That afternoon, the sea wind carried the smell of oil and old metal into the yard. My father was taking apart an engine in front of the house, his hands dark with grease, his shirt long stripped of its original color. Beside him lay a thin manual, its cover worn and filled with foreign characters.
He clicked his tongue softly as he flipped through the pages and sighed. It had been a long time, he said. The manual was in Japanese, and he had forgotten some of the terms.
I stood a short distance away, watching him work. In my previous life, this was a familiar sight something so ordinary that I never paid it much attention. I would have sat down, waited, or gone off to do something else without a second thought.
This time, however, my eyes stayed on the book.
Not because I suddenly understood it, but because I had seen those letters before. I had heard them on the radio, glimpsed them in old magazines, and stored them somewhere in the quiet corners of my memory, still unorganized but no longer completely foreign.
I took a small step closer.
My father pointed to a single line on the page and frowned slightly as he spoke. He asked what it meant.
I swallowed.
The words did not magically become clear. They were still vague, still uncertain, hovering just beyond what I could confidently grasp. Yet one word only one felt familiar enough to surface.
"Turn?" I said quietly. Then, after a brief pause, added, "Or… reverse?"
My father stopped moving.
His reaction was not anger or shock, but simple surprise. He looked at me, then back at the manual, and finally followed my suggestion, adjusting the bolt in the opposite direction.
The engine responded with a soft click.
He let out a short breath and muttered that I was right.
When he turned to face me again, his expression had changed. It was the look of someone seeing something for the first time, even though it had been there all along.
He asked how I knew.
I shook my head quickly and told him I didn't. I said it just looked that way. It wasn't entirely a lie, but it wasn't the full truth either.
From the kitchen, my mother, who had been watching silently, stepped closer. She studied me with a faint crease between her brows and said that I usually didn't like things like this.
I had no answer for her.
That night, I sat alone in my room with an empty notebook open in front of me. I wrote down a single foreign word, then carefully added the meaning I guessed beneath it. Whether it was right or wrong didn't matter yet. What mattered was that my hand kept moving.
Outside, my father remained by the engine longer than necessary, lost in thoughts he did not share. My mother looked at me more often than usual, as if trying to find the right question.
The next day at school, my friend would look at me and say that I seemed different lately.
I still wouldn't know how to explain it.
But for the first time, I was certain of one thing.
I was no longer standing still.