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Despair– it wasn’t the right word.
This was silent, hidden, without the heaviness that despair carried. It weighed nothing, made Mafuyu feel like she was floating. It made her ceiling swim.
It didn’t hurt; it simply made it hard to breathe.
Her world was spinning, all of the light from her computer and the apartments and cars in the city outside of her window blending and blurring into blobs. She wasn’t hurt because she couldn’t hurt, there was nothing to hurt because she was no one, just a vacant container that constantly leaked anything put into it.
If one were to grab at the bits and pieces and try to find something of substance, they’d end up with an unfulfilled hollow sensation that was akin to hunger but lacked even the intention of such a sense.
Mafuyu knew this, and she wanted to keep it away, perhaps even from those that she thought might understand, perhaps even from Kanade. Kanade, who stood out in color for some reason, whose pale hair was illuminated by the sickly light of a computer screen in memory, face filled with a despaired kindness that was so enraging it was lovely.
Some distant urge bubbled up from the fragmented recesses of Mafuyu’s mind, an unformed image of a child curling into Kanade’s side with short purple curls and a restrained expression, tears overflowing but refusing to fall on their flushed cheeks. Then a few more memories drifted in: all of children, all filled with something painful but so removed from experience it couldn’t be called an emotion, all dissolving into smoke before they could form any image or coherent thought to be replaced by a new fragment.
Mafuyu was nothing.
She reached over to her laptop, clicked onto her youtube playlist on autopilot, played a song without registering what she was doing. It wasn’t one of Kanade’s that she liked to listen to when she forgot who she was or needed to calm down, and it wasn’t one of her own old ones, the ones that made her feel sick to her stomach; it was by a producer with no face and it was sick. She didn’t know how else to describe it: It described sickness. It felt like suicide.
Mafuyu leaned back, stared at the ceiling.
The lighting didn’t make sense.
She had never been in this room before.
She had never been in this body before.
She had never been this person before.
She still felt dizzy, too.
It was in this state, if she could just–
After all, she felt no fear. It was just as foreign as her.
So really, it would be so, very funny.
The room was way too dark. She blinked once, twice, slapped her cheeks with her hands gently, then hard.
No one, nothing. Maybe she was going insane.
An abrupt, familiar sound; a nightcord notification which drowned in her malfunctioning sensory processing.
This, whatever it was, it was so light her chest couldn’t contain it. She thought it might rip her apart from the inside and leave behind a corpse for good. It’d be a good cadaver to study, an amalgamation of traits so carefully constructed into something beautifully disgusting; just like this song, which Mafuyu realized she put on loop as it slowly drained back into her hearing.
Another curt notification.
Her fingers twitched, conditioned to check the dm and answer.
She clicked onto it, stared at the letters until they stopped being shapes and her brain regained the ability to read.
It was Kanade.
And that, it felt– it didn’t feel– it made it harder to breathe.
She wasn’t– she shouldn’t show this part of her, she shouldn’t ask for help, she couldn’t. Kanade was disgusting. A conversation was disgusting. Mafuyu was disgusting. Reading was still hard; staring at a computer screen made everything else run out of focus and transform into abstract shapes.