He drew a line on her palm. He went to write his name, but the sun dipped below the horizon. The strobe turned off. The frequency cut to static. Mitsuha disappeared. Taki was standing alone in the dark on a silent mountain, holding a marker that had run dry. He looked at his hand. There was nothing there. Years passed like fast-forwarded footage.
Two trains pulled up alongside each other, moving at the exact same tempo. Taki looked through the window of the green line. Mitsuha looked through the window of the red line. The beat dropped.
Taki became an architect, designing buildings that looked like stacked cassette tapes and grid patterns. Mitsuha moved to the city, a quiet girl who always wore a red knitted ribbon on her wrist, though she couldn't remember why. They both felt a phantom limb syndrome of the soul, a feeling that they were searching for a missing beat in a song they had forgotten the lyrics to. Then came the spring morning in Tokyo.
In the neon-drenched summer of 1985, Taki lived in a world of wireframe skyscrapers and cassette-tape static. He was a city boy with a digital watch that beeped on the hour and a walkman that never left his side. Mitsuha lived in Itomori, a mountain town where the wind sounded like a low-frequency synthesizer and the shrines were built from ancient, glowing green phosphor.