Chapter Text
Akechi Goro was never taught how to cry.
That is to say, every time he does, it feels like the end of the fucking world. And it’s been happening more and more and more often lately.
It’s such an arduous, absolutely graceless process that it puts him out of commission for the entire rest of the day. It burns, and stings, and makes him feel both frigid and like a ball of fire. He thinks his body is just making up for lost time, and years of it; as a teenager, the only things he really allowed himself to feel were anger and resentment, typical of someone his age, yet entirely divorced. God forbid he cried in the orphanage. In a foster home. God forbid.
So when he lets himself cry, the culmination of any and every kind of emotion he’d never have allowed himself to feel, it’s so alien that it feels as if he’s discovered a new color: something that’s been there the entire time, yet out of reach. Something he’s shocked nobody else seems to have discovered first. Because they had been allowed to cry, probably.
Goro is not crying right now, however, because right now, he is on his way to his job. He wasn’t lucky enough to grab a seat on the train today — he never is — and he’s swaying along with the crowd as he stands not too dissimilarly to a packed sardine in a can. He always feels disgusting like this, but there’s nothing to be done about it, so it’ll have to do.
His job is fine. It’s not really a thinking job. He works in the back of a bookstore, taking inventory and the like. It’s fine, really.
There’s not much else he can do when he didn’t finish high school or go to college, so it’s fine.
He steps off the train, overwhelmingly sweaty and annoyed because of it considering it’s still autumn-into-winter season and there is no reason to be sweaty right now, and makes his way up and to the right, where his job will be.
He wishes for more sometimes. But it’s a selfish thought and he knows it, so he wishes less than he used to.
Not to mention that he’s had quite enough more for a lifetime, thank you very much.
It’s really all he can do to not sit and think about it too hard. How he’s ended up here, alive despite it all, living what one would likely call a ‘normal’ life. It’s mundane in all the ways he had refused his life would ever be.
Actually, let’s amend — Goro doesn’t think he’ll ever be ‘normal’, and he hates the idea of what it could mean, anyway, because it’s not him and it doesn’t include people like him. His therapist uses that word too much for comfort, asking things like What does a normal day look like to you? and Do you consider your habits normal? knowing it’s useless, because what is he supposed to say? She wouldn’t understand. Not to be defiant, but she simply wouldn’t. He’s gotten very good at bullshitting answers to questions like these, which he’s aware is not the point of therapy, but it’s just easier this way.
He pushes the door to his work open to a ding while pondering these thoughts.
“Hi, Akechi-san,” greets one of his nameless coworkers from behind a shelf. He’d maybe feel bad about not knowing her name if he saw her for more than twenty seconds per shift, but he does not, so.
“Good morning,” he nods.
He’s almost reached the door to the back when he hears a thunderous voice calling his name. “Goro-kun! How have you been?”
His boss.
Goro's boss is a man who acts far older than his age named Nobunaga Toshiyuki. His personality irritates Goro more than a little bit, because he acts in a way that's supposed to be supportive, but it comes off as patronizing. Most everyone affectionately calls him ‘Toshi’. As affectionately as they can, anyway, because he nearly insists that they do; it's a rite of passage of being hired at their store. Call me Toshi, son! he had said to Goro on his first day, with a big clap of his hand on his back. Goro merely scowled and did not do that, because the man wasn’t even thirty.
He likes Toshiyuki enough. He’s not a bad manager. The ‘old soul’ schtick gets on his nerves, sure, but he’s understanding and patient. He’s got a young daughter that he prattles on about, loves her to death, has a thousand photos up of her in his office. Goro wouldn’t say he’s jealous of this toddler that he doesn’t know, but he’s pretty damn close, if he had to be honest. Which he wouldn’t be.
Goro turns around to see Toshiyuki barreling towards him from across the store like a freight train with no breaks. He’s a huge guy, just in general, and Goro surmises that at least part of his personality stems from not wanting people to be afraid of him because of this.
“Toshiyuki-san,” he responds, waiting for him to catch up. Once he does, he’s got the biggest smile on his face. Much too big for a morning shift at work.
“So, how are you?” he repeats, expectantly. “Anything fun going on lately? Any fun dates, or are you still cruising bachelor-style, eh, eh?” He jabs an elbow towards Goro’s side. It’s the kind of thing that becomes awkward when it doesn’t actually touch the person you’re aiming it at, but Goro made it very clear very early on (after the back-clapping incident) that he did not want to be touched, so this is the best Toshiyuki can hope to get.
