Shoutout to moody, reflective stories about yearning, public transit, the ephemerality of words and dreams, and the quest for substance in infinite moments- gotta be one of my favorite genders. I love the wispy, diffuse art like trailing dust particles in a sigh of sun, the patchwork shadows that knit backdrops in negative, loose uniforms in molten black winging raven-mantled girls down winds of change, pulses of music and conversation and movement like spikes of a morning migraine followed by the haze of minds trying to recall the formula to ergo's sum, silhouettes as long goodbyes and opaque memories, panels overlapping, cutting across, swimming and diffracting and slicing black-white like piano keys warring for a tune, and the union of forms in finality, shadows given weight and heft and traced to pasts and futures, fulminated by love and light into iridescence. Right from that exquisite first page with a girl-who-will-become-Yuki framed crow-pale against a sky in roiling hues, one foot each in sun and shade, hesitant on the stretch of a dewy path as she stares down a track curling into darkness, unsure if she must advance or await, we're transported into the tale's misty penumbral world, marinating in maudlin moods.
Fitting, then, that so much of the story is about places without trails, lines without connections, words without responses, all lost as they enter the light, scattered to so much ash and ember in purgatorial adolescence- Harumi's touches clouding Yuki's winter-sunned heart, the voice on the phone that prattles without presence, the hubbub of conversations untraceable to speakers, the flush of fantasy diffused in soapy water, words that always curl off course, shadows weaned on formless lights, and trains that trundle to ends of lines few passengers will wait to see. At the end, these girls commit to presence, to bodies, to moments, to the now-and-then, letting go of deferred dreams and postponed appointments and wordless fantasies to see at last what's right before them and infinitely richer. Past the fog and glare of eternal peripheries, they venture at last towards the hearts of people and the town, exploring and escaping themselves. Forget that crusty old Lesbos- the coolest sapphics vacation at Silent Hill.
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