Spoilers for Shimeji Simulation
As Shijima and Majime start fusing together to become one, Shijima kicks her lover and escapes into the void.
In almost all love stories, the fusion, becoming one, is the main goal. In Shimeji Simulation, it is the threat for love’s very existence. The obvious reading of the series is a gnostic one, the world is a false thing, made by something that shouldn't have made it, and what saves you is knowing — gnosis, seeing through it. Shimeji Simulation gives you all of that. Shijima’s sister, after the world starts glitching, creates a contraption that escapes it — and later everyone lives in their “pocket-worlds” created by themselves. This is the reading Kathryn arrives at in her essay, and she puts it better than I could: "the meaning of life is to understand love." When you return to the kick scene, that reading collapses. Gnosticism strives for dissolution into the One; Shijima runs from it.
Only through individual existence is there Another to Love.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Human Instrumentality Project is literally fusion as salvation. The AT Field — defined in the show as a wall of the heart, a defense against invasion — dissolves, and with it the boundaries of the self. Hideaki Anno is honest about the price of total union: if nobody has an outline, there is nobody left to love. Shinji refuses. But he refuses in the name of the right to suffer, not in the name of love — and the first thing he does with his reconquered separateness is put his hands around Asuka's throat. In EVA, distance is a wall that protects you; in Shimeji Simulation, it is the very form that makes love possible.
Shijima spends what she guesses may be thousands of years alone. She mostly sleeps, because dreaming is the one good thing left. On Majime’s planet, a calendar runs to the year 1400 of the Majime era.
“Every time I wake up from a dream, my chest is pierced with a sharp feeling of loneliness.”
Shijima takes a train, described as the materialization of the will to see one another. While a train crosses distances, they still remain — it is capable of connecting two points, but only because there are two distinct points in the first place. The train comes only after she decides that, despite the risk of dissolving, she wants to see her lover. When they come together, Kathryn is right that there is a realization, and it is all about love. But you can’t understand love. Shijima doesn’t decipher anything. She’s only moved by the desire to see someone; the realization at the end is not a proposition learned, but two people sustaining each other without ever explaining what sustains them.
You cannot comprehend love — you can only be comprehended by it.
Majime, alone in her world, gets tired of darkness and says “let there be light”; tired of being alone, she gives life to her plushies and “sees that it is good.” This is not a vague allusion to Genesis — the book of Creation — but a transcription. Majime is the only character in who series who sustains a world instead of merely inhabiting it.
The structure is clearest when the girls reunite in Majime's universe. There is union, but no one is dissolved. There is distinction, but not separation. This structure has a name. Christians call it the Trinity: three who are entirely one without ever ceasing to be three. What matters is not the number, but the form — Persons who love one another eternally, and are never less themselves for it.
The two girls are together, and they are still two.