Hikari Cafe was a frequented restaurant on the eastern corner of an intersection, often crossed by buses and cars on their way to here or there. The two people that ran it - they were family, I think - welcomed those who came with airy smiles, whimsical yet hollow in a strange sort of way.

I’m not sure why it closed down - the customers still came in droves, the food tasted as it always did (for better or worse) - but eventually the glass door locked itself closed, and the people who came by bus or car or foot were met with glances of packed boxes behind the tinted windows.

Hikari Cafe was a beloved restaurant on the eastern corner of an intersection. But despite the warm food and crowds of people, it always seemed cold. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting, or the way the tables were spaced a bit too far apart, or the frigid shade of yellow paint that spread itself across the walls. Maybe it was because the only music that ever played there was quiet elevator music, usually overpowered by conversations of strangers with words that drifted around like dandelion seeds. Maybe I was just irritated that the smoothies there always separated into water and fruit preserve, but Hikari Cafe never felt like a place of unity. In another world it could’ve been somewhere where foes became friends and strangers became family, but of all the places in the universe, sometimes it felt like the loneliest one.

Hikari Cafe was a forgotten restaurant on the eastern corner of an intersection by the time it reopened. The owner’s son, they said, from Osaka. I was able to go to the reopened version once. I walked up to it and found it open, a sign read FOOD IS CHEAPER THAN THERAPY, I ordered a some food and a mango smoothie, someone dropped a fork on the ground, someone played a video at full volume on their phone, my food came, I stopped paying attention. As much as I appreciated the newly mixed smoothies, it felt wrong - Hikari Cafe had died, and this resurrection was nothing more than a well-dressed zombie.

A star, despite its beauty, will eventually burn out and either fade away or explode in a supernova; returning to form in a shinier state was not one of those options. I suppose the world agreed with me, because two weeks later a storm hit and a great tree, an ancient conifer covered in dark needles, crushed Hikari as it toppled. The restaurant was empty, thankfully, but I went to see the wreckage.

Shards of wood and steel splayed out on the sidewalk, support beams crunched and shoved aside, and in the middle, the tree, surrounded by splinters of the building that shimmered under the rain like nebulas. A spiral of glass, an ignition of space dust. Oh, I thought, the supernova.