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She draws the curtains, closes the doors. Traps herself in a murky ocean, locks herself between earth and sky. She puts herself up for display, and looks at herself through that glass cage.
“How are you, Asahina?”
She was well (she was loosing herself).
“If you aren’t busy…”
Don’t worry, I’m not (how can she be busy without anything to busy herself with?).
“Thank you, Asahina!”
She was glad to help (she was tired of helping).
“You’re such an good example, Asahina.”
Thank you, you’re too kind (you wouldn’t want to become like me).
The words of her classmates are full and genuine, edged with admiration and jealousy and determination and so many emotions she cannot feel. Each word and sentence and breath and sound is piled onto a fragile scale, weighed against a single girl who is breaking under the weight of everything and a single girl who is already broken under the weight of nothing.
They reach out and muddy her perfect cage with fingerprints, ugly and dirty and utterly imperfect. She knows they will be washed away as the sun raises, the purest of waters rinsing away her little shadows. Her exhibition is closed, and she alone sees the stains on her clean, clean glass.
“Huh? Is that your crappy attempt at an insult, Amia?” Ena’s voice cuts through the silence.
“Insult? That was a compliment!” Mizuki retorts, her annoyance tangible through the screen that separates them.
“Compliment? Saying that my art looks like an absolute mess is a compliment?”
“Isn’t that the mood you were going for? This song symbolizes the jumbled mess in the singer’s mind! You literally said your goal was a messy piece!”
“Why are the two of you always fighting?” Mafuyu asks.
Kanade breathes out a half-laugh, half-sigh. “I’m glad you logged on, Yuki.”
Mafuyu doesn’t smile, nor does her expression change. But she doesn’t need to, for at the twenty-fifth hour of the day, she is not observed through glass. She is not on display, but rather swimming in her own little aquarium surrounded by fake pebbles and fake seagrass which do not judge her for her perfections nor her imperfections.
Mafuyu floats, alone but not lonely. She is carried by the little ripples in her water, and the ocean sighs with the sound of friendly bickering and sings with the echo of a hopeful song and resonates with the togetherness of a distant symphony, where the performers play for no audience and there is nothing upon that empty stage but the echoes of a familiar melody…
Mafuyu’s world is quite unlike her cage. She extends her arms and is met by no barriers. She extends her legs and breaks into a sprint, and she runs and runs and the edge of her world will extend to let her run free, forever into a never-ending horizon. She runs past the tall trusses that reaches high into the sky, leaps across the geometric figures protruding from the ground, and relishes the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet. It is real, so real, and tangible through every fiber of her body, it is strong and invulnerable and she leans into it with everything and it holds steady, it does not break like her cage surely would.
Mafuyu is tired now, and she sinks against a truss, closes her eyes, and lets the soft light of her world wash over her. She is tired now, and she can sit down, lay down, stay down, and she’s patched together little by little. There are still those who pass by, but they do not praise her when she is perfect nor judge her when she is imperfect. Their lightless eyes slide over her and linger, just barely, before they leave, and they walk into her endless world, their silhouettes pale as they approach that blank canvas of a sky, they shadows dim as they disappear into the landscape that reflected the emptiness of her and herself.
Mafuyu leaves her world, drawn by the sweet tune of a song. It is composed by warm hands and an even warmer smile, three faces amongst the crowd that are not blinded by the reflections of glass, three faces amongst the glass that look at Mafuyu and not she who sits between hung strings. Three pairs of hands welcome her, three voices merge together in a chorus accompanied by static, three faces she knows but doesn’t see behind the screen that she does. It’s nice, she thinks, but she doesn’t know why.
At twenty-five o’clock, Yuki plucks words from something somewhere deep inside, lays them out like poetry, and they will line up with the hopeful beat K weaves, pulsing with infinitesimal light that only Mafuyu sees. Lights glow and shine, frames dark and shift, moved by a director by the name of Amia, and Enanan wraps it all up with an artwork that reflects everything within, arcing lines and blooming colors across those lyrics, beats, and frames.
Mafuyu’s heart beats and resonates with the birth of each song.
It stops again when she wakes up to the glow of the sun. To most, it brought the hope of a new day and welcomed them in a warm embrace, but to her, it is cold like glass and ever-so-gloomy. An alarm rings, rattling around her skull, and she follows the path she always does, out of her sanctuary.
She is back inside her glass cage. People slowly trickle around her, crowds forming like waves. Her uniform is always clean, her posture always straight, her eyes always friendly, and it was just another always that people are drawn towards her.
She wishes to disappear, but it is hard when everything around her stops her. It’s easily to run, but hard to find the will to. She could lash out, throw that crowd into chaos and panic, but she cannot find it in her. If they knew what she was like when her gallery closes, if they saw the light in her eyes going out with the lights in her display, they would surely know that she is not perfect. Would they throw her out? She wonders what it would be like, to walk without being confined to a cage.
Deep inside her, she wants to try, but she cannot finish that courage out, and so she bends to the will of those waves, and
She settles back. Her glass is pristine, and there are eyes on her. They see her, a perfect being, and it floats away like a dream, that silver earth crumbling into fragments, that iridescent sky fracturing into splinters. They see her only when her glass is flawless, when she refracts the light around her like an angel, when she is here in this confinement, when she is a good girl on exhibit, when she is no more than the perfect
Asahina.