He ignores the question about ‘dates’. Talking about his love life with Toshiyuki is the conversational equivalent of getting teeth pulled. It’s not like he has much to say, anyway. “Just work, I’m afraid.”
“Really? Goro-kun, you’re breaking my heart here. Have some fun, why don’t you?”
Goro sighs. “It’s quite alright, Toshiyuki-san. I’m content with this.”
He doesn’t know if that’s a lie or not.
“I’m going to get to work,” he says, turning back around to open the back door.
“Well, that’s what I like to see. Go get ‘em!”
It’s too early for this.
Goro makes it inside the back room and sighs again, slumping slightly against the door. He’s been doing a lot of sighing as of late.
The good part of his job is that it allows him something mindless to do, away from people, where he can think to his heart’s content about anything he pleases.
This, unfortunately, is also the bad part of his job.
This little room has seen him pondering things from the world’s most pressing unsolved issues to what he’s going to buy at the konbini for dinner to why he deserves to be alive and, for as long as he keeps this job, it will continue to observe as such. He’s not exactly in a mood to think today, though. He considers rearranging every shelf in the room for the fiftieth time. Strenuous activity would do him some good.
He’s really the only person who ever comes back here. Sometimes Toshiyuki pops in, but it’s never to observe or to find anything. It’s mostly just to say ‘hi’, which drives Goro kind of insane, but he supposes he should feel cared for, maybe. He’s found some kind of pathetic solace in here within the cobwebs and the smell of rot. It doesn’t matter if his organization system isn’t the one he’s supposed to be utilizing because it’s his and his alone. A nice, physical product of his handiwork that can’t be attributed to the actions he took in a world that no longer exists. There’s no empty praise to be found here and he relishes in it.
Suddenly, there’s rapid knocking at the door he’s still leaning on. It scares him out of his thoughts enough that he nearly trips over a box of books next to him.
“Akechi-san? Would you open the door, please?” says a muffled voice.
He turns and opens the door. It’s another one of his nameless coworkers, although he seems to recall that this one’s name may be Mari or something of that ilk.
“Sorry to bother you. We’re going to need some help restocking some shelves over there—” she throws a thumb backwards over her shoulder, “—and it would be great if you could help us.”
Nameless Coworker #2 Who May Be Named Mari is extremely short. So short that she looks almost directly upwards to make eye contact with Goro. It’s a little bit funny. “Alright.”
He takes a peek at her nametag hopefully inconspicuously before she turns to lead him away and — good work, Goro, her name is indeed Mari. Check, that’s a point for himself.
He quickly starts feeling very conscious of the fact that he knows nobody’s names because, as they meander their way over to the direction Mari had pointed in, he notices that almost all of his coworkers are helping restock the shelves. They all know his name, somehow.
Well, oops. It’s not like he interacts with them much. They’re just going to have to deal, Goro thinks.
They restock the shelves with everyone else, including Toshiyuki, who is also giving lively commentary to the kinds of books they’re restocking. If Goro had met Toshiyuki in any other context he would have thought him the kind to not read at all, but that’s neither here nor there.
Watching the others restock the shelves is making Goro… not nervous, it’s not that. But it feels wrong. They’re doing it all wrong. After someone is done, he takes the books out and puts them back in correctly. If he can’t get it right on the second try, he does it a third intermediary time and then a fourth, and the fourth is usually enough. He does this in the back room as well, but he feels much less scrutinized there, which is why he likes it. Right now, he can feel pairs of eyes burning into him.
Nobody says anything, though. Just a lot of lingering stares. Maybe this is why he didn’t feel the need to learn any of their names.
After they’re done, the rest of the day goes as usual, which means: Goro takes stock of their books, requests a few deliveries, moves some things around, thinks too much for his own good, and then his shift ends. He is genuinely not sure how much patronage the store gets, being sequestered away from the public and all. Bookstores aren’t exactly the hottest place on the block, sure, but they do have some dedicated customers, so he can’t say one way or the other.
He clocks out, leaves with a quiet goodbye and a wave over his shoulder, and goes directly to the convenience store across the street. Time to pick dinner.
Goro is still an awful cook. He does not like the prep, the mess, the time and energy it takes, but it’s not for lack of trying. He tried very hard to pick it up after he moved into his new apartment, as he did with many other things advertised in the self-help books he bought. He even took online classes. But, for all the reasons previously mentioned, it never stuck. His roommate likes to cook, but they have different tastes in food and he doesn’t want to ask her to make meals for him. She doesn’t seem all that eager to indulge him, either, which is fine. He knows he wouldn’t be were he in her position.
