KREEZO

Aika Misora never planned to fall in love. Not with the boy who sat alone on rooftops, or the one who pressed flowers instead of speaking his pain. But some stories don’t wait to be written — they bloom in silence, in shared glances, in the weight of unsaid things.

After her mother’s quiet abandonment, Aika survives high school by keeping her heart zipped shut. Her world is routine: library lunches, hushed notebooks, and pretending everything’s fine. Until she meets Ren Hayashi, the quiet sketch-artist with rumors on his name and bruises in his smile.

He doesn’t talk much. But his silence says everything.

Drawn together by chance — and maybe fate — the two begin to orbit each other in secret places: the abandoned rooftop, the library’s back corner, the flower shop that smells like lost time. As seasons shift, so do they. Slowly. Tenderly. Terrifyingly.

But love, even the gentle kind, brings buried pain to the surface. And when a long-unopened letter from Aika’s mother resurfaces, the wounds between them deepen — not enough to break, but enough to test whether two broken hearts can really hold each other.

A soft, grief-tinged coming-of-age romance about first love, second chances, and what it means to stay — even when everything else leaves.

“I’ll Still Love You When We’re Old”

The apartment was still, the kind of quiet that only came after bedtime stories and nightlights.

Ren was curled on the couch, sketchbook on his chest, pencil still in hand. He'd dozed off mid-line — a half-drawn flower bleeding softly into the edge of the page.

Aika sat cross-legged on the rug beside the coffee table, a shoebox open in front of her. Inside: the past.

Old notebooks. Ticket stubs. Doodles Ren had left tucked into her lockers.

And one battered blue diary — the same one she'd given him years ago, now filled from cover to cover.

She flipped through the pages slowly, fingers grazing the margins where her teenage self had poured everything she didn't yet know how to say.

Her handwriting was messier back then. Angrier. Braver in the places it broke.

She found the page she was looking for — the one she wrote after the first rooftop kiss.

> I don't know if this is love yet. But it feels like something alive. Like something growing between raindrops. And he looked at me like I wasn't hard to hold. Like maybe I could stay.

Each entry was its own timestamp — grief. Joy. Fear. Healing.

The days she ran. The days she came back. The days he didn't let go.

Written in smudged ink on a page titled:

> To the boy I met on the rooftop.

Aika took a breath. Then, aloud — softly, just above a whisper — she read:

> You met me when I didn't know how to be met. When I flinched at kindness and laughed too loudly to drown out the ache.

> You never tried to fix me. You just stayed. And that... that rewired everything.

> There were days I wanted to disappear. You didn't pull me out of the dark. You sat in it with me until I wasn't afraid anymore.

> You made space for my silence. You waited through my leaving. You kissed me like I wasn't a mistake waiting to happen.

> So thank you. For not giving up. For not letting go. For choosing me every time I thought I was too much.

> I don't know how this ends. But if there's a future — any future — I want to find it with you.

She closed the book gently, like it might shatter if she moved too fast.

"Was that... you?" he asked sleepily, eyes blinking open.

He rubbed his eyes, sat up, smiled with that soft, slow look that still made her heart stumble.

"Do I still get to be the boy on the rooftop?"

She walked over, sat beside him, and rested her head on his shoulder.

"You always were," she whispered. "Even now. Especially now."

He took her hand, laced their fingers together.

That night, Aika opened a fresh page in her current journal — the one with juice stains and Hikari's sticker-covered fingerprints — and wrote:

> I read the girl I used to be. And I still see her in the mirror sometimes.

But I also see the woman he helped grow.

Love isn't always about being saved. Sometimes it's just about being seen. And staying seen — even when we change.

Chapter 17 – Diary Pages