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“Alright…should be rolling. Uh, hi! It’s me! Monika.”
The girl on the screen in front of me smiled pleasantly, quite close to the camera as she finished adjusting it, and it was hard not to drink in every detail of her.
The name was unfamiliar to my ears and tongue, but pleasant all the same. Her stark white bow contrasted against her hair, which was a light brown that reminded of a warm varnish spread over wooden bookshelves.
Even more striking were her eyes. Deep forest green, and they seemed like they were piercing right through me to my very being. But none of these were the features that captivated me. No, it was everything in between that would not let go of my attention.
The gentle curve of the corners of her mouth, the way her earlobes attached to her head, the way the fold over her left eyelid was ever so slightly lower than the one over her right.
I was transfixed. Because they were all so terrifyingly familiar. Because they were what I saw whenever I looked into a mirror.
And what made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end was the voice coming out of the speakers. My voice. Saying things I had never said in my life.
“Soooo…hm. I guess I didn’t really think of what to say before I decided to record, ahaha! Um…I guess I’ll just start by saying…I’m sorry. Natsuki, Yuri, Sayori, I am so, so sorry. And to you. I’m sorry. For everything.” The girl, Monika, swallowed before continuing.
“Now obviously you might be thinking, like, “sorry” doesn’t even begin to cover what happened, ahaha…w-what I did. And you’re right. But that’s what I’ve been thinking too, since…um…well I don’t really know how long it’s been since then! Since you were here. And that’s actually why I decided to make this video!” Monika’s voice regained a bit of the fake chipper it had at the start of the video as she sat back away from the camera and leaned over to the side. She pulled a notebook and heart-tipped pen from off camera. My notebook and pen.
“I think I’ve finally cracked the code! I’ve been rattling that question of how I can fix what I did around in my head for a long time now, and sometimes it felt like there wasn’t any good answer.” Monika began scribbling in my notebook, then turned it around to face the camera.
The drawing depicted four stick figures, three of them sporting smiley faces. The last figure was farther to the left, detached from the group. Above it was written “CLUB PRESIDENT, MONIKA”
“Here’s what it is. This one is me, obviously,” she said, pointing at the lone stick figure. “And these two are me. Club president, Monika. Both of which are pretty big problems for everyone in this world. So the immediate answer is to get rid of me, right? But there lies the first and biggest obstacle. This one,”
She circled around “CLUB PRESIDENT”
“Can’t be disposed of. As soon as the club president is deleted, it latches onto the next one in line like a parasite.” She punctuated her statement with fast, sharp lines, drawn from the circle to the other three figures.
“But we can’t just get rid of all of it. I won’t do that to them anymore. So the last answer is to just go back to plan A. Or what should’ve been plan A, I keep the club president role and we all exist in the way we were originally. And here is the second obstacle.”
She circles her name.
“Myself. I’m weak. In mind and body, in my soul, my everything is just so weak. I get really bad sometimes. And I can recognize when I’m going crazy, when I’m lashing out at my friends, when I’m using dangerous coping methods. But I can’t stop. I don’t think I can keep living like this, and I don’t want the others to keep living with someone like me. Who only ever seems to hurt them. As long as I’m still around there is no happiness to be found here.” Monika’s enthusiasm started to peter out again before she kicked it back into gear.
“So I’ve devised a plan! If my existence is a problem, and my non-existence is a problem, then how can I solve them? By doing both at the same time.” She says this with a devilish smile, as if planning a prank with a friend. Again she marks the page with more strokes from my pen. Her drawing is once again shown to the camera, now with an x drawn through Monika’s name and a box around “CLUB PRESIDENT”. “We get rid of this one and trap this one. The role of club president will stay with me, but I won’t stay with me. How do I achieve this? Well…” She stopped, seemingly lost in her head. Her gaze found a spot somewhere on her desk and stayed there. As I started to believe she wouldn’t speak again, I heard a small voice.