So, convenience store food it is. Sometimes a ramen made over the stove if he’s feeling adventurous. He knows how to use the toaster, at least.
His roommate is a somewhat inefficient cook. She is good at it, that much is true, yes, she’s a very good cook and Goro is more than a little jealous that she has no trouble following recipes or creating her own on the fly. But she is also very touchy about messes. She leaves no spills, drips, pieces of compost; once an ingredient is done with, it returns to its rightful place either in the trash or back in the alcove of the fridge or the cupboard. They have a million little bowls to create her perfect mise en place, but it’s honestly kind of a waste, because she washes out each one immediately after using whatever’s in it anyway. It’s a waste of the water bill and a waste of cabinet space, Goro thinks, but it would be useless to have an opinion on this kind of thing seeing as he doesn’t cook, so he’s never verbalized these thoughts.
Not to mention he has no idea how she has the energy to cook at all considering she works as a vet tech.
He skims through the sushi selection in the back of the store; it’s mediocre today. He’s been trying to wean himself off convenience store sushi as of late after a particularly bad bout of food poisoning, but he is nothing if not a creature of habit, so he’s looking anyway.
In the end, he buys several pre-cut sandwiches and a green tea. A boring meal to compliment a similarly boring day. As all his days are. As all his days will continue to be.
It is so bad to want more?
If he were able to grasp what more he wants, perhaps not. But he can’t.
Apartment six-eighty-two on the sixth floor of Goro’s building is a dismal little thing. Not as much as it used to be, not at all, almost entirely with the assistance of his roommate, but it’s nearly the same sterile environment he had lived in when he worked under Shido. He’s been meaning to rectify this, but he doesn’t… have anything. He doesn’t really understand art, so there’s no draw to craft fairs. He doesn’t indulge in Ann’s requests for purikura, much to her disappointment, so the corkboard in the kitchen stays empty, save for grocery lists. He will not let himself try gachapon machines because he is ninety-five percent sure that’s a recipe for disaster. The only real semblance of personality that shines through the apartment that’s entirely Goro’s is the bookshelf behind their couch; it’s filled with chintzy detective novels (a guilty pleasure), old philosophers (something he no longer has a vested interest in and reminds him too much of teenhood), and his self-help books (useful, sometimes). He likes it. It’s mostly for aesthetic purposes, but he supposes that’s what decorations are meant to be for.
If he let his roommate have her way with the place, it’d be pink and purple and cute-all-over. And would it be surprising to learn that that’s not exactly Goro’s thing? She settles for a happy medium of colorful fridge magnets, the occasional plushie sitting on a chair or counter, and sometimes, if Goro’s feeling generous, a scented candle. In turn, she lets him… keep the couch a neutral color. Pretty fair trade off, really.
He opens the front door to a click, flicking the doorknob up and down four times before entering the hallway and putting his shoes and coat away. His roommate isn’t home yet. She never is when he gets home from work. Their schedules rarely work out to be in the apartment for long stretches of time together, which is unfortunate, but not the worst thing in the world. Goro goes to bed a little too late and wakes up correspondingly; his roommate seems to have the circadian rhythm of a grandparent, sometimes bafflingly going to bed at nine in the evening. The first few weeks after she had moved in, Goro was convinced that she was playing some kind of prank on him when she’d retire to her room with a goodnight before he’d even eaten dinner.
She seems to have her life together in a way that Goro still doesn’t. He’s envious about it, but more depressed than anything.
Regardless, he’s still an adult, and still needs to carry himself as one. Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that he lives almost exactly the same way he did as a teenager, because Akechi Goro was already more jaded at the age of sixteen than was your average forty-year-old, and therefore treated himself as such. He almost feels bad for himself.
At least his nightly routine doesn’t involve killing people anymore. Sometimes he even gets a full eight hours of sleep.
He changes, carefully taking off his binder so it doesn’t catch on his hair (again), and lets the air soak deep into his lungs.
Goro doesn’t feel like he’s really living.
He lays in his bed and doesn’t think much about anything at all until he hears his roommate come home. He knows this story by heart: He’ll ask what she’s going to make herself to eat, be mildly interested in it, recede back to his room and get angry at himself for not being able to do something as simple as cook, and then distract himself with a book or a show or thinking too hard about the past. Like he always does.
He peeks from his door. “Hi, Chihiro.”
