It had been exactly twelve days since Ren left.
Airi knew because she'd marked each one with a red dot in her planner.
Not crossed out.
Just… dotted. Like they weren't gone—just temporarily misplaced.
She still hadn't heard from him.
No messages. No calls.
The silence clung like humidity.
Even the sky seemed quieter without him—no sketches sent, no cryptic one-liners. Just the occasional drizzle, mocking her with memory.
Yui caught her staring out the classroom window again.
"You're going full drama heroine," she teased. "Waiting for the rain to spell his name?"
Airi smiled, thinly. "I'd settle for a cloud shaped like his stupid face."
Yui grew more serious. "You okay?"
"I don't know."
"You want me to distract you?"
"With what?"
"I dunno—boys, books, karaoke?"
"Ren once sang in a whisper so the walls wouldn't laugh."
Yui blinked. "Okay, wow, I walked into that."
That evening, a letter arrived.
No return address.
No name.
Just a sketch on the envelope—two shoes side by side, facing opposite directions.
Airi's breath caught.
She tore it open with shaking fingers.
Inside was a postcard. The kind Ren used to collect from thrift stores. It had a faded picture of a sunflower field under a cobalt sky.
On the back, in his scribbled scrawl:
"Still learning how to say goodbye without saying less."
— R.
Over the next week, more postcards came.
A clock tower in Prague. A café in Seoul. A rainy pier in Hokkaido.
Each carried just a sentence or two.
Sometimes drawings instead of words.
Sometimes only half of a thought.
But they all carried him.
In return, Airi sent her own.
Snippets of poetry.
Photos of places they used to walk.
Pressed leaves from trees near their school.
But most often, she just wrote what she couldn't say out loud.
"I miss the way you look at things before you draw them."
"I still hear your voice in empty places."
"I'm trying not to write 'come back' at the end of every line."
Weeks passed.
The world kept turning, inconsiderate and fast.
But she was still caught in that invisible space between departure and return.
Until one morning.
A knock at her door.
Not the front door—the window.
She opened it, thinking maybe Yui was being dramatic again.
But it wasn't her.
Ren stood on the other side.
Soaked. Shivering. Smiling.
"Surprise," he whispered.
Airi blinked. "You—what—"
"Left early. Couldn't stay gone."
He handed her a final postcard.
No drawing.
Just words:
"This is me, choosing us."