G.G.

It was an inconsequential Spring the year I died. The cherry blossom trees laid their blushing carpets softly, cautiously, only to be trampled underfoot. Days grew brighter and damper, as the people grew sicker, and I paled swiftly on my deathbed.

That was the year I realised I was no longer young.

In all fairness, however, youth is an elusive concept. As soon as we are aware of it, it escapes us.

The world persevered with its revival through those blossoming months as I lay waning, grieving my own death. An ancient, inconsolable grief, flooding my lungs with every breath and strangling me into silence. As my limbs grew useless and leaden, my world was narrowed to a barred glass square; through the window, I watched the season pass by, fresh petals glistening atop the city, and listened with newfound resignation. I’m here! I wanted to scream. But was I? No one would believe me.

I silenced my own cries, and closed my eyes to the world once more.

As I listened, I became aware of a certain rhythm in the world around me. The passing of time brought events that came and went.
Change is the rhythm of life. I had fallen out, and so I was left to observe from the shadows.

On the first Sunday of March, I ventured back into the house. The rooms and their inhabitants were now unfamiliar, and a strange sense of isolation came over me as I watched them quietly. Watched as they conversed and argued, watched my mother turn her violent attention to her other children as my father sagged, alone, collecting dust. Voices rang out from the dining room - my sister was preparing to celebrate hanami with her friends.

“We do this every year! Why can’t I just have fun without being questioned?”

“Life is not just about having fun. Think of your responsibilities for once! What would you do if I were as idle as you?”

They faced each other tensely across the table, mirror images, reflected in turn on the glass tabletop. The distance between them seemed to widen with each passing second.

“Well I’m not going to argue. We’re going to Arashiyama, and I’ve already packed lunch.”

My mother sighed, her face crumpled and grey as ever. The exchange was simply routine - this household of obligatory conflict was never blessed with peace. I turned my gaze away from the wretched sight and looked instead to my sister’s soft, flushed face, wondering what it was to be alive.

Soon, the dishes were cleared and the pair stood, eager to leave. As they fled, I drifted to the table and sat in a vacant seat. In the ensuing silence, I observed a crack in the tabletop; a slender fissure halving the glass, thin as a hair.

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Spring soon gave way to Summer. The fresh young days melted into long stretches of sun and sweat. The air carried a hot odour of smoke and chemical sunscreen, and the streets outside my room squirmed with cars and bustling crowds. I had always hated Summer. Its humid deluge upon the more serious seasons was an intrusion upon my usually sober existence.

The spacious living room was the coolest area of the house. It was wide and low and neutral. The open plan of the first floor joined the living room with the kitchen, where the sun beamed at its reflection in the scrubbed countertops. I often found myself finding solace there, staring drunkenly out of the sliding glass doors to the balcony.

I was sitting at the dining table one airless afternoon, a forgotten lemonade fizzing to my left, when I realised I was no longer alone. Somewhere, in the elusive stretch of the minute, my sister had appeared in the kitchen.

I did not meet her eyes, but I knew it was her. She stood still in front of the humming fridge, and it was unclear whether she had been watching me, or if she even faced me. Helplessly, I recalled the days when we were as close as family, and wondered when that had changed so completely.

“Is this all you’re good for now?”

The question cleaved through the viscous stillness. Alarmed, I turned to my sister and met her eyes at last. She stared hard into mine.

“Stop doing this to yourself. It’s so useless.” She took a few steps closer, and my body began to tremble with the need to escape. “Get up and do something. I’m sick of watching you become such a loser.”

She spoke clearly and deliberately, enunciating the cruel words in a formal manner, as if I had become little more than a stranger, an outsider.

“What?” I rasped.

I couldn’t continue. But she was finished with me, and she plucked the lemonade from its post and strode away.

I had been a vacant husk for so long that her directness was an awful shock. All at once, the tangle of shame, struggle and racing thoughts came surging back as blood rushed again through my idle veins. What have I been doing for the past few months? Suddenly I hated myself. What had I wasted, while I was drifting in and out, inept with boneless wallowing and self-pity?

