It's an evening in late August, and Tokyo is hotter than hell, hotter than a bathroom with the shower turned up all the way, but here in our hotel room it's artificially cool and comfortable.

We're going over our purchases, N and I, rummaging through the results of rampant consumerism like starving raccoons through a trashcan. We're listening to music, too-- stuff that we bought and stuff that we brought, and sometimes we compare. One will hold out her headphones to the other, eyes bright. "Here, listen to this."

She waves the headphones at me, and I sit on her bed to listen. "This is hide," she says, and I only think, oh, that guy, I've heard him mentioned a few times. He's dead, right?

Hee-day. hide. No capital H. Huh.

I stick the headphones on, not knowing what to expect. N is kinda grinning, the way people grin when they want to say "I KNOW you'll love this" even if you're not so sure. A few days back she bought hide zipper-pulls; I looked at them too, tempted to buy them, just because they were sort of cute. And pink, I remember now. Very pink.

Didn't buy them. He was just a dead guy, after all.

A dead guy with no capital H.

The music starts, and unlike most things, it floods directly into the "cool" section of my brain without passing go or collecting $200. Nice intro.

Nice intro, nice everything. The singing starts. The singer's voice is so strange. Kinda nasal. I've not heard anything like it before. I like it.

Pink, I think to myself. No capital H.

Huh.

Fast forward about six months.

It's an evening in mid-February, and my city is colder than hell, colder than a freezer turned up all the way, but in my apartment it's artificially warm and comfortable.

Tokyo is half a world away, and so is N, but I've got my headphones on as I sit on my bed. The singer's voice is still strange, still nasal, and I've still not heard anything like it. Like has morphed into love almost without my noticing it. There's a picture on my wall now, right by the door, and he stares out from it with wide eyes and a head cocked almost cynically to one side.

Pink. No capital H. Dead.

And now, only now, does it bother me.

How can he be dead?

That's just not fair-- he died before I knew him, before I knew X-Japan, before I knew anything.

It bothers me that he matters to me too late for it to matter.

Is it stupid, then, to cry? I never knew him. I never had to feel the impact of his death, never had to stare at the raw gaping hole in the world that his dying left behind. If not for happenstance and twists of fate, I'd never have known he existed, let alone that he had ceased to exist.

But I know. I do know now. And once you know something you can't ever UN-know it.

I can look at pictures, little fragments, instants of time captured and preserved in bright warm colors. I can watch videos, those slightly longer moments with those same bright warm colors, now highlighted with equally bright movements that repeat, over and over, just as fixed as the photographs in spite of their mobility. I can pop in a CD and listen to him sing and play the guitar, and once again it's only a shard of time, caught and tenuously preserved like a vivid butterfly under glass.

It is stupid to cry, but I do it anyway, maybe because I never knew him.

And now I never will.

Pink. No capital H.

Dead.

.....Huh.