Vol. 2 Chapter 1.1

I have so many things that feel nostalgic to me.

For example, summer clouds, cold rain,

the scent of the autumn wind, the softness of spring soil,

the comforting feeling of a convenience store late at night,

the cool air after school,

the smell of a blackboard eraser,

the distant sound of trucks in the middle of the night.

Noboru-kun, those kinds of things,

I always, always

wanted to keep feeling together with you.

Even if something looks worthless to other people, I think there are things that are precious to the person themselves.

Something that has been used so much that people might say, 『Why don’t you just throw it away already?』And even if, depending on how you look at it, it should have retired from active use long ago, to that person, it is filled with memories too hard to throw away. An irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind treasure.

In my case, this old cell phone is that precious treasure. It is a model from more than ten years ago and I doubt there is anyone anywhere in Japan still actively using one. There is no doubt that it has long since passed its service life.

For about the past two years, I do not remember using it, and I am not even sure whether it still works. Now I just carry it around like a charm. Because there is no longer any need to use it. But this cell phone once received message after message from someone precious to me, sent from a place unbelievably far away. What is packed inside it are the bittersweet, helpless memories I shared with that precious person.

I am Terao Noboru, twenty-seven years old, a communications engineer. I work in space.