Chapter 14:

The Fact That People Who Do Not Know You Are Nonetheless Secretly Cheering You On From Afar, However Consciously Or Unconsciously

***

There are unpleasant things in this world. There are wounds and diseases. But there are wonderful things in this world. There are things that mend and heal. 

Medicine is a sacrament. The taking of a biopsy is, perhaps, a prayer to Fukurokuju, the lucky god of health, or to Yakushi-nyorai, the Medicine Buddha who cures suffering using the medicine of the teachings. Or, if you like, to Kanon-bosatsu. She is the bodhisattva of infinite mercy, and an aspect of Amida Buddha, redeemer of all. "Please let the news be good", the wordless prayer says to anyone listening. Sakaki performs the first step in this act of syncretic sacrament: she presses a long, thin, sharp instrument into the abdomen of the sedated Momoko. This is the needle-like shaft used for a biopsy. It is not a pleasant device, but it is a tool of information that can save precious lives, and we damn well ought to revere it for that.

As Sakaki plunges the biopsy tool into a marked place on the abdomen of the precious creature, she is frustrated by an unexpected difficulty. The territory she is pushing into is supposed to be soft tissue. But there are parts that feel hard, and resist the measured pressing of Sakaki's trained hand. This does not make sense. Veterinarians who love and care about animals do not like to encounter things that don't make sense, and Sakaki grunts in frustration as the final inch of needle presses its way into its point of purchase. But Sakaki chides herself for even this small emotional excess. Getting frustrated does not help an animal. Staying calm and completing the biopsy helps the animal.

Sakaki has not been entirely honest in her assessments of Momoko's health thus far. It has not been her intention to mislead; simply to avoid raising unnecessary alarm. The strange muffling she heard as she listened to Momoko's insides correlated with strange lumps that Sakaki detected while palpating the abdomen. While the locations of these anomalies didn't quite add up to a specific diagnosis, Sakaki's cautious mind turned up a single word in its analytic considerations: Tumors. While she had little information to go on, and no easy way of doing non-invasive tests, her most dire concern was bovine lymphosarcoma having spread to other parts of the body.

A biopsy would be the fastest way to--she refused to consider any other possibilities--to rule this out and allow for other avenues of testing and exploration. This was what she steadied herself with as she closed the stylet and sheared a sample of tissue into the body of the needle-like device. With patient, deliberate movements, Sakaki pulled out the biopsy tool and held it aloft to the light to ensure that everything looked to have been done correctly. And so the sacrament was completed before the watchful eyes of Kanon-bosatsu, bodhisattva of infinite mercy. Then she placed it in a sealed container, to be delivered to the waiting courier, who would deliver it to the closest lab, which might get results back in... hours? A day? Days? Sakaki had no way of knowing that. And, as she had long learned to do in order to survive a life as an animal lover and a veterinarian, she yielded up her anxieties and expectations in a simple act of entrusting, hoping for mercy and preparing for anything at all.

*****

Kaorin might have thought she was nothing special, but to the girls at the dairy farm, she was everything. And so all of them very politely yet pointedly had insisted that she please take the day off from direct caretaking of the cows and spend it on paperwork or something instead.

Doing paperwork sucks, but at the moment, Kaorin was grateful for the mind-numbing effect that it had on her. Paperwork is, after all, just rote little patterns, recitations, box-filling-in. If you do it right, you can achieve a sort of state of boredom-induced nothingness, a discount Nirvana. And in such a state, you don't have to think about what paying the bills and the rent means, you don't have to think about contracts and censuses and regulatory bodies at all. You don't have to worry about your sickly cow, or the cost of medical care, or your regrets of the past, or how long it's been since you've called your mom, or how badly you want to resume your conversation with Sakaki, or how anxious you are that cutting off aforementioned conversation meant the moment has passed forever. Just hiragana, katakana, kanji, romaji and Arabic numerals. Just the flowing stroke of the pen and the decisive crimson push-smush of the customary hanko stamp used in place of the signature. An empty bliss beyond this world, at least for a couple of hours.

Then her couple of hours were up, the papers were arranged, enveloped and addressed where relevant, and discount Nirvana spat her back out into the Samsara we have at home.

