Chaos Theory

CHAOS THEORY

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show from happiness. We learn so little from peace.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK / Diary

                THERE WAS A TIME in which Hino Shiina believed in kindness. She believed in selflessness, and gentleness, and unconditional love. Although, had someone asked her that question within that time frame, she would surely have been confused by it. They would have had to define those words to her young self, they would have had to translate kindness by her mother's warm hugs, her father's bedtime stories, the old lady next door sharing her Sunday batch of cookies, the boy at her preschool letting her have the swing for one half of recess. They would have had to explain kindness to her by telling her of the lack thereof. They would have had to explain cruelty, and violence, and indifference. And so, Shiina might have answered that, no, she does not believe in kindness, but she knows it as a fact. The sky is blue, flowers bloom in the Spring, her mother is beautiful, and the world is kind.

Shiina took these things as facts for the first six years of her life. In the years that followed, every day that passed proved her wrong.

Looking back, she wonders if all of this could have been prevented, if, someone, at some point, could have warned them, or taken a different direction, or acted on a second or third thought. She wonders if anything, anything at all, could have gone differently, less painfully, less tragically. She wonders if, in some other version of the story, she's twenty-eight and unharmed, twenty-eight and not mourning, twenty-eight and surrounded by all the people she loves. Or if she was always doomed to stand here, in the ruins of Shibuya, covered in too many different shades of red to be counted, extending her hand to her side and only meeting an empty space instead of another hand that always met her halfway.

Shiina read an article, once, about something called Chaos Theory. The branch of mathematics which states that nonlinear dynamical systems that, at first glance, seem haphazard are actually consequences of previous simple equations. It explained that, as time passes by and more actions are taken and followed by reactions, it becomes harder and harder to predict what the final outcome will be. Chaos Theory applies to weather forecasting, for instance—it is relatively easy to predict the weather for the near future, for a day or two, but the further you go, the more yet-unknown variables will come into play. Chaotic systems are unstable and unpredictable as they do not resist outside disturbances and all react to them in different ways.

Mori Haruna was already dead and buried by the time Shiina learned about this, but she remembers thinking that she would have probably been the best person to speak of it with. As soon as she had that thought, she crushed it and scattered its pieces far, far away from her mind. She refused to think any further of her former teacher, of all the things Haruna could have and should have done differently, of all the warning signs she must have ignored, of how she failed so many people. Perhaps it's an unfair train of thought, a burden of blame placed on the shoulders of a woman who wasn't built to bear it. Perhaps it's illogical, as well. After all, Haruna, at the very core of her soul, was an example of Chaos Theory. If she could hear Shiina's thoughts today, Haruna would probably give her that kind, if a little sorry, smile of hers and tell her, no one is omniscient, Shiina. Knowledge is too precious for the gods to share it blindly.

Still, Shiina cannot help but wonder where it went so wrong, what the very first catalyst was. She has names, of course, as well as events which come to mind, but she cannot tell if it was a series of unfortunate events that led them there, or one singular misstep.