Kyoukai no Kanata - Chapter 1, part 7 [English]

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After classes were out, Mitsuki and I went back to the torture chamber, where we were again subjected to the cruel and unusual task of selecting stories for "Lady of the Night". I did not have an encounter with Kuriyama. It was past eight by the time we packed up and headed home.

By the by - I'd been renting an apartment in the city. I lived alone. Though the apartment complex wasn't exclusively for women, security was tight. The doors wouldn't open without a keycard, and the mailboxes were sturdily and securely locked up.  This being the case, I couldn't be troubled to fetch the mail on a regular basis. I'd wait until the mailbox was overflowing with mail, and then heave all of the stuff out of it at one go.

So, today.

I felt like taking a look at the mail - perhaps because I was tempted by a mail-daemon - so I stopped by the mailboxes on my way to my room, and took a look inside mine. The receipts for my electricity, gas, and water bills were mixed in with a bunch of direct mailings. For the record, I have all my bills set to debit from my account automatically, so I don't need to go and pay them myself. I started tossing all the unwanted mailings into the wastebin I was holding under my arm. As I did so, I noticed a postcard buried in the mountain of paper. It was blank aside from my address.

"-------"

I jolted. It was from my parents. They sent one of those postcards every so often to let me know they were still alive.

The postmark on it was from late March. The date was April 13th. That meant that I had left the postcard in the mailbox for nearly half a month. This was my fault for being so lazy, yes, but my parents could certainly afford to be a little bit less slapdash about this sort of thing. The way they sent these we're-still-alive postcards was just bizarre. Sometimes I'd receive three in a month, and other times I'd go nearly a year with neither hide nor hair of them. They'd usually arrive right when I was about to forget about them altogether, which is to say that they weren't doing a great job of letting me know my parents were alive. Even so, it was only on the days that I received these postcards that I really felt at ease. Kinda weird.

I placed the postcard in my bag.

"Still alive, huh." I was so relieved that those words just slipped through my lips.

I stepped out of the lobby and looked up at the sky. A crescent moon and a vast field of stars filled the heavens. On a night like this, it just wouldn't do to mope around. With the blessing of the moon and the stars, I went out for a walk under the night sky. It was an unfamiliar experience.