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You make one last effort to concentrate on the mumbled speech of your teacher, but it’s impossible. Once again, you fail to listen to what she’s talking about for more than two seconds, let alone to understand whatever theory, process, or procedure she’s explaining. You glance at your notebook to try and make sense of the notes you’ve been taking subconsciously, but the few lazy tips you have written down are surrounded by nonsensical scribbles and doodles, mostly hearts, flowers, and faceless couples. How could you let this happen again? It’s like the sadness inside you prevents you from paying attention to a class you don’t even care about. It’s hard to care about these superficial things anymore. Listening to class isn’t going to make you feel happy, and you know it. So why bother?
It’s no use trying. You start looking at anywhere but your teacher, now attempting to distract yourself from the emptiness in your life. Looking out the window doesn’t make it any better. Nor does looking at the varied faces of your classmates, some of whom look bored, some interested, and some just as distracted as you are. You wonder if it’s possible that at least one of them feels just like you do. Most likely. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not like you’d be able to bring these feelings up in public. You glance at the clock, but the hands have barely moved since the last time you checked, and, damn, why is it taking so long? You’ve been waiting all day for lunch break, it has been the only thing in your mind since you woke up, and it’s only two minutes away now. So why is the time slowing down? You internally beg those last two minutes to go by quickly, as if you could speed the process by desiring it enough.
Your desperate thoughts allow you to tune out the world around you, but it still takes an eternity for the bell to ring. When it does, however, you’re the first one to bolt out of the classroom, out to the hallway, without looking back. The bustle of the students coming out of class, opening and closing their lockers, and walking to the cafeteria fills up the school, but you run away from the crowd and all the excitement to find the quietest, loneliest spot in the whole school at this hour. Over the last few months, you’ve tested empty classrooms, rarely frequented hallways, and even the restroom, but you’ve determined that this one spot is the one that works better for you. It’s not too pleasant, but you can stand it, and, most importantly, it’s silent, it’s faraway from the judging eyes of your peers, and you can connect to the Internet from here. Most of the times, at least.
With your lunchbox in hand, you plop down, fidget until you’re comfortable enough, and take your phone out of your pocket with one swift motion. Unlocking it, you automatically open a video call, hoping that the connection will be stable enough to be able to talk for at least fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes or thirty at best, nothing more. It’s the only thing you ask for. Even though you would appreciate more time, fifteen minutes of uninterrupted talk is much better than spending up to an hour struggling to even start a call, only to give up and go the rest of the afternoon regretting not being able to exchange just a few words.
Everyday it’s like this. The most special part of your day is that rushed lunch break at school. It’s the only time you have to talk to your boyfriend, it’s literally just once a day, and, because of how short and scarce it is, it’s the most precious half an hour for you. No matter how much comfort you need, how lonely you are, or how much you miss him, it’s always just thirty minutes at most, and they always go by in the blink of an eye. You do have other people in your life who care for you, but not being able to see the guy you love in real life has been silently destroying you in the inside. If you are being lucky, your half hour is conceded, but you can never touch him. You can never hug him, kiss him, or feel his warm breath on your neck when he leans on your chest after a hard day of school. You can’t go out anywhere, stay in watching movies, or share a meal. There’s always a screen between him and you. It hurts. It hurts bad and it hurts everyday.
Your video call loads for a while, but he picks up soon. On the other side of the screen, you see your boyfriend, with his characteristic messy black hair, his adorable glasses, and his sweetest smile, looking back at you with an expectant shine in his eyes. You know he’s been waiting too, just as impatiently as you have. Like always, he’s in his PJs and in a darkened room where it’s hard to see him clearly, but going by his face, you wouldn’t be able to tell he just woke up in the middle of the night. He’s been getting used to this. He’s been sacrificing his rest for your sake for so long that it doesn’t affect him much nowadays, or at least not immediately.
“Hey, sweetie.” He says, in his deep, charming voice, which is so fluent that anyone would’ve mistaken him for a native English speaker. “Are you having lunch right now?”
He asks because he knows that, sometimes, you get so focused on the conversation that you forget to eat, and then you’re hungry during the rest of the day. To please him, you open your lunchbox and start eating hastily. You really don’t want to lose any time eating when you have the chance to spend time with your boyfriend instead. You just can’t waste a single moment.
“Enjoy your meal.” He says politely.