The unfortunate inevitable: she had time to push herself back from her desk and wonder, "What the fuck am I gonna do?"

She thought about what the fuck she was gonna do. 

Okay, so first of all, whatever she did end up doing, she wasn't going to beat herself up anymore for obviously still having feelings for Sakaki. She was still skeptical of destiny in the way that anyone burned by life naturally becomes, but she believed that there was meaning in this encounter. Potential, even. Oh, hope can be a scary thing. When it's handed to you, it so often comes mixed with anxiety and dread. When was life going to slap her down once again? When was the narrative going to punish her for being a lesbian and thinking that maybe her friend might be too?

The glassy gleam of an ancient CRT monitor showed a distorted mirror image of a monochrome Kaorin. "Maybe that's your problem, Kaorin,", the distorted mirror image said to her. "You're always trying to brace yourself against painful outcomes. Doesn't that get tiresome? Doesn't it wear you out, to be bracing yourself all the time?" It was tiresome. It did wear her out. "You're facing the situation right now. What's the worst thing that could plausibly happen? She tells you she's that unlikeliest of sorts, a heterosexual himejoshi who reads Slowly the Melody and Pink Crystal of Endor but does not dream of such things for herself, and that she's flattered you're interested but she can't feel that way? Sure, that would be weird, and kind of suck, but. Would that be the end of the world?" Indeed, that was a terrible, abysmal possibility. But... loath as Kaorin may have been to admit it... it was not the end of the world. Technically.

"You know what I think would be a greater tragedy, Kaorin?" Kaorin looked quizzical at this self-imposed question, and the mirror mimicked her quizzical expression. "I think a much greater tragedy than 'lesbian gets rejected' would be 'lesbian runs away from love forever because she got hurt decades ago and didn't know how to take what she wanted for years after that.' I think that's the worst ending to any story. If there's a girl in a yuri manga you were reading, who gets disappointed in some way and is deeply hurt by it, you would think something like, 'that girl should nurture herself a little bit and find someone who *will* love her and *will* accept her for who she is.', right?" Kaorin had to agree with the shadowy eidolon of herself visible in the dusty relic of a monitor. If she saw a girl like that in a yuri manga, she would be cheering her on with all her heart to find real love and not be defined by her disappointment.

"And so I ask you, Kaorin: how are you any different from the heartbroken girl in the yuri manga? If empathy applies to her, then why not you? If she deserves a happy ending that looks like decades of romantic fulfillment and every instance, second, moment and nuance that entails, then why? Not? You?"

Damn. 

Damn, her mirror image kind of had her dead to rights. The inexpressible thing she'd been afraid of all this time, and it looked so fucking *silly* now that she'd dragged it out into the light of day. She was afraid that if she got her hopes up and got disappointed, this would be the final straw that would just. Break her utterly. Break her forever.

And wasn't that ridiculous? Nothing had ever broken her before. Life had always gone on for her after its inevitable unpleasant vicissitudes. She might have--she might have some melancholy and bitterness that she hid from the world, but--but that smile she showed to the dairy girls every day was *fucking genuine*, let there be no doubt. 

Her self-reflective monologue-conversation having run its course and done its job admirably, Kaorin then did something which might seem strange to some readers, but which might be familiar to some readers who are a bit strange themselves. She planted her lips right there on the dusty screen of the seldom-used monitor and kissed herself in gratitude. The papers and envelopes were in loose stacks for her to gather up, tighten, and neaten as she stood up from her chair and prepared to go take each of them to wherever it was they needed to go.

Tonight, Kaorin would spend more time with Sakaki. Whatever that ended up looking like, it would mean something. Sakaki was good. Spending time with Sakaki was good. Disappointment was an acceptable risk. And for the first time in who knows how many months or maybe even years, Kaorin unclenched that worry in her tummy. Then she strolled easily out of the room that had for some minutes now played host to her contemplations.

