This is a story about a boyfriend I used to date. Back then, I worked at a rear-projection screen workshop, and being prone to adolescent emotional instability, I often found myself crying alone in the middle of the night.
About ten years ago, cell phones were still out of reach luxuries, and we only had pagers. Whenever I cried at night, a message would always come from my boyfriend saying, "I want to see you." When I replied, "Okay," he would really come right away. Even without traffic, it takes at least fifteen minutes by car, but he always arrived in precisely fifteen minutes—timing that made it seem as though he must have left the moment the pager went off.
One day, after realizing that those messages never came on nights when I wasn't crying, I casually asked him in a joking manner, "Why do you come to see me so often?" At first, he seemed reluctant to talk about it, so I changed the subject, but about an hour later, he muttered quietly, "I always see you crying in my dreams. When I worried and came over, your eyes were all red and swollen shut, so I couldn't just ignore the dream anymore."
Seven years have passed since that boyfriend passed away.
Seven years ago, when he died, we were in a long-distance relationship because he was attending a university in Tokyo. Since he was helping out with his family business, he commuted between his hometown in Kyoto and Tokyo twice a week, so I think we still met about once a week. He attended his classes diligently, getting only about three hours of sleep a day. I was worried about him, but he wouldn't listen.
One day in May, I received a message on my pager from him saying, "Sorry." Since I had no idea why he was apologizing, I replied, "What for?", but there was no answer. A few hours later, he passed away.
I knew he had been hospitalized for a bad cold, but it turned out he actually had a weak heart. To keep up with his grueling schedule, he had been excessively taking sleeping pills and caffeine-based medications alternately. As a result, he collapsed from overwork, caught a cold, and placed too much strain on his weak heart. Neither I nor his parents knew about his heart condition. But looking back later, there were many strange things.
On nights when we were sleeping together, whenever I woke up to voices, I sometimes found my boyfriend talking to someone. The content usually went something like:
"Why are you so early?"
"Give me more time."
"Just give me a few more years."
I think those were the kinds of things he was saying.
In later years, his parents mentioned that he had always predicted when people around him were going to die before it happened. Perhaps he had been having conversations with "someone who had come to fetch him." He seemed to have a stronger sixth sense or spiritual awareness than most people, and I can only imagine how terrified and scared he must have been. My only regret is that I couldn't do anything for him.
By the way, after his death, his parents told me, "He didn't just tidy up his room; he had completely sorted everything into things to throw away and things he wanted given to specific people."
"He even organized his own belongings before he left. It might look like he was being a dutiful son, but he knew he was going to die before his parents and kept it a secret—what an undutiful son."
I can still never forget his father laughing through his tears as he said that.