AND BY THE WAY

"It’s a new animated film called Kimi no Na wa. 'Your name'." And his eyes lit up when he said, "You should definitely watch it." So you could tell he meant it.

Ate Pan and I look at each other. I smile quietly and nod as Ate asks him more about it. I had gotten used to seeing him like he wasn't completely there, with that vacant look on his face. But sometimes, when his eyes take on that sudden spark... I don't know. The feeling becomes more than a relic. I want, for a moment, to let that boy mean more than a chance encounter on a Wednesday afternoon when we all have two hours to spare. It’s funny. There was a time when he meant the world to me. But I guess it’s funnier still to think I could want that to happen again.  

The waiter arrives with our half and half pizza and the moment passes. My four cheese is just as much a necessity as his bacon overload. Ate, who will eat almost anything, starts telling us about how our old Research teacher is doing (still looking for a sugar daddy). We let ourselves steep in our pizza and her stories as she tells us what I think is frankly more than we ought to know about a person.

I can feel him stare at me from across the table. And as I meet his eyes, he's almost squinting. It's like he isn't entirely sure how much of me he's willing to take in. I tilt my head to the side, still meeting that blank scrutiny. Maybe I'm not all here either.

His eyes stay that way until we finish our meal. 

Ate Pan has gone down her own road and he walks me home. I am neatly deposited at my front lawn. And in what seems like one continuous motion, he hails a cab and as it pulls up, he pulls me into a hug, says goodbye, and closes the creaky metal door behind him. I watch the tail lights round the corner and disappear. 

The last glimpse I get is of his face dimly lit by a cellphone screen.

----------------------

This movie refuses to leave me alone.

"It's a really good anime!" She declares. I stand corrected. It’s an animated film.And she doesn’t know him or Ate Pan. She says it with her eyes practically on fire, and while that’s pretty standard, it looks like she really means it. Hands motioning in a flurry, she attempts to persuade me with brute force.

"Watch it, watch it, watch it!" she says as her body lurches forward across the table with each repetition.

I look up from my book and laugh. The librarians must have a love-hate relationship with this kid. At times like this, it’s easy to forget she isn’t actually a kid.

"People do say it's pretty good." I return to the book, now staring blankly at the pages.  

"Oh, wait…,” I hear the chair shuffle as she pulls herself back into her seat. “Am I bothering you?" And you could tell from that sound that her brows had furrowed.

And if I were honest, I would have said 'Yes'. But honesty isn't as comforting as the endless flow of hands and stories and barely contained laughter. Honesty isn’t as comforting as this figure, who is now slumped uncharacteristically still as she waits for an answer. I could chose to honestly be left alone to take notes or lie and be overwhelmed, but pleasantly. 

I look up, again, at this ball of restless energy and smile. "No, not at all."

And so the stillness, along with my book, has been rejected in favor of seven more animated retellings of this story and that. Of course, she gives me one last reminder to go "Watch it.”

-----------------------

It has been over two years since this movie was released and I have adamantly refused to watch it. It's become a metaphor for a word I decided to forget. If you give something a name, you allow it to exist in your mind. In my head, he has now dwindled down to a meager partial existence. Progress.

But Wikipedia says it's the highest grossing anime film "of all time". Quote them at your own risk, though. The soundtrack is pretty good, too. The YouTube video has this image of boy on what appears to be a mountain reaching out into thin air.

The video title says "[君の名は] Kimi no Na wa OST". It's pretty cool how Japanese hanzi characters sound different from their Chinese counterparts and still half hold the same meaning. So you get a glimpse of what a phrase means even if you're familiar with only one language but not the other. I don't know how "名" is read it Japanese, but I do know 'ming2' means 'name' in Mandarin. The upper left corner of the video says "Your name" in Mandarin (“你的名字”), too. My limited vocabulary gives itself a high five. You take what you can, especially when you find cool linguistic semblances.

Then again, I'm not sure how useful it is to connect random dots. Either way, it's an interesting—albeit incomplete—bit of trivia for my mind to play with. It's like learning bits and pieces of a 'something' even if I don't know what to do with it yet.

I guess there are some things that, in one way or another, make themselves known in ways you didn’t expect. You find yourself learning about them even if you didn’t want to. They barge into your life whether you want them to or not even as they insist that doors shouldn’t be left open. 

Sometimes it’s a movie, or a name, or a person pumped up on too much sugar. You find yourself having to learn about it (possibly again; probably the person more than the things). And they bring along a language you only half know (perhaps because you’ve forgotten the other half, or more likely because you didn’t really learn it in the first place). 

The ensuing arrangement is maddening. 

But the more you connect the dots, the more you might find yourself wanting to learn about it. Maybe this time it won’t be a simple matter of being the one to say goodbye or being the one that has to listen to it. Maybe sometimes what matters is having someone you want to watch a pretty cool movie with. Possibly even the coolest animated film “of all time.”