The cab stank. Old leather. Cheap pine air freshener. The ghost of a thousand strangers. Kenji drove. The wipers smeared the neon across the windshield. Red. Blue. Green. Liquid streaks. Another Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Who gave a fuck.
The radio was static. Then a voice. A song from a dead century.
First love.
His foot slipped. The cab jerked. A horn screamed behind him.
He didn't hear it.
The world peeled back. The rain stopped. The sounds of the city—the growl of engines, the hiss of wet tires, the distant sirens—flattened into a single, thin note. Then silence.
Aoi.
The name was a bone in his throat.
The blue hour. That specific, desperate blue just before the streetlights buzzed on. The rooftop gravel bit through his jeans. He was hiding. Smoking a stolen cigarette. It tasted like burning dirt and freedom.
Then. A crunch.
She was there. A silhouette against the fading light. Chewing. The sharp, clean scent of mint cut through the smoke.
"Those'll kill you," she said.
He coughed. "So will boredom."
She laughed. Short. A puff of air. He saw the candy, a white sliver between her teeth. She wore an oversized sweater. Navy. Swallowed her whole.
He offered the cigarette. A dumb move.
She took it. Her fingers brushed his. A spark. A static shock from the dry, cold air. She inhaled. Coughed harder than he did. Laughed again, tears in her eyes.
"Yeah," she gasped. "That's terrible."
They shared it. Passed it back and forth in silence until it was a stub. The mint on her breath mixed with the ash on his. A new flavor. The only flavor that ever mattered after.
A fist on the horn. Long. Insistent.
Kenji blinked. The song was still playing. The dashboard clock glowed: 23:17. The light was red. Had been. The passenger in the back—a suit, a briefcase—was yelling. "The light! It's green, man! What's your problem?"
His hands were tight on the wheel. Plastic and fake leather. He could still feel the rough filter of that cigarette. He could still see the way her hair caught the last of the sun, a fuzzy halo from a disposable camera.
"Sorry," he grunted. The word was sand.
He hit the gas. The cab lurched forward. The song reached its bridge. He lunged, stabbed the radio button. Off.
The silence was worse. It was full of the echo.
He drove. Automatic. Muscle memory. The streets were a blur of reflected neon in black water. His chest was a cavity. Hollowed out. The scent of mint, impossibly fresh after twenty-seven years, filled the cab. Choked him.
It wasn't real. It was a ghost. A chemical reaction in a decaying brain. The Proust Effect. He'd read about it. A trapdoor in the mind. One note, one smell, and you fall through. You're gone.
He was gone.
The fare ended. The suit got out, muttering about a one-star rating. Kenji didn't care. He sat in the idle cab, the engine rattling. The rain started again. A soft tap-tap on the roof.
He fumbled in the glove compartment. Found the pack. Shook one out. Lit it.
The smoke filled his lungs. Harsh. Chemical. Nothing like the stolen one. Nothing like the taste mixed with her mint.
This was the flavor of now. Of 2026. Expired tobacco and regret. It was the only thing that felt solid.
He let the ash grow long. Watched it tremble.
The song was still playing in his head. On a loop. He could see her face. Not the woman she would be. The girl. The one with the sweater and the candy and the laugh that sounded like a key turning in a lock.
He was supposed to be over this. He was a grown man. He drove a cab. He paid taxes. He had a life, a thin one, but a life. This was pathetic. This was a wound that should have scarred.
It hadn't. It was open. Raw. Gaping.
The frequency of her had never changed. He'd just learned to live with the static. Turned it down to a low hum. A background noise to his existence.
The song turned it back up. Full volume. Deafening.
He finished the cigarette. Flicked the butt into the wet street. It died with a hiss.
He put the cab in drive. Pulled back into the flow of light and rain. Another anonymous car in the night.
But he was broken. A crack had splintered right down the middle of him. He knew it. The rest of the night would be a blur. Every red light would be that rooftop. Every hint of cold air would smell like mint and cigarettes.
The first love.
It wasn't a memory. It was a sentence. And he'd been serving it, day after day, for twenty-seven years.
The cab drove on. The city swallowed it.