Allow me to say ask this much. If you had knowledge of when your life would crumble away before your very eyes, would you stop it? That's not always how it works, nothing is as easy as it first seems.
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - Isaac Newton's third law of motion, and the most I can remember from the top of my head of what I studied in Physics class.
If it's truly a law of motion, does it apply to the motion of life as well? Does everything you do really have a profound reaction of equal size, or are the things that occur more frivolous than that? These are the questions that tend to come into your mind when you while away the hours sat at the table of a once more atmospheric coffee room on the second floor of a bustling arcade.
These were the questions that buzzed aimlessly in the expanse of my mind, its substance syphoned away by harsh realisation. These were the questions I had exactly one year in the past, and the questions I try so very hard to hide under the tightly-clasped net of my subconscious. Unknown to me, that was also the moment that my being underwent a change. Maybe it would be better to call it a reversion, a return to the lowest and most unsupported state of myself. If the water of the river abandons you, the only choice you have is to flail on the land until you accustom to it, or eventually dry out.
I struggled to accept it, the pain that came from the denial of your desires. A denial that one half of you finds impossible to rebel against because of its certainty, digging into your chest with a frigid spike like an ice pick. You come to realise that this pain is something you have to become comfortable with.
It was a month later when I stopped visiting the coffee room, then a month after that when I stopped visiting the noodle restaurant. Yoshimura introduced me to ordering takeaway online. I suppose he was the only person I could turn to. Sometimes I still feel bad for neglecting his calls because I was too shy to answer them.
My parents had always come with me on my visits to the strangely spoken and endearingly empathetic women, whose offices were filled with the odour of fresh leather furniture, loss and deprival. But I couldn't bear it if they were to find out I'd fallen into the same pit of unending spikes again. For their sake and my own.
Maybe what I was really trying to do was blame myself, because I could never see the real reason. I never wanted, or ever want to, face the real reason behind it. The reason they left me and my dream behind that day.
I shrank away into the mouse hole of my apartment room for just under a year, strumming away at the strings of my dwindling nostalgia and staring blankly into the static screen of the present.
The moment that everything changes is the moment you realise that nothing has changed at all.
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Rebellion of the Soul
Mystery / ThrillerEdogawa, Tokyo, Japan - January 2020. A unique citizen awakes on the morning of New Years to an event that would change the lives of everyone who came into contact with it, especially their own. Depressed, listless and a shut-in, they seek f...