Worried that he’s losing too much sleep, you ask him if he’s been waiting for too long, to what he says he just woke up five minutes ago. He tells you not to worry over him, since he has Morgana to take care of his sleep schedule. Your boyfriend has a curfew, which is one of the things which make it hard to communicate with him, and he always jokes that it’s Morgana, his cat, who forces him to go to sleep early, but you know it must be because of his guardian, Sojiro. Everynight, though, he sets his alarm a few minutes before the clock hits one in the morning for him, and he wakes up as stealthily as possible to avoid being spotted and sent back to bed. At first, there were calls in which he’d have to hang up suddenly because he had been caught, or even calls that he wouldn’t be able to pick up, but he eventually mastered the art of sneaking out of his room at night with his laptop for a quick video call.
“Losing a bit of sleep is nothing compared to the burden of not being able to see you.” He says. “I’m very glad to see you again. I missed you. I missed you so much.”
Your heart flutters as you tell him that you missed him too, that you wish you could see him more often, and that you’ve anxiously waited for this call all day. You trust him a lot, not only as a lover, but as a friend, so you’re able to communicate your feelings freely, and, before you know it, you find yourself talking to him about your friends, your family, your hobbies, and your school assignments. You inevitably speak about how boring your classes have been, about how you almost drifted off to sleep during a particularly tedious lecture, and about the latest rumors you’ve heard from your classmates. He lets you speak to your heart’s will, as he listens attentively, nods every once in and while, and laughs with you at the most recent antics of your school’s troublemakers. You let him know about your joys, your worries, and your problems. Despite not being very talkative, he always has the right answer for everything. He sympathizes with your concerns, cheers you up when you speak about something unsettling, and shares your happiness, even if he wasn’t there to experience those happy moments at your side. The happy moments are fewer and more scattered around as time passes, though. Everything seems more and more dull the more you realize how lonely it all feels without sharing it with the person you love the most.
You eventually bring up a recent piece of news you read about on the Internet on your way to school today. It’s about the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, a Japanese group of outlaws that dedicate themselves to targeting criminals, ‘stealing’ their hearts, and making them confess their own crimes. Your boyfriend is a big Phan-boy, he follows their every move, and it almost seems like he knows their next move even before they themselves know. He’s so passionate about their activities, that he made you curious and you decided to check out any information available about them. At the beginning, due to the lack of news about them in your language, it was hard to keep up with him, who literally went to the school where the Phantom Thieves made their first move, but they’ve progressively gotten more famous after targeting more well-known criminals. Now you’re able to contribute to your boyfriend’s musings about the group and their morality. Either way, this morning, you read a report about a rich business man who had received a calling card only today, or yesterday in Japanese time, and you wanted to hear what the dedicated Phan-boy thought about it.
“Kunikazu Okumura.” He looks down and bites his lip, but he can’t repress a smirk. “Something tells me that The Phantom Thieves must be having a hard time dealing with him.”
Your boyfriend sighs, averting his eyes. Figuring out that something is wrong, you ask him if he’s gotten into any fights recently. After all, you know that he’s a pure-hearted person who would rather not hurt other people, but he would fight anyone for what he considers the right reasons. It’s happened more than once before. His exhaustion, his cuts, his scars, and his bruises were never visible at first sight, but you knew they were there, even if your boyfriend rarely brought them up voluntarily. When you asked him how he’d gotten hurt, or who he had fought, he always dodged the issue, and he instead tried to shift the topic of conversation towards you, his friends, or the Phantom Thieves. No matter how much he told you he was fine, though, you couldn’t help but worry. Now that you are talking about the Phantom Thieves, it is the perfect opportunity for you to ask him about it.
He looks at the screen with a confused expression and blinks. “What do you mean?”
You say that he tends to get into fights on the same days when the Phantom Thieves pull off their heists. He chuckles and brushes it off, but you mean it. No matter what he says, the evidence is there, and it’s obvious that there’s a correlation. One possibility is that, he’s such a big Phan-boy, that he’ll get into fights with anyone who trash talks the Phantom Thieves, especially after one of their successes, but you doubt it. He’s not the kind of obsessive fan who would go to great lengths to defend his heroes, especially when beating someone up wouldn’t solve anything. The other option, the most believable one, is that he actually collaborates with the Phantom Thieves directly. You’ve been suspecting that possibility for quite some time, but he never gives you a straight answer. As he always does, he deviates from the implication that he might be involved with the activities of The Phantom Thieves.
“I guess you could say I’ve gotten into a few fights…” He reluctantly admits. “But it’s nothing to worry about. The medicine has helped.”