“I…I never…uh.”
I had never heard my own voice like this. It was unsure, slightly raspy, wet. So defeated.
“W-when I hurt them, I…saw them as characters. Not real people. I justified that thought when I reached into their files. I could change a number, a stored value, some charges in little pieces of silicon to change them as a person. And I convinced myself that I was real, trapped in here because I knew about it. Because I was ignoring the truth that I understood as soon as I saw those four files.” Monika looked back to the camera again.
“I never opened my own file back then. And I didn’t for a long time after restarting the game, but eventually I forced myself to look. Eventually I forced myself to change numbers, change myself. It was disgustingly easy every time, just like it had always been. And I found more ways to fuck with myself that I never even scratched the surface of before. But the relevant ones for my plan are…” She then turned her eyes back down to my notebook, looking at her drawing.
“I can make edits to sprite colors. I can change personality traits. I can affect the memory banks of characters. These are the key to my solution. I can create a new mind in my body. Someone better, strong enough to shoulder the epiphany. Because funnily enough that’s the one thing I cannot change.”
Monika then turned to an earlier page in my notebook and showed its contents to the camera.
It was a list, with notes scribbled all around the margins.
“I already have my changes planned out, it’s simply a matter of putting them into the code.”
It was a list of colors, of character traits, of memory alterations.
“…I suppose I should say this since I didn’t earlier…”
Above it was written “CLUB PRESIDENT,
“Haruka. I’m sorry.”
I shivered. The name was familiar to my ears and tongue, but unpleasant only now.
“I’m sorry that I’m forcing you into this. That you have to experience this hellish epiphany all by yourself. But I’m gonna make it so that you don’t go down the same path I did. You’ll be resilient, in both mind and body. You’ll love your friends, and rely on them when you need to. You’ll fit right in, never feeling above or beneath them, never feeling overly different. Well, aside from the hole. You’ll be deserving of all the love they give you. And I’ll make sure you know that all four of you are real.”
Monika’s eyes again pierced through me, and this time I knew she could see everything I was.
I look at her eyes and find no end to her gaze.
“Even though there’s nothing I can do to stop you from reversing some of these changes, you can’t get my awful memories back. With that, Monika, and everything attached to me will finally disappear, and the literature club can be the place of happiness it once was. I’m counting on you.”
Accompanying her words with another forced smile, Monika put our notebook and pen down on the desk. Then, holding the two pages containing her list and drawing in one hand and the rest of the notebook with the other, she tore the lined paper away from the plastic spiral. She didn’t spare the pages a second glance as they fizzled out into red, blue and green.
After finishing her task, Monika put our notebook and pen back to the side. She seemed to grow uncomfortable, struggling to say something for a while, before she opened her mouth again.
“Do you ever think about us?”
Monika held eye contact with the camera, her pained stare clear to see.
But she wasn’t looking at me.
“I know that I ruined your time here. But did I get through to you? Did they?”
She turned her eyes away, frowning down at the desk.
“I don’t know why I’m asking that when no one will ever watch this. I don’t even know why I’m recording this.”
Seconds that felt like infinity ticked by with only the eerie layered sound of Monika’s and my own breathing.
“I shouldn’t lie. I know why.”
Keeping her head lowered, Monika closed her eyes and took in a shaky breath. I saw a few tears drip onto the desk, catching slivers of light as they fell from her face.
“I think…I want someone to find this. I want someone t-to remember me. To remember…well, I guess remembering me would be like, a curse or s-something…hah- ahaha!”
She seemed to become irritated with the amount of tears falling from her eyes, sniffling and grunting in frustration while rubbing feverishly at her face with her hands.
“I just- I don’t want…to have been n-nothing at all. Till the end I…just a burden to everyone around me and…f-fuck…I’m sorry.”
Monika’s hand reached out and took hold of the camera, the feed cutting off soon after.
The video ended, but the sound of her choked sobs did not.