At a loss, I glanced down at the tabletop. Somehow, the glass had fractured completely from the centre, new cracks splaying out like fingers over its splintered surface. Staring wordlessly back at my fragmented reflection, my vision grew hot and bleary. As the tears burned clear tracks down my skin, all the pain that had been sealed away burst violently, brilliantly free. I wept, ashamed, and turned toward the blazing sun as I was washed anew.

The next morning, the glass was covered with a pale new tablecloth.

+++

The crawling heat stilled into Autumn, then hardened into Winter.

Nagoya has settled once more into boredom. The wind is still thin in early December, steadily whittling away the feeble warmth of the sun. In the evenings, the city blinks drowsily at the empty sky.

Presently, the sky is an unassuming grey, the same shade as the coats my mother and I are hastily struggling into. There’s a weekly sale at the supermarket, and the scavenging is going to be fierce. Friday afternoon, 2pm, AEON MALL. The door opens with the soft exhale of chilly dampness, and we step outside and away into the hushed maze of sidewalks. Before long however, the greyness above darkens to a telling intensity. My mother curses anxiously under her breath - chikushō! Shit! What absurd weather! - because it is December, so why would we expect rain? But the clouds roll overhead and then, unbelievably, it begins to pour.

The rain stirs up a fine mist on the tiles as it rushes from the featureless sky. In the next step, I slip, and shatter on the pavement.

"Heavens, is she alright?" "Oh my god."

"Scared the hell out of me!"

I curl onto my side as I lie on the sodden concrete. The droplets are a wintry caress on my eyelids, and I feel myself drifting away. Perhaps I will meld into the ground, soon to become a fossil for some unfortunate passerby to uncover, a distant memory of who I once was.

"What is wrong with you!" my mother wails, heaving at my arms. And just like that, I am wrenched back into the world of the living.

+++

Sometimes, in those rare moments of lucidity, I can almost remember how it felt to be alive.

I remember this particular drive in my childhood. I was with my mother, on our way to my violin lesson. I was looking out the window, as I always do - watching the spiralling dust motes in the shivering summer air, heatwaves distorting the half-dilapidated buildings and the sluggish cars. We were driving down a long main road, approaching the bridge, when my mother suddenly asked: “Hey honey - when you look back at your memories, are they mostly happy or sad?”

I snapped out of my trance in surprise. I understood the words clearly enough– but I was unsure of which answer her question warranted, suspicious as I was of its sincerity. My mother seldom really cared to ask how I felt.

“Happy ones, I think.” The words were sincere, though they tasted peculiar on my tongue. “Oh thank God.” There was a short pause. “That means you’re still a happy child, then.”

My mother caught my eye in the rearview mirror, smiling. A brief moment of acknowledgement, before turning her attention back to the heat-baked road. She seemed strangely satisfied, and it became clear that I’d answered correctly. Still a happy child. My mood soured at her self-assuring conclusion.

It would be a long time before either of us realised that I wasn’t.

Being a child, however; I mulled over that question for the rest of the drive. Were they happy? I certainly didn’t think they’re sad.....no, that wasn’t the word to describe them. I didn’t know the words back then. But even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to say them anyway.

Then I remembered that she’d asked if they were mostly happy or mostly sad.

So I thought again. And most of the happiness I felt...was a primal kind of pride. Vanity. A sense of superiority - at winning, gloating, finally getting praise from my parents. Being seen, in the ways that others wanted to see me - being loved, for the reasons that others decided were meaningful. That happiness came from them, and I had little left to save for myself.

There were of course simpler moments in my childhood. But it was just a pity that I also forgot about the good times when I needed to forget the bad.

+++

The world comes alive at nightfall. The moon pulls back the curtain of day and unveils the stage of the city, a swank and glittering mirage where memories are made to be forgotten. As the lights of man darken the stars, so do the people fade into each other, a collectively rising hum in the land of night.

But the night is a sweet liar. It creates intrigue disguised as fear and foolishness disguised as courage. Things are unseen, unknown, and therefore unreal.

