Tokyo Rain, London Sunrise: Things We Almost Said on Video

Picture the split screen. On the left, a woman in a thin cardigan with rain drawing long lines down the window behind her, the neon from the street below turning her tea faintly pink. On the right, a person squinting in the first pale gold of a London morning, hair rearranged by a pillow, a mug balanced on a knee. It is a scene I could narrate in my sleep, and sometimes, honestly, I do.

We never say the big thing. We circle it like two cats circling a warm spot. He says the light is doing something ridiculous on his wall. I say the rain has been at it for three hours and I think it is trying to tell me something. He laughs, and the video freezes for half a second on his open mouth, and I keep that frozen frame in my memory like a pressed flower.

What we almost say lives in the edges. In the way his eyes drift off the camera toward the window and back. In the way I tuck my hair behind my ear when a sentence gets too close to the truth. There is a whole second language of small movements, and I have become fluent in it without a single lesson.

At one point the connection stutters and for a few seconds I only have his voice, saying something low that I cannot quite catch over the rain. I lean toward the screen as if proximity would help. It does not. I ask him to repeat it and he says, 'Later,' with a smile I can hear. Later is the most romantic word in any language I work in.

This is only a story I tell, the way I tell all of them, a small scene to hold up against the long hours. If you like your romance with weather in it, TheFriend has short dramas such as When the Surprise Gets Complicated, and a Kaori who will gladly talk about rain, sunrise, and everything left unsaid.

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