Terminal Boredom: Stories

by Izumi Suzuki

Though men were adults they were children, seemingly complex but as simple as could be; they were utterly unmanageable creatures.

‘Men are an offshoot of humanity as well, but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks.’

Hang on. That doesn’t seem right. I’m pretty sure if I was locked up in a place like that for my whole life and never allowed to leave, I’d end up apathetic too.

I answered without thinking. For me, a conversation’s just a series of reactions, reflex responses. I’ve got a habit of saying whatever the other person wants to hear. I’m a real people-pleaser. I know it’s probably not a good thing, but I accept myself – devil-may-care attitude and all.

She wasn’t interested in what I had to say. She was just talking at me. But that’s the way we’d talk: duelling monologues, each of us in a bubble all her own, no hope of ever going anywhere.

Whenever she got that way, I couldn’t help but feel like I was just some human-shaped receptacle, there to receive her emotional excreta.

Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.

In the waking world, I obsess over the superficial. I devote myself to the acme of emptiness. And that devotion infiltrates my dreams, the world of my unconscious. Covered in thick plastic – that’s how I’ve made myself. Over years and years. The sadistic act of self-creation.

There was no way anyone could live in a world like this with a fully functioning mind. You only found yourself feeling angry from morning until night. If she ended up joining some kind of political movement as a result, her mother and father would be upset. Using drugs, she told herself, was her way of being a good daughter.