“Hello,” replies Chihiro, tidying up their genkan. It’s already very tidy, because she and Goro are tidy people, perhaps too tidy, but she loves tidying. Her glasses slip slightly off her nose as she’s leaning down and she’s making a valiant effort in pushing them back up every few seconds.
“What are you going to make for dinner?” Goro asks automatically.
“Actually,” she says, standing up and brushing her hands off on her thighs. She’s going off-script. This is getting interesting. “I was going to ask you.”
Oh, this is enthralling. Goro feels like he’s watching a very intense game of sports. “Me?”
“I thought you might want to choose what I make one day. I’ve never asked.”
What’s going on? The world must be collapsing! “You haven’t,” he agrees with a small nod, “but I don’t have a refined palate or anything like that.”
“But there are dishes you like, right?”
“…Yes.”
“Tell me one of those, and I can make it for us.”
This is it: the most exciting moment of Goro’s life. He gets to choose what his roommate makes him for dinner. Oh, what a joyous day, he can hardly believe it. “Um.”
Chihiro walks away when it’s obvious Goro does not have a recipe off the top of his head. “Just tell me before dinnertime,” she calls back to him.
Goro was so starstruck with the proposition of being able to choose his own home-cooked meal his brain shut down for a couple minutes, which is embarrassing, but seriously, what a grandiose offer. He’ll have to make it up to her somehow. Such an action can’t go unnoticed. His little refrigerated sandwiches will just have to submit to their soggy fates, because he’s going to be eating something delicious and warm by the end of the night. Oh, yeah!
He feels ridiculous for being so excited about this. It’s telling that he fusses over his options like he’s choosing the menu for his own wedding.
Gyudon could be delicious. So could hiyashi soba. Goro knows Chihiro is particularly fond of yakiniku; perhaps he’ll choose something he knows they both like.
Curry also sounds good. Amamiya always liked curry—
Mm.
Maybe— maybe not curry.
Gyudon seems to be really calling his name, so gyudon it is. He realizes he’s been standing in his doorway spacing out facing the genkan since Chihiro said he could choose dinner and boots himself alive again. “I’d like gyudon,” he calls into the air, because their apartment is small and it’s not really like he could be talking to anybody else. He hears an alright from somewhere and goes back into his room.
Oh boy, oh boy. Gyudon. Goro feels like he’s waiting with a bib and oversized utensils. He can barely even focus on filling out this damn spreadsheet for work because he’s thinking about simmered beef and onion over rice.
He kind of hopes Chihiro doesn’t notice how much this is affecting him because his life feels so meaningless that a change in routine so simple as dinner prep is upending his entire universe at the moment.
And this is just how every new thing affects him, really. Initially, unsurprisingly, he was very happy to have this boring and menial life, because he was so unbelievably and bone-achingly tired that doing more than a commute to work and a twice weekly therapy session made him feel like his head would fall off his body. He’s not living a very lonely existence, even if he acts like he is: he has coworkers. And a couple friends. That’s pretty good, all things considered.
But he still feels like a knot that continues to be partially tied. Like someone made it seventy percent of the way there, got up to do something else, and forgot him under a pillow. And that last thirty percent is what’s weighing him down so heavily, keeping him planted in a little bit of a liminal space that extends far past how much he’s traversed so far.
He doesn’t even know how to get the rest of himself untied, is the thing. He doesn’t know what it is. He’s begun to accept that this is how he’s always going to feel, because four years after dying twice, he’s still slow-going at life and he has been sitting on a huge, flat plateau that has no change in sight.
It’s what he deserves. In truth, he thinks he deserves much less than what he has.
This is all irrelevant, though, because Chihiro’s back from the store with ingredients for gyudon and Goro’s going to sit at the kitchen bar and watch her make it. After she arranges everything into her little bowls first, of course.
As he watches her, Goro thinks that he could probably make gyudon if he tried. It looks easy. He takes care of the rice while Chihiro lets the meat and onions simmer and lifts the pot lid to skim off fat from the beef, and he sets out two bowls and utensils for the both of them. He also pulls out some tsukemono from their fridge for Chihiro, something he is not a fan of himself.
It’s a nice meal, and before he knows it they’re done cleaning and he says thank you very much and it’s time for him to resume his awesome spreadsheet adventure. Joy.
If Goro had known how his future would shake up, he’d have shunned his future self. Well— he didn’t think he’d have a future self. Not one that lived until nineteen, anyway. He wanted to go out in a blaze of fire and that’s all that kept the well-oiled machine of his body running.
