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“Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?” “Of course they are,” Mitsutsuka said with a smile. “We’re talking about the same light.”
Whenever I chased after a detail, I felt a motion in my chest.
I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game that I would never play.
“Does that mean that the longer we live, the more it feels like time speeds up?” I asked.
“I guess I spent a lot of time sleeping. I really spent a lot of time asleep, probably half the day, like it was nothing. When I woke up, my head would hurt from oversleeping. So I’d just go back to sleep.”
If anything, I felt in sync with the entire world, like my chest was opening to the horizon, and everything before me was a part of me, flowing in and out of me, coolly and freely.
“So, putting it simply,” I said, “the color that we’re seeing is whatever’s left behind.”
My eyes stung, like I was going to cry. Somewhere a bird let out a small chirp. It was a call I’d never heard before.
As long as you’re living on this planet, you have to be serious about something, but it’s better to be serious about a limited number of things.”
Whenever my emotions or whatever kick in, my world goes blank—like something’s taken over me.
“When it comes to love, the only weapon that we’ve got is our emotions, right? So what can you do when your foundation’s all messed up? If that’s the state you’re in, there’s no way you can ever get serious with anybody.”
And that’s why I’m fine with all my feelings being derivative, and why it’s actually a problem if they’re not, because I kinda need them to be.
From an early age, I’d always had a hard time being in groups or socializing, which meant I didn’t really have any enemies, but it also made it harder to make friends.
Noriko spoke in a quiet voice that shook in a puzzling way, like it was blowing in the wind, and said that because she had been teased about it ever since she was little, it made her self-conscious and resistant to talking.
As I sat there surrounded by the blue sky and the whiteness, I felt myself sinking into a depression.
Ice clattered in the glass, the only sound in the room.
But trying to decide what to do next made me so tense that I could almost hear my body cracking as it shrank, to the point where I was unsure which muscles I would need to move to make my arms and legs do what I wanted them to do.
It was a strange sensation, like my core had been twisted up as tightly as humanly possible, but also like I was being crushed to pieces.
It occurred to me that I had never seen somebody else’s face so close before.
I focused my imagination on the rain, letting it wash away all I could see and all I couldn’t see, obliterating everything.
I couldn’t even see inside my feelings far enough to know what they meant.
Sadness and happiness are all experienced by someone else before us; we’re simply following their lead.
Things that I was certain I hadn’t noticed at the time, things that probably hadn’t even happened, and things I never imagined I’d remember sprang up and multiplied like wildflowers, growing silently and with incredible speed, filling my eyes and ears and heart.
“Then again,” she said, wiping her fingertips with the oshibori once more, “maybe your personality’s the problem here.”
“In short,” Kyoko said, “people like her use people like you to validate themselves.
“The humanity’s too much for you?” “Something like that.”
While I listened to Mitsutsuka talk, I observed the length of his fingers around his pen, or the tone of his skin, then look at the pens in his shirt pocket, and watch his eyes trained on the page, and the brown spots in the skin around them.
In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling.
I took a giant breath, my utterly transparent chest sparkling with light as if I’d swallowed a nebula from tens of thousands of light years away.
Not like he made it hard for me to ask. Far from it. I simply couldn’t get the words out.
Are you on Twitter? Everybody writes the most mindless, meaningless stuff on there.
me
He knows that facing the facts won’t change anything, so we might as well keep going.
I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realized how alone I truly was.
Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colors packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch.
“. . . No matter who you are when you come here, Fuyuko, I really do enjoy your company.”
After struggling to focus for two hours at my desk, I would completely lose my drive and climb back under the covers, spending the remainder of the day in a haze.
The world passed by without a sound, and the little part of the sky that I could see outside my window moved through a cycle of colors.
Not like I was expecting anything, but having a phone that never rang and an inbox without any messages was difficult to bear.
No matter where or how I looked, I knew that I would never find the time that we had spent together.
We stared at the man’s body from afar, as if it were a hunk of clay, or an abandoned glove, not one of us stepping off of the sidewalk and into the street to take a closer look.
Had I ever chosen anything? Had I made some kind of choice that led me here?
It occurred to me that maybe I was where I was today because I hadn’t chosen anything.
Unsure if I was feeling crazy or happy, I hung my head and laughed without making a sound.
This was the first time I learned what it feels like to cry with someone there, watching over you.
Will you walk through the night with me? And will you listen to that song with me, just the two of us?
Either way, it’s obviously a lot of trouble for you to open up to somebody, to do something, to get involved, right? I mean, what if they misunderstood you? You’d be devastated, right?
I want to know you better, she said. I want to know you, she cried, so I can be your friend, too.
“I know, sweetie,” she said with a smile. “It sounds like a lot, but this world isn’t so bad, okay? Now hurry up and get born.”
Squeezing my eyes shut against the onslaught of memories, I felt a pain pass through my chest over and over, and told myself that this would be the last time that I listened to the song.
Now that the light was gone, I closed my eyes softly, knowing it would only be a short time until the light came back in the morning.