*****

Sakaki wasted no time in handing over the packaged sample to the awaiting courier, expressing her gratitude, and thanking her preemptively for her haste in returning it. As the courier drove away, the chill of oncoming evening expressed itself as a frosty spring breeze. This might have been a time for Sakaki to do what Kaorin had been at risk of doing--stewing in her feelings and anxieties, overthinking the conversation she'd just had and where it was leading, worrying about what the test results would say, replaying a non-sequitur stream-of-consciousness reel of embarrassing moments and episodes of disappointment from her past. But of course, it's at just such a moment that helpful Yuuka arrives, announcing herself with footsteps so that her first words did not startle the troubled daydreamer.

"You've done great work today. Thank you so much, Doctor. I'm sure Momoko-chan will thank you too, as soon as she's able." 
Lips parted in a smile to show the pleasant angles and eccentricities of a real girl's teeth. Yuuka's winsome eyes were the color of stained wood, and the edges of her eyelids were considerably creased for a young woman of Yuuka's age. Sakaki was drawn by such charms, out of her somber ponderings and into the nascent conversation. She was careful to word things optimistically without making empty promises. "Aaah, yes, of course--there's still a lot of work to be done, but your cute little cow has been very brave, and I feel confident in her..."

Before replying to this, Yuuka made a broad beckoning gesture and turned to start walking away, indicating that Sakaki was to follow her and talk too, and not worry too much about the destination either way. "That's really the best. Every cow means a lot to us. They're all trying hard to support our livelihoods. So we try and take the best care of them that we can, just like they take care of us." Sakaki nodded; she was about a foot taller than the diminutive Yuuka, so catching up to Yuuka's stride was of little challenge. "Yes, your farm here is... Well. Not everyone treats their animals the same as you do here. So anyone who does... well, I admire that very, very much."

There was a beat of silence, but not quite an awkward one; even at a glance, Sakaki could see in Yuuka's eyes the immense pride she felt in helping run a farm that ran just a little contrary to the Hobbesian ethics of the animal husbandry mainstream. As the silence progressed, Sakaki could sense Yuuka's thoughts shifting a little, and saw a merry twinkle in her eyes that she hadn't seen before from the diligent girl.

"So you've known Kaori--or, I guess she's Kaorin--for a while, huh?" Yuuka's smile looked demure and almost playful now as she stepped into the territory of the real conversation. She took Sakaki's affirmative nodding in response to the question, as a prompt to continue towards her actual point. 

"Even longer than us, for sure. and, well... Maybe she wasn't like this back when you knew her, but.... Kaorin can be very hard on herself, you know? It's why she sleeps in a converted storehouse instead of taking up extra dorm space. It's why she'll stay up late sometimes listening to our problems and giving advice but will always say she's doing fine whenever we ask about her. It's why she worries so much about us failing when we're relatively successful in our field, even if we are still kind of living check to check." Yuuka punctuated this with a pleasant smile, and then glanced away from Sakaki as she circled in further to the meat of her point, allowing a brief silence for Sakaki's response.

Sakaki nodded, accepting Yuuka's words at face value. "I think I know what you mean. I can see her influence all over the farm... and see how the years have, have matured her in some ways, even if she was already reasonably diligent before."

Yuuka chuckled a little bit to herself after considering Sakaki's reply. "Yeah... I'm glad you can see it too. Her influence over this farm is everywhere. Kaorin means *everything* to us, Sakaki-sensei. She's our rock, our stable place, and I don't think she even realizes it. She is so, so, so very dearly important to us." And then Yuuka turned to her side and looked at Sakaki directly in the eyes again. "Is... Is Kaorin important to you too?"

Despite the audacity and directness of the question, Sakaki did not hesitate and was answering before she even realized it. "She is. A lot more than I think I even realized... Um..." Sakaki felt she had the right to ask a follow-up question, as the conversation was starting to feel... a little more personal and less general. "Is there... Is there a reason you're asking me that?" Sakaki was, upon giving her answer, a bit surprised that this was being brought up to her. Sure, there had probably been a chain-tapestry of gossip tidbits passed around the farm already, but why did everyone... What was everyone... No, this wasn't the time to ask silly questions that don't have answers yet. This was the time to listen. 

Yuuka cocked her head to one side. There was some cryptic intention in her eyes, but she was masking it well with guileless politeness. "Of course. But you don't need to worry about what it is, necessarily." 

