path like scattered words, and he walked on.
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*End of Prologue*