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While she'd been Sen, living in the Yuya, she'd never had to look for Haku; he'd always just been there, whether she wanted him or no.
But now she wanted him, and she didn't know where to look. The Kohaku river was gone, dammed and dried up and paved over with unforgiving concrete, and so Chihiro had a hard time knowing how to find Haku again. She asked herself: what happens to the river kami once the river is gone? And she couldn't think of an answer.
One afternoon, she took the train to the apartment complex that stood on the old river bed, thinking that he might still somehow be there. A dark-haired boy walked out of one of the doors, his hair swinging sharp-cut at his jawline, familiar and ancient and beloved; but he was not Haku, and soon he'd gone.
She'd brought a never-cut piece of white paper with her, and she left it folded into a fluttering ribbon by a wall of rounded stones, hoping that they had perhaps been raised from the river bed. She didn't write a proper wish on it, only the characters of his name; she'd learned well enough that names were important, and she loved writing his. As she drew the characters, her heart was filled to bursting with tenderness and the memory of his eyes, shining brightly in the moment when she'd returned it to him. But the stones must have carried little of the spirit of the river, because Haku didn't come to her, or even send her word.
Her mother and father didn't keep a family altar, but she did go to a shrine, once, looking for him. As she washed her face, she remembered drowning, the water rushing over her eyes and into her mouth, and then changing from a violation into an embrace. His embrace.
Chihiro was sure that she remembered him telling her that one day, they would meet again, and she was sure he'd keep his promise. But at the same time she worried that he'd forgotten her, or that Yubaba hadn't freed him, or that something terrible had happened to him. Even in the Yuya, he hadn't been very good at taking care of himself, and then she'd left him behind. Perhaps he'd been hurt, and needed her, and was now lost to her forever. Perhaps he didn't come because he couldn't.
She didn't find Haku at the shrine, though the familiar feeling of kami around her was lovely. She kept looking, trying to discover where he might have gone. Chihiro read the reports of the damming of the Kohaku, the legal documents giving permission for its destruction. She looked at aerial photographs of its winding course taken before the development had been built. She started to read about the watershed of the area, the smaller tributary creeks and streams, the water that passed under the ground, and about the changes that had come after the loss of the Kohaku.
Maybe, she thought, Haku isn't gone. Maybe he just isn't in one place any more, and since I've been calling to him as if he does, he hasn't been able to come to me.
So she went to the streams, and the marshy places where the ground was wet, and she hung her paper prayers again at the old riverbed on a day when the rain came down in grey streaks, because she thought that the water of the river might have passed into the cycle of evaporation and precipitation before the dam had been erected, leaving traces of Haku's spirit in the falling drops. She waited for him each time. He never appeared, but she felt somehow as if he was not far away, and each day when she returned home her heart was quietly comforted.
And then Chihiro started dreaming. She dreamed of flying, of long sad train whistles and floating tears, and she dreamed of Haku's face smiling at her. Sometimes he coiled around her in dragon form, sinuous and silk-scaled. Sometimes he was a boy, wearing old-fashioned clothes and looking at her with fathomless eyes. For nights, she did not dare to speak to him, grateful just too see his face. But at last, one night, she said his name – his real name, Nigihayami Kohaku Nushi – and it spilled long and beautiful off of her tongue. "Chihiro. Welcome back," he said, and her heart leaped joyfully in her chest. She'd found him, and she would make sure not to lose him again.