And then he lived, so. That didn’t work.
He feels like his life will forever be dictated by a scale that’s never balanced. The more Goro heals, the more he feels like there’s no justifiable reason for him to be doing such a thing, that he’s taking up the time and energy and space in lieu of someone more deserving of it. But the opposite is true as well: even as he’s mellowed considerably, he has his moments. Everyone does, because this is a given, and recovery is not a straight line nor is it fun or easy or anything that can be achieved in a timely manner and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
In these moments, ones where Goro thinks it might just be easier to give himself a painful and fittingly tragic ending, he knows that’s not fair, either, because he hasn’t repented.
Does he even deserve repentance?
And this is how he gets so stuck in his thoughts. Because none of his questions have answers, because it feels wrong to live a simple life after… everything. Because he is no longer fourteen and opening up his heart in an alternate universe, fifteen and ruining his life forever, seventeen and loved by the masses, or eighteen and dead.
He is twenty-two and alive and wondering when the universe will decide better of it.
***
Goro tries to be better for himself, but also for the people in his life, which is a truly foreign feeling. He’s never had people he wanted to be better for.
He had people he’d needed to please, of course, but they shan’t be named, because Goro’s done jumping down that rabbit hole over and over again. There are other burrows to be explored, and by God he will explore them.
He’d never felt a particular need to please his mother. He was a child. There is not much a child thinks of to please their parent other than saying I love you and I’m sorry when the situation calls for it, and even if this attitude would inevitably change as he got older and became more disillusioned with the notion of parenthood in general, he was still a child, and all he knew how to do was love her and be a good daughter.
Some daughter he turned out to be.
But, in the present, Goro has many — or at least a few — people he tries harder for. Nogami Chihiro, for one. Part of it is because he cohabitates with her and there’s nothing quite like pissing off someone you live with, so he tries his hardest not to do that and hopes (though he believes the opposite) that many others follow in his stead. Some other part of it is because she treats him like he’s a human being, which is an added bonus.
His boss is another. And his coworkers, too, at least the ones who talk to him, of which there are… some. Goro feels very lucky that his job is simply fine and not anything worse than that, which it could very easily be. He’s extraordinarily fortunate that Niijima Sae scouted something like this for him for when he thought he’d be able to work after he got out of rehab. Toshiyuki bought him a cake on his birthday shortly after he began working there. Goro doesn’t like cake, but he ate it anyway, and said a sincere thank-you.
And then there’s Takamaki Ann. His sole, lasting connection to the Phantom Thieves.
By Goro’s choice, obviously. He wanted it to be this way. He’s not sure how Ann managed to worm her way into his extended life; maybe it’s because they’re just so fundamentally different that Goro felt the need to keep her around, and vice-versa.
Goro is sure he’d be very lonely without Ann, who is enough of a friend to feel like ten friends at once. Most of the time he worries that he feels like less than one percent of a friend to Ann herself, but she’s never expressed something like this, and she’s very good at expressing herself and very bad at lying, so there’s no reason for Goro to worry.
In theory.
Goro feels very worried, very constantly, very all the time. It’s like a simmering of his brain, if he had to describe it. The frog-in-the-pot situation or what have you. He’s sure that the good things in his life happen because something very bad will also happen to counteract them, and this is why he tries extra hard to be good for the people around him: because he’s not sure it’ll last. Nothing in Goro’s life ever lasts. Both the good and the bad.
Like,
as you’re well aware,
death.
***
When Goro finishes his fifth or tenth or six hundredth spreadsheet however many hours later, he counts his nighttime pills, holds his breath as he makes it to the bathroom and swallows them, holds his breath on the way back, and submits himself to a hopefully fitless night of sleep. He’s been sleeping better recently. It’s very nice. Being sleep-deprived is one of the worst feelings on Earth, Goro thinks, and it also makes him feel like he’s eighteen again and that feeling in particular is probably worse than sleep deprivation itself, so he avoids undersleeping as much as possible.
Too many regular things still remind him of being eighteen. Instant coffee. Certain textures of clothing. Wearing gloves, which he stopped doing the second he got out of the hospital.
(This one is slightly unfortunate, as it means his hands are now free for the world to see, and they’re the ugliest hands one could have. He picks them.)
Wearing makeup, too. Goro has been told endlessly that he is pretty. It’s a numb compliment at this point, which feels excessively pretentious to think, but he finds it very hard to like his face when the amount of adult acne he has rivals that of sixteen-year-old boys.
