‘cause you wrote a confession on her palm when she wanted your name; better yet you should have written the plan instead

i. alternate ending

Twilight, spiked with sake for the gods, did not have the magic to have her take his memories.

The price that took form of losing each other’s name, at what purchase was it attached to, then? Certainly not the blueprints of his terrorism. Or the fate that befell a city bicycle that took her halfway to here, while having to suffer a trail beaten down for mountain bikes and people on foot.

She was confused. How could one hang on to sanity when your last memory before this dream-like dusk was of the festival of falling comet shards over windswept grass fields? True, their minds had taken turns at driving each other’s bodies, but as dancers do - weaving across the floor, deftly flowing out of each other’s way, guiding the other, but always with a chasm separating them, never together on the same precipice.

So she stood there at the lip of the crater, behind her the lonely green paradise it encircled, the rock shelter of gods. Before her, the breathtaking lake whose beauty she had grown to take for granted. The town she always wanted to toss over her slender shoulders, all of the first some-teen years of her life she could not wait to leave behind.

Death. Death was falling upon her world, her mind nagged at her. But her now-questionable memories confined her where she stood, the uncertainty stemmed from him living as her on that day she had already lived. It threatened to overlap and mock whatever is left of her reality. For instance, the question of how her hair got cut short that day: was her memory false now, had he overwritten this day but left it clinging to her like a phantom only she could see? Or, was it even the same festival day, was it even the same comet?

And it must have took him forever to get her up here. The exhaustion it taxed on her body kept her rooted where she stood and demanded she gave in, and it was just too easy to fall to her knees, and wait for the end of the world.


ii. alternate epilogue

She was not where the rocks from heaven landed.

But the lot death had taken from her, abetted by her psyche’s state of already skating over the slippery ice of this mind-switching mistaken for romance, had broken her. They found her sporting an empty gaze, wandering around the edge of the water where her town used to be.

No, she did not return to his city. They found her a comfortable bed where they cared for her and others like her, until weeks later when no one was looking, she went into the younger of two lakes and walked to the bottom to sleep and rest, knowing in three years he would come and restart the torment.


2017.feb.01

This was from last year, when I was still bothered by the plot hole in the ending of Shinkai Makoto's anime your name.