Campus Applications

POV: Haruka

Her sleeves smelled of bread.

Amidst deliveries and dough, Haruka had begun to do something she hadn't attempted in years: dream again.

It started small—a glimpse of a flyer tacked onto a corkboard at a tiny café along one of their delivery routes. A creative writing class. Just a weekend.

It continued from there.

She tore off the bottom half of the flyer and stuffed it into her pocket, saying nothing to Kaito.

A few days later, when Kaito was busy taking pre-orders in the rear kitchen of the bakery, Haruka borrowed his phone and utilized the complimentary Wi-Fi. She looked up the name of the class. And one link led her to another. And another.

Soon, she was looking at universities. Not big ones. Not the kind that were full of looming gates and expectations. Just small ones. Schools that had quiet classrooms, poetry workshops, or creative writing minors.

Her heart raced with each new tab she opened.

One of the schools in west Tokyo hosted open poetry readings in their courtyard every week. Another was teaching a course titled Writing From the Wound. She had no idea what that was supposed to mean exactly, but it made something in her chest ache—good. 

She screenshot everything and emailed it to herself from the email account Kaito helped her set up when they registered for bread pre-orders.

She slept on their futon that evening, the hum of the refrigerator at her back, the sound of a neighbor's TV through the thin wall. She pulled out an order receipt from their flour delivery and began to scribble notes on the back using a pen from the bakery. 

She didn't have a laptop. She didn't have a desk. But for the first time in a while, she had a sense of direction.

Kaito finally caught her hanging around the bakery after deliveries. One evening, while closing up, he found her hunched over the ancient desktop in the office corner—the one that barely functioned and took five minutes to open a browser.

He didn't speak. Just set a small cup of coffee beside her and smiled.

"You don't have to tell me," he said softly. "But I hope you're running toward something good."

She stared at the blinking cursor on the screen for a long time.

It took her a week to write the essay.

Not because she had nothing to say, but because this time, she wouldn't lie.

She didn't write about awards. She wrote about running away. About silence. About the quiet strength it took to survive when the world insisted she perform.

One paragraph simply read:

I want to write again. Not because I have anything important to say, but because it's the only thing that's ever felt like mine.

When she finally clicked "Save," her hands were shaking.

She didn't speak to Kaito right away. She left a message on the fridge, written on one of the same sticky pads they used for labeling bread.

"Maybe… I want to try again."

Kaito found it the next morning. He stood for a time, with a half-eaten roll in one hand, and looked at the message.

Then he grinned.

"You mean school?" he said.

Haruka nodded, cleaning crumbs from the counter.

"Then let's do it," he said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

And, somehow, with him, it was.

Applying wasn't glamorous.

She used Kaito's phone again during a delivery break, crouched in a park near the library, hijacking Wi-Fi and triple-checking her attachments. Kaito stood a few feet off, sipping from a canned coffee, pretending not to loom—but very clearly waiting in case she needed him.

She hit "Submit" with a breath that felt as though she'd been holding it since she was seventeen.

Days passed.

The sticky note stayed on the fridge. She didn't take it off—not even when it began to curl at the edges.

They went on with their small life: early mornings, rising dough, quiet evenings, umbrella walks together. But somewhere in there, hope had taken root.

The answer came on a gray afternoon.

She was checking their bread pre-order messages when she saw the email in her inbox:

"Application Status – Accepted."

No loud reaction. No gasp. Just her blinking at the screen and slowly setting the phone down.

Then she grabbed another sticky note, wrote in tiny letters:

"I'm ready now."

She peeled off the old one and stuck the new note in its place.

When Kaito returned from buying groceries, he saw it and stopped in his tracks.

"You got in?"

She nodded, a small smile tugging at her lips.

He wrapped his arms around her without a word, holding her close. "Told you," he murmured into her hair. "You're meant to shine. Even in small rooms."

Outside, the wind picked up, carrying fallen cherry blossom petals across the street.

Inside, in a tiny apartment lit by fresh bread and dreams, a girl who once ran away from the world had just decided to run towards it.