(The real reason she was asking is because the dairy girls had been spending all of the past day following Kaorin and Sakaki around and eavesdropping on them because they all basically knew what was going on and were absolutely obsessed with the idea that everyone's beloved Kaorin might be kindling something with this tall, beautiful stranger that she had some kind of past with. But of course, Yuuka could not tell Sakaki all of this, so she continued to play it all coy and mysterious.) 

"Yes, no need to worry about what I'm asking you questions for. You gave the correct answer, after all. Sakaki-sensei, if I may... I'd like you to remember that. I'd like you to remember and keep in mind, that you're very, very important to her, and that you can be honest with her about anything that's on your mind."

Yuuka took a deep breath. As she exhaled, she looked up and away from Sakaki, as if resolving herself to something. At length, Yuuka filled the resulting silence:

"Okay, so. Hear me out. Let me speak about my own self for a second. How about that? Let me tell you some completely unrelated things about myself."

"You see... Sakaki-sensei, I, Yuuka, darling daughter of the independent dairy farm... am a lesbian. Isn't that strange? Try not to pass out from shock. But it's true. We exist, and I am one. We exist everywhere. And even despite existing everywhere, it seems that we often lead isolated lives. Perhaps because the world is hostile, and punishes us for being honest with ourselves, we do not express the truths of our interior emotional worlds. We hide from the world in plain sight. We hide from each other. We even hide from ourselves."

"Isn't that a shame? Isn't it a waste, for women such as myself, to lie to ourselves? And to deny the truth to each other that could allow us to connect--to deny the truth from the world, so that we are virtually absent from the public and historical record in so many places where we have really and truly existed?"

"Perhaps it would be better if we just told the truth. If we weren't afraid to take the risk of saying what we feel to the people who might be best equipped to listen. If we were honest about our experiences. Even the difficult, complicated stuff. Perhaps the act of expressing it to another might help us sort it all out. And perhaps speaking candidly might cut through the tangled gnarls of unneeded interpersonal melodrama."

"You know?"

And then Yuuka was silent.

It would be dozens of paces of silence before Sakaki, her head suddenly bowed and staring at her muddy-booted feet, could muster even the most meager, preliminary form of a reply. "Yuuka-san, thank you, but I--"

Yuuka turned back towards Sakaki, and spoke so suddenly that it jolted Sakaki out of her gloomy head-slumped posture. That wry, knowing smile was back on her face again in full force, as if something about Sakaki's reply had confirmed it. "Sakaki-sensei, when did I ever say I was talking about you? I couldn't possibly know anything about you, and it would be quite rude for me to take a guess, or to divulge informed guesses about the personal life that Kaorin tries so hard to keep quiet about, that is, when she isn't drunk at one of our end-of-month parties." 

How can someone be simultaneously *so* nosy and yet so cloyingly faux-delicate at the same time? Sakaki kept looking at Yuuka. Sakaki's eyes were full of complex and contradictory feelings, bewilderment and dawning understanding, nervousness and the first possibility-glimmer of hope. She wasn't sure what to say, and Yuuka didn't seem to expect her to say anything, so much as listen. Then Yuuka continued, tying a red satin ribbon around the carefully wrapped present of helpful advice she had just given.

"Ahhh, but do listen to me go on talking about my silly ideas about truth in personal expression. All you want to do is go have a friendly conversation with an old friend, right? Anyway, you won't have to wait long for that. We're here."

And they were. Yuuka and Sakaki stood in front of the shed-sized free-standing domicile next to the larger dormitories. The lights were on, and the door was there for knocking.

"I think you'll know what to do from here. Good luck, Sakaki-sensei. Remember that you might feel alone sometimes, but in this world there are people you may never have even met who are secretly cheering you on from afar, always. Goodnight."

Yuuka slipped away to the dorms before Sakaki could say anything further. Stiffly, Sakaki stood there for a few minutes, clenching and unclenching her hands. 

Then Sakaki knocked on the door. Kaorin was deeply surprised to see her when she answered, but this time, both of them were able to keep from passing out, and Sakaki passed the threshold of Kaorin's front door without incident.

Sometimes, decades worth of things can happen in days. Lenin probably wasn't talking specifically about lesbians when he said this sort of thing, but it is certainly true for lesbians, too.