34 The Meadow Numb Kanji T. Dallas Saylor With August heat-hazing the end of summer’s tracks, our elderly friends have given you and me a dirty weekend at the St. Regis. Nightfall, cooler but no less humid: we’ve swum, bathed, fucked, bathed, and dressed again, so we cut rum with soda and flop down on embroidered shams to watch Shinkai’s film 5 Centimeters per Second: the springtime rate of falling sakura petals, which remind Akari of snow. She waits out the late-winter blizzard for Takaki’s train, shivering off to sleep in the countryside station, but it gets later and colder, the snow stalling city, country, and all the rails between. Shaking my third drink, I watch the wind assault the connecting platform, snatch up Takaki’s letter right out of his pocket: his words dissolve into steel tracks, bare pines, dark snow.
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