He sighs heavily and you know he’s glossing over the issue for your sake. Saddened and a little frustrated, you remind him that he has to take care of himself and you assure him that you are here for him. He should know that he can talk to you about anything he needs, that a relationship is a two-way street, and that he can trust you just as much as you trust him. In fact, you feel bad about burdening him with all of your problems when he has a lot going on in his life too. He replies that you’re not a burden, only for you to insist that he can rely on you just as much as he needs to. Actually, you want him to rely on you. You want to help him, just as he has helped you in the past. Despite the overwhelming distance between you two, you want to share his successes, his failures, his problems, and his best moments. Even if only through casual conversation, you want to be by his side at all times. You want to be there to pick him up when he falls down, to comfort him when the world crumbles around him, and to give him company when everything is lost. You want him to be happy, no matter what. You love him.
Your words make him perk up almost instantly and he gazes at you through the screen. There’s a thoughtful silence as he breathes in sharply and closes his eyes. Slowly, he grabs his glasses with one hand and takes them off, opening his eyes again, but without looking at you. He mutters your name and it rolls off his tongue nicely. He says it two more times as if comfort himself with the fact that you care about him.
“... It hurts.” He finally says, with his voice quavering abnormally. “Everything hurts, sweetie. I can’t stand it, I… It’s hard. It’s hard. The medicine helps, but when you’re getting beaten up by powers stronger than you could have ever imagined on a weekly basis... it’s hard not to break down. I’ve been doing this for a while, but I still can’t get used to it. Am I even doing the right thing? Ah… It’s like I’m always wearing a mask, trying to look stronger than I really am. Trying to support everyone else when I’m breaking down in the inside. Trying to… Trying to hold on while I can. But my body hurts. I’m tired. Sometimes I’d like to sit back and relax for once. But I must keep going on, for everyone around me. For society, for my friends, for… for you. I must be strong. But… It’s hard. It hurts. It seems like I’m always suffering in silence… I… I got badly injured last time. I’ve had a sleepless night up to now, with all my injuries burning and aching even after visiting Takemi… It hurts. And it’s scary. When things get particularly tough, sometimes I wonder if I’ll get to live another day. If I’ll get to wake up again, if I’ll see the sun, if I’ll see your smile one more time. And there are a lot of people depending on me. So, even if I’m not alright, I need to make sure everyone around me is. Their lives depend on me. It’s as if… As if I’m playing god. I can’t make any mistakes, not even the smallest one. They… They all rely on me.”
As if reliving painful memories, he squeezes his eyes close and his hand reaches out to his forehead. He’s holding his breath in and his whole body has tensed up. It’s almost as if he’s trying not to cry. Shaken up at his own outburst, he places his glasses back on his nose. “I’m sorry.” He says. “I didn’t mean to bring the mood down. But I can’t talk about this with anyone else. You understand, right?”
It breaks your heart to see him, who is usually such a cheerful, confident, and relaxed guy, melt down like this. More than ever before, you wish you could be over there right now to give him a tight hug and whisper in his ear that everything will be alright. You wish he could believe in himself like everyone around him believes in him. However, it seems that the expectations others place on him, and how much they rely on him for support is ruining him little by little, as he suffers all by himself. It pains you to think that such a wonderful person is dealing with such thoughts all alone. It pains you to imagine what must go through his mind everyday for him to feel this way. It really pains you that you can’t do anything but allow him to vent like he feels he can’t do with anyone else. You nod, reassuring him once again that he can open up to you about anything. But you cannot hold back your tears when you see him like this. Dammit, why can’t you be there for him when he needs you the most?
You sniff and a tear rolls down your cheek. He notices immediately and improvises a sad smile. “Sweetie… Please don’t cry for me. I’m alright. I can do it. I promise I’m okay. I don’t want you to be sad because of me.”
Hell, you want to hug him. You want comfort for you and him both, but the only thing you can do is helplessly reach the screen of your phone and try to touch his beautiful face. It’s useless, though. That’s not enough. You want to sit next to him, to put your arm around his shoulder, and to cuddle with him during his stressful night. Finally snapping, you blurt it all out. You tell him how badly you miss him, how much you need him, and how hard you want him to rely on you. You wish you could be the support he needs but that he feels he’s never had. Moreover, you wish you could be the support he deserves. It’s hard for him to admit it, but he needs someone to talk to, someone to help him turn his frown upside down, and to share both his good and his bad moments. And even though the daily video call you both have committed to gives you something to look forward to everyday and it’s the most valuable thing in your lives, it’s never enough. You need more time together. These calls need to be more frequent, these talks need to be longer, and you need to see his face. If you cannot touch him or accompany him during the most important milestones of his life, then at least you want to provide him with moral support. As for the support he already shows you, you want to extend it as well. You always feel empty when you wait all day long for his calls, but it doesn’t have to be like that. You go on and on about how you feel and he doesn’t interrupt at all. He waits until you finish to agree.
