ICON | [ tenya iida ]

[ introduction ]

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❝ even with broken wings,
we still must fly ❞

⇻

NOBODY KNEW HER.
Of everything that one can be unambiguous, gathered green from the ground before touching the withered hands, covered with layers upon layers of injections and operations, undertaking sojourn upon sojourn, vagabondage upon vagabondage, of society's plastic-preserved poison, this inhabited, incontrovertible, inside the continually-concealed cavern of interminable ideas, hypersonic hopes, and inerrable intentions. Years of schooling yearned, propitiously, their own extraordinary equipment with which to excavate the crystalline chamber, conductor of thoughts and emotions, language and movement - the most importune, of course, ideas. And soon the solid was a channel, and the channel was a cave, and the cave was a world, an ocean, a galaxy, a universe, in which birds sang and butterflies flapped their wings to the unspoken tune of growth, prosperity, and desires.

Desires were dangerous things.

From a young age, no one had known her name. She was never popular. Never unpopular, for that matter, but rather somewhere in the lukewarm middle. She never had many friends. She had friends, yes, but only a handful of close ones, a roughly medium amount proportional to the friends of those surrounding her. She was never particularly talented at anything. She was perfectly capable of completing everything, but excelled at nothing; all-around an average child. She obeyed her teachers, albeit just as much as she obeyed her more troublesome friends, and thus had a rather plain reputation.

Shortly enough, however, the reality of the world, as gray as it was, shone through it all. When the wind whispered, she listened, and then it was no longer the wind, but rather her own mind, the observer of all, the carrier of knowledge, the vessel in which every piece of her that made her herself, was so meticulously maintained. Through it all she had seen only the black and white - but now she saw the in-between, the ever-elusive shades of gray.

There were colorful butterflies in a monotone world.

There were monotone butterflies in a colored world.

And there was she.

A transparent butterfly in a transparent world.

She did not want to be the world. She did not want the world to be her.

Because somehow, blending in was far worse than standing out, even if for the wrong reasons.

Nobody would know her face. Nobody would know her name. Nobody would know her.

Was that truly the path she wanted? To exist solely to fade, and fade solely to exist?