Don't be sad even if I'm gone! I'll always be by your side, right along with the snow!!

#nana56b


Synopsis

Outside the window, rain continued to fall, drenching the hydrangeas. It was on one such gloomy rainy-season afternoon that the word “cancer” slipped from her lips.

“You know, they found cancer in me. But it’s okay—I’ll definitely get better and come back. Wait for me, okay?”

As always, she smiled with the look of a child who’d just pulled off a mischievous prank.
I didn’t doubt her words for a second.
I believed, without any basis, that with her boundless cheerfulness, she would overcome this quickly, and the day would come when we could laugh together again.

But that thing called illness was far more ruthless and unforgiving than I could have imagined.

When I rushed to her hospital room, using the vacation time I’d finally managed to secure, the sight before me took my breath away. The healthy glow of her skin was gone; she had wasted away, and her condition had deteriorated to the point where she could barely even sit up.

Even so, the moment she saw me, she gave me that same dazzling smile she’d shown me back then.


“You came…”
She said in a hoarse voice. Then, gazing at me with eyes that seemed feverish, she quietly—yet earnestly—voiced her wish.

“Hey… go get some snow for me. Please, I want to see snow…”

I was taken aback. There was no way there could be snow here on Honshu in the middle of summer. But she was someone who loved snow so much that she’d go to the ski slopes almost every week once winter came.

“…Okay. I’ll go get some right now. Wait for me.”

Hearing those words, which I’d finally managed to squeeze out, she smiled contentedly. So that she wouldn’t feel lonely by herself, and so she could draw “pictures”—her second favorite thing after snowy landscapes—I placed a new sketchbook and colored pencils on the side table before leaving the hospital room.


There was only one path left for me.
The only place in Japan where snow might still remain even in the height of summer—the summit of Mount Fuji.
Clutching a cooler, I climbed the mountain like a madman. Even as the thin air burned my lungs and my legs grew as heavy as lead, I pressed on, guided only by the memory of her smile.

I packed the scant remaining snow near the summit into the cooler as if it were a treasure and carried it desperately to her.

But when I opened the hospital room door, her “life” was already gone.

Her mother, who had collapsed in tears beside the bed, told me that her condition had taken a sudden turn for the worse right after I left the room.
“Why… why couldn’t I have been there for her…”
I should have held her hand in her final moments.



Seeing me hang my head in intense regret, her mother quietly shook her head.
“It was for the best. She told me… that she asked you to go far away on purpose because she didn’t want you to see her in pain when you were by her side…”

Her wish to see the snow was…