Higher

100°

How many years has it been since he had seen a face that didn't contain such ugly expressions? How many days has it been since the last time he shook hands with a human being that was not under the classification of materialistic adults? The façade began to tire him out, but it was not something he could easily discard.

The mask had already stuck to his flesh.

As the show ended, Fukase bowed to the audience, alongside the other actors and actresses who found delight in performing on a big stage. Their smiles were beaming, as radiant as the spotlights that shone over them, and so was his. It was a perfect copy of what once was on his features. It was a perfect layer that nobody will ever suspect of being untrue.

Phantasmagorical. Extraterrestrial. Nonexistent. Null.

As he bent down on his waist to give one last bow, the curtains began to descend, drawing the line between those who only needed to watch, and those who needed to be good enough to watch. It was a hierarchy of sorts, and yet no one even understood that it was of the same concept just because it had a different design. A pyramid was a triangle, and a theatre never had three corners with a total of a hundred and eighty degrees. It was as if the varied format of a room helped brainwash those who stepped into it.

It was disappointing. Just like materialism and dreams.

One would immediately find the need to acquire an item due to the fact that it has been tweaked and augmented. For a necessity like a bag, a lot of manufacturing companies have went out of their way to create their own statement and get more people to flock to their side. An adult's mind has been distorted by the belief that a famous brand makes better bags than that of a local merchandise store just because it has a better standing in society. The idea of making these leather bags and those of ordinary cloth were born for the same purpose, and yet people begin to think there is a difference. They have been successfully brainwashed by something so simple yet so cunning.

And then again, one would need to either give up on their dreams or abandon them completely, just because these materialistic adults have successfully fallen into toxic trances.

"Look, Rana. It's the actor who played the main character!" a mother's voice came from the left, where a few other flashing lights from cameras were coming from. It was quite cold out here, and yet these people were willing to expose themselves to weather that was far from comfortable, just to look up at those they admired. It was more on stupidity than noble sacrifice. As he faced the mother and child, an automatic business smile crossed his features, and the mother swooned. The child was also smiling up at him and waving, to which he got down on one knee and patted her head.

"Do you wish to be a theatre actress as well?" he asked, and before the child could respond, her mother butt into the conversation as if it was her business.

"Oh, oh yes, she wants to be like you and the others one day."

tick

The child simply nodded her head, either out of sheer innocence or out of obligation to not sully her mother's small name.

tock

"She says she wants to help me achieve a dream I could never quite reach."

tick

The mother smiled warmly, and if it weren't for her greedy, sacrilegious remark, Fukase would have been convinced that she birthed her child into a stage of fools out of unconditional love and a promise to take care of her. Maybe. Maybe not.

tock.

"Oh, is that so? Well, I wish the both of you good luck, madame." he bowed slightly, his business smile still plastered on his nonexistent face. "Especially to you, young one." The ulterior motives scratched at his throat and the back of his arms as insistently as a captive, desperate to escape a room that was gradually being gassed. He closed his eyes tightly shut as he turned away from the mother and daughter, their frivolous eyes boring holes into his back.

tick

He needed to break free. He no longer wished to be pressed down under the force of such realities, and although he wanted more than anything to just go back to when he had not yet awakened from his shadowed mind, he knew he couldn't.

tock

For he saw infinity, and it threatened to devour him as a whole, but not to digest him in its acidic stomach. Instead, he was left to wander in such a place, his flesh melting away, only to be replaced by the next hour of sunrise. How many years, exactly, has it been since he started thinking about things he never really had to care about? He knew he was a mere speck who couldn't even be troubled by the state of the entire earth, or the sentiments of other people on the other side of the globe, but he could no longer turn back. If solitude was a drug, then agony was something you could never escape from. Agony was a safe haven for those who knew more than the rest of the population. An addiction. It hurt, but you would willingly stay to see it through.

As the redhead shed his coat and hung it on the rack, he was greeted by a personal assistant who was with him ever since he managed to make a standpoint in the entertainment industry. The blue-haired man smiled warmly as he offered to serve tea, and Fukase returned it without the slightest hesitation. It was just a routine by now, including the complaints and praise he'd offer, the stories he'd tell his assistant after a tour.

Even lying was part of this routine. It was no longer just a bad habit he developed in order to please people. It had already become an element of life.

He sipped his tea.

It was Earl-Grey.