Tonight, however, the house is quiet. The rooms are still with a false sense of peace, as unrest brews in the hearts of their inhabitants.
My room is cold in its stillness; there is me inside the four walls, and outside there is everything else. But in this rare moment of calm, I am afraid– afraid of the impending wave of loneliness as it stalks me in my solitude; lingering in the next breath, every coming minute where I am still alone.

When emptiness comes, we must find a way to fill it. “Mom?”
The silence presses closer.

“Dad?”

I call for my sister. I scream for my brother. Where has everyone gone? Why did they leave, and why was I left behind? I open the blinds and peer out the gaps to find the sidewalk empty, the street still, the windows dark. And finally, I open the door.

I was wrong about the outside. There is no sign of people, and being in the middle of winter also means there is scarcely any sign of life. The usually cramped road is bare– cars, motorbikes, bicycles have vanished on journeys of which I know nothing. A row of street-lights illuminate the sidewalk in an endless procession of intermittent yellow circles. I have two options left: forward, or back. So I walk. I follow the row of streetlights, marching, left right left right left right, breathing, in out in out in out. I cross the chasms of nothingness between the lights as quickly as I can until I no longer recognise the street and there is nothing left but the next flickering patch of yellow. The stars observe my path with cruel apathy - or the ghosts of stars, light which hurtled through space and left the failing body behind to die. That seems more fitting. My legs turn a corner and loneliness finally finds me, a familiar old enemy. My eyes peel themselves upwards from the pavement and back into their sockets. I stop walking. I look. The apartment building looms ahead like a spectre.

I am home.

My room is even colder than before. With numb hands I close the door and fumble through the stacks of CDs on the floor. One clatters to the ground near my knee; Mojave 3, Ask Me Tomorrow. I slam it into the speaker and turn the volume to max. The ethereal tones of Dream Pop swells from the device, a song as familiar as loneliness. The wave breaks, engulfing everything.

And so I sit, curled toward the ivory desk, music undulating across the room and a depression in my chest.

The pen of my tongue has ceased to form words - my mind has become a mere container for consciousness. The labels on the CDs shudder into incomprehensibility. Ligneous rooms stretch soundlessly away from sight. They were empty; the night was devoid of voices.

And in that moment, I felt very, very alone. 

+++

It’s said that seeing is most important. Our eyes are windows, to view both inward and outward, the vital means to observe all we can. But seeing can quickly become meaningless if we choose to be blind. What we hear is more important. There is so much silence in the world, because we see but choose not to speak. So how are we to listen?

As if to answer my question, the door to the classroom bursts open. A barrage of students thunders into the room, filling up its corners, the empty desks and chairs. Lunch break is coming to an end. I turn away from those wide smiles and lusty conversations toward the window, a square of muted scenery.

The sky outside the thick, mottled panes of glass is blindingly white. Life stirs all around me in the form of voices, humming, writhing bodies and regular, rhythmic breaths. Lashes flutter with each passing second, time ticks on the wall outside. Incessant chatter nudges in waves against my eardrums.

It's almost fifth period and I am full of sadness, but it isn’t just an emotion. It’s a tangible thing, curling through my ribcage, into the heart, the tips of my fingers, behind my eyelids. Fills me up like blue, blue water, until I want to burst with its waves. Until my lungs burn for air, and I need -

Good times for a change

See, the luck I've had

Can make a good man

Turn bad

“Hey, Mari! Flip your skirt back down, who’re you trying to impress? Yuuto, huh?” “Shut up, Suzume!”

Classic Mari, they all laugh. Falling over each other in mirth, sprightly with ruddy adolescence.

Haven't had a dream in a long time

See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

I adjust my headphones more securely over my ears. The song fills my head, drowning out my classmates.

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time

Please, please, please let me get what I want.
I clasp my hands together reverently, before realising it is a ridiculous action. God won’t listen to a prayer that never began. It’s just the title of the song.

Lord knows, it would be the first time.

~ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths

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