(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
- ee cummings


It’s another day – a new day – and Kaioh Michiru doesn’t feel any different.

The world still turns, it seems, and outside her window, the city wakes slowly, the lights lining the street flickering off as the sun peeks over the horizon. The edge of the world lies somewhere beyond those first gold-white rays, and she wonders where the horizon would lead if, today, she pulled on her shoes and started towards it.

She dresses, instead, in the normal school clothes, tugs on socks, finds her shoes. She fluffs her hair, checks her reflection – vain motions. Feminine motions. Motions that should be out of place today, of all days, but somehow, they’re all the same.

It’s another day.

She starts off to school, walking through the rays of sun and catching glimpses of other people, strangers on the streets. A shop owner sweeps leaves and litter from the sidewalk; a mother hushes her howling toddler as she struggles with a newspaper stand. She’s never noticed these things before, these little details of another day.

Lessons ramble past, the speed of light, and she watches the sunlight glint on the metal and glass of the school complex, buildings surrounding a track and soccer field. The younger girls are out, practicing cheerleading, while a group of boys struggle their way through American-style football. She rests her chin on a hand and watches them with half her attention, the other half wading slowly through the expanses of space – between here and there, between now and some other time, between who she was – Kaioh Michiru, ninth grade, quiet girl, violinist – and who she is, today.

The haze around her, a surreal disconnection between here and elsewhere, follows her home and into her homework, into listening to her mother curse and demand on the phone, into the slow-building feeling of both excitement and dread in her soul. It follows her through six etudes, each more difficult than the last, and through her mother’s chiding words over dinner that she needs to stop playing that “screeching violin” and focus on her school work. It follows her until the night, until she lies awake and knows, instinctively, what is ahead.

A rush of air, and suddenly the haze breaks around her, leaving her to chase shadows through alleyways and across wide, winding roads. A splash of a sea breeze, and she’s face-to-face with something beyond her own comprehension, larger and broader and more terrifying than anything she’s ever met, before.

And then, as soon as she was away, she’s home again in pajamas and slippers, listening to the wind rustling the vertical blinds in the next room, the autumn of another year in the life of Kaioh Michiru.

The next morning comes, a gradual dawn over the horizon of her days, and immediately after she rubs her eyes, she checks under her pillow.

It’s not metal, or plastic, or any material she’s ever felt before, but it’s cool and firm to the touch, and she closes her fist around it with a relieved smile.

It’s another day – a new day – and Kaioh Michiru feels both completely different and absolutely the same at the exact same time.