Had He Ever Come Back

That night, unable to sleep, I opened Aya's letter beneath the light of a single candle.

She had been writing to a man who, unknown to her, had already been carried across the sea.

Had he ever come back, the letter began, she would have forgiven him everything.

For years she had been waiting at the edge of the fields, counting springs instead of days.

Had she known that he was forbidden to return, perhaps she would have grieved less bitterly.

The letter explained that she had been raising their son alone, telling him stories of his father.

Had my grandfather received even one of her letters, everything might have unfolded differently.

But the letters, it seemed, had been disappearing at the border for years.

He had spent decades believing that Aya had chosen to forget him.

She, in turn, had been convinced that he had simply abandoned her.

Had the two of them ever spoken again, the silence between our families might never have formed.

I thought of my grandfather, who had been carrying that folded map through every year of his exile.

Had he not kept it, I would never have known that any of these people existed.

The son, named Kael, had been searching for news of his father well into his old age.

Had he found him, the two might have shared at least a single afternoon together.

Instead, they had been living parallel lives, each unaware that the other still hoped.

Aya's letter ended with a request that startled me more than anything I had yet discovered.

Should you ever meet my son, she had written, tell him that his father meant to return.

Had I read those words in Tokyo, I might have dismissed them as an old woman's dream.

But I had been travelling for weeks now, and the dream had become undeniably real.

My grandfather had not been running from his family; he had been mourning it all along.

Had anyone told me a month earlier that I would weep over strangers, I would have laughed.

Yet these strangers, I understood, had been part of me before I was ever born.

I resolved to find Kael, wherever the last star might lead me.

Had I turned back then, the whole journey would have remained a beautiful but broken thing.

Instead, I folded the letter, added it to the map, and set my face toward the sea.