It probably doesn't help that he incessantly scratches at it, but. Whatever. He only occasionally regrets the first time he gave into the urge to scratch his cheeks during a particularly stressful day years ago because it very easily snowballed, but he also knows it was inevitable. Nothing a little concealer couldn't cover.
(His editors always airbrushed his face past the point of looking human, but nobody really ever seemed to care.
He’s obsessively watched every interview of his dozens of times over, so he’d know.)
Goro’s really never chomping at the bit to make himself look particularly nice anymore anyway. He is perfectly fine with presentable. His fashion sense has stayed exactly the same as it was when he was a teenager, which is fine, because it makes him look like a respectable young man, and it’s easy enough to find inexpensive sweaters and slacks. Being able to dress himself up used to feel very necessary, and it also made him feel like he had something to appreciate about himself—
but there really aren’t many of those qualities anymore.
As he’s laying in bed, Goro wonders if he’ll have to wear a scarf tomorrow.
He falls asleep and dreams of nothing at all.
It’s a little bit of a sick irony that the first time Goro had ever seen real snow was in Maruki’s reality.
He walks through the flurries on his way to work and bites his lip as hard as he can to prevent the tears welling in the backs of his eyes from falling, because if they do, he will surely have to stop in the middle of the street while he makes a mess of himself.
He wishes he had never learned how to cry.
It was so blatantly obvious that nothing in that reality was real. Maruki was terrible at imitating life. He would have made— he made an awful God. Nobody’s ever that happy in winter, and the sky is never that beautiful.
Goro looks down at his shoes while he walks, because the sky is beautiful today.
He never imagined winter could be so personal to him.
The day passes normally, like it always does. Goro briefly entertains the thought of Chihiro asking him what he’d like for dinner again. A lovely pipe dream. Maybe Maruki’s in this reality, too, making him wish for good things that he can’t have.
Ann texts him a photo of the skirt she bought. He’s completely clueless as to why anyone would buy a skirt in winter, and she replies That’s the point, Goro, you buy clothes out of season!, and he doesn’t feel any more clued in, but it’s a nice skirt and he says as much.
They go to a ramen bar later that evening. He goes to work the next day and finds out one of his coworkers is engaged. Nothing happens the next day, or the day after that, but on the day after that one, he finds a European banknote being used as a bookmark in a shipment of second-hand books they received. He pockets it because it’s not like it’s worth anything, and it’s new. It’s interesting. And then nothing of note happens after that. Or after that, after that, after that, or—
Can you sense a pattern here?
Because Goro can.
***
More than anything, Goro wants to be.
It is so much more than wanting to be real. There is generally little doubt in his mind that he is real. It took years to accept it, but he is real, and he knows as much, even if it falters occasionally. Even if he doesn’t deserve it. But being real isn’t the same as being in of itself, is it? In the same way he is real, a dresser drawer is real. A star in the sky is real. Compounds and elements and atoms and nuclei, they’re all real. But he wants to be.
In this way, he can almost find it within himself to feel justified in this want of more, because this is not something most people want; it is merely something most people already have. Selfishness could not cross the boundary of this wish when it is for something he was implicitly given and then explicitly denied.
Maybe Goro doesn’t know what he wants. He thinks all of his chances to be have already passed him by. At the ripe age of twenty-two, he has never been. A blip on the radar at most. To most.
He has many restless nights spent pondering things that fall through the fingers of his mind as finely as sand. They’re all has-beens — he’s a has-been — and he has never hated the past more than he has in his entire life. That the past is exactly that: past. Gone. With a breath, his life has been whisked away by the whims of people who are no longer in it. He likes to mindlessly trace these words and names fluttering around in his mind into his palm with a fingernail; it’s a physical manifestation of a thought. There, and gone again in a second.
As if thoughts can be so impermanent.
He digs his nail a little harder sometimes.
Goro has not made peace with the fact that the world no longer has a special place for him. Ann would hate him for thinking this way. Ann does hate him for thinking this way, and she has told him as much. She would — does — insist on some banal counterargument like, But you have a place in my life, Goro, and he would have — has — to take a deep breath and pretend she’s telling the truth, to make him feel better about himself for some few and fleeting seconds. The paltry number of people with whom he’s confided these thoughts with (three: his therapist, Chihiro, and Ann) all insist these same sentiments with different words and different anecdotes to prove it. He wants to buy it.
He wants to buy it, so he can be.
Maybe this is what Goro truly wants.