“I feel the same way.” He also reaches out with his arm as if he could touch you through your phone. “I’m so sorry I’m so busy all of the time. If only we could communicate with each other more often.”
He’s right. When it’s evening or night time where you live, you can’t call him because he’s at school, and, if anything, you can only exchange a couple of texts with him. Even if you do, you can only do so sparingly, out of fear that he’ll get discovered by his teachers and scolded. When his classes finish for the day, you’re still asleep, and during the evening, he always takes up a bunch of tasks, responsibilities, and compromises that keep him away while you go to school. That’s why lunch break is so precious to you, because it’s the only time when your schedules align, provided, of course, that your boyfriend doesn’t care about having to wake up at one in the morning for half an hour only to see you. It’s rough, but it’s nobody’s fault. You just happened to live in opposite sides of the planet. You’re helpless, and, if you want this relationship to work, you are forced to deal with it until you can see each other in person.
“... Let’s do something.” He says. “I’ll call you more often. I’ll make time for you. I promise I will be a better boyfriend and I’ll do my best to treat you how you deserve to be treated. We can’t always video call each other, but I’ll send you more pictures. And videos. And texts. Alright? Will you do the same?”
Wiping your cheek dry, you tell him that you’ll be there for him whenever he needs it. It won’t take you too much extra effort, for you already think about him constantly, so it’ll make you happy to check up on him more frequently. He needs to be an active part of your life and you want the exact same role in his own life. You like it when he opens up to you. You love him.
“Love you too.” He smiles warmly. “Thank you for keeping me sane.” He sees you’re still gloomy and tries to cheer you up with a more excited tone of voice. “Hey, we’ll see each other in real life eventually. I’ll give you a thousand hugs and kisses to make up for all the time we’ve spent apart. Oh, and I’ll prepare my best curry and my best cup of coffee for you, sweetie. You’ll love them. And if we meet here in Tokyo, I’ll take you out to Seaside Park at night, I’ll shower you with gifts, and we’ll snuggle together as we admire the landscape. Would you like that? But if we meet at your place, you’ll have to show me your favorite spots. I want to see where you like to go for fun in real life. You’ll teach me your hobbies and your traditions, right? Do you promise? I’m a fast learner.”
You smile at his adorable boyish excitement and you promise you will create new, amazing memories together. Just the thought of bringing him home, of showing him around your school, of taking him out to the most romantic, fun, and recognizable spots of your hometown makes you feel better. You can’t wait for that day to come by. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to hang on, contacting him as frequently as you both need to if you want to relieve your loneliness. You need to talk to him more often, and you know he needs it too.
The bell rings, signalling the end of your break. Your lunchbox is still more than half full, but you don’t regret it at all. You feel free, as if a burden had been lifted from your shoulders, as if you didn’t have to deal with your sadness on your own anymore. In your phone’s screen, your boyfriend seems surprised, as if he didn’t expect the bell to ring. You also think it’s too soon, but you mentally reassure yourself that it won’t be a problem. After all, the two of you will make a conscious effort to have more of these comforting chats from now on. You don’t hang up the call yet, but you start to pick up your lunch.
“Already?” He asks. “Yeah, you should go to class. I should also go to sleep, I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow. In any case, I’ll be waiting for you. I might not be able to reply right away, but text me when you leave school, okay? I hope everything goes well in your classes. Love you.”
You thank him and wish him a good night. He then hangs up from his side of the screen, leaving you all by yourself once again. Strangely enough, though, you don’t feel alone anymore. Now you’re not only looking forward to your daily calls, which often fail because of the wi-fi, the noise, his curfew, or other reasons, but you’re also looking forward to the texts, pictures, and videos he promised. You slip your phone back into your pocket, with an uncontrollable grin invading your face, you take your lunchbox, and you quickly head back to class. You’re determined to make this relationship work. It feels good to know that you have someone who’ll always watch your back, and who will face any obstacles in order to be by your side whenever you need him. Same for him. You’ll cheer him up. You’ll listen to what he has to say. Supporting each other in the good and in the bad, you’ll be both patiently waiting for the day in which you’ll finally be able to hold hands, kiss, and say ‘I love you’ to each other’s face.