Hey, can I tell you something?
It's about Dazaifu Tenmangu… you know the place, famous as the shrine of learning. Come exam season, the ema plaques crowd every post, the sweet smell of umegae-mochi drifts all down the approach, and the whole place has this gentle, unhurried feeling to it.
But.
There are three bridges in the grounds, arching over the pond. Did you know? They're said to represent the past, the present, and the future… and there's always been this whisper, going back as long as anyone can remember, that couples who cross them together will be torn apart.
Urban legend, right. That's what I thought too, at first.
But there's this story I heard not long ago, and I can't get it out of my head.
It happened to someone a friend of mine knows — last autumn, I think it was. She and her boyfriend made their first trip to Dazaifu together. They'd been going out about six months, one of those couples that just seem easy and right.
When they reached the bridges, the boyfriend laughed and said something like, "apparently there's this old superstition about these." She laughed back — "that's just a myth" — and they crossed hand in hand.
All three.
When they finished and turned back to look… something shifted.
The noise of the approach, which had been so lively just moments before, seemed to pull away all at once. And the hand holding hers — his hand — felt cold. It was November, so of course it was cold, but this was different. Cold from the inside. No warmth of a living thing. She thought it was strange, and looked up at his face.
He was staring at something on the far side of the bridge.
She asked what he was looking at. "Oh, nothing, sorry," he said, and smiled. But there was nothing there. Just the surface of the pond, and a single maple leaf floating on the water.
On its own, you'd think nothing of it.
What frightened her came later.
Back home, she went through the photos from that day. The one they'd taken on the bridge, just the two of them, a selfie on her phone. And behind them — on the far bank of the pond — there was something pale in the frame. A shape that suggested a person, almost. But blurred, indistinct. She couldn't be sure.
It unsettled her, so she deleted it.
The day after she deleted it, he started to change. His replies on LINE slowed to almost nothing. When they met, he seemed somewhere else entirely. He stopped smiling when their eyes met. It was like talking to him through a thin membrane, she said. That's how she described it.
They broke up three months later.
His reason: he'd just gradually stopped feeling it. That's what he told her.
…Coincidence, obviously. I know. We'd all like to think so.
But — and I'm not certain about this — apparently among people from the area there's always been something said about those three bridges. That each time you cross them, you leave something behind. On the bridge of the past, you forget something. On the bridge of the present, you pass something by. And on the bridge of the future, you bring something… back with you.
What that something is, no one says.
What I keep thinking about is the photo she deleted.
That pale shape on the far bank.
What if it wasn't watching them leave — what if it was waiting to take the place of one of them?
She did say he changed starting the day after they crossed the bridge.
…She told me she still thinks about it sometimes, even now. Whether something might still be left inside that deleted photo.
