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This bone-deep fatigue hadn’t been part of the equation.
My own scattered words chipped away from the sky, as feeble as I felt. Little by little, they would creak as they shifted. Hinges broke. Pipes and rods were wrenched out of their spots, plummeting towards the ground. Circles melted into defective ovals, defective ovals melted into lines of nonfunctional code. Each and every crash seemed to miss me.
Like meteorites. They resounded from far, far away.
Amidst the exhaustion, I had been taken further from myself. I could see it from an outsider’s viewpoint, now, for the very first time, the ways in which it wore my body thin. The ragdoll quality of my limbs. How tufts of hair that were too short to fit into my twintails stood on end, after months of getting continuously twisted and ripped off.
An uninvited guest trailed behind me, away from sight, trying to untangle what little knots she could reach during our stride. There was a blanket of numbness over the pinpricks she dealt to my neck. A fever. My nape fell through her hands as I knelt down.
It shouldn’t have mattered. All I had left to do in this world relied on consciousness alone. Or rather, consciousness reaching its end.
“Wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, sandalwood, tobacco…” To think Yomikawa would get as bored as to read out her grocery list to me. “That would actually be hilarious, but you’re wrong. It’s from one of Emerson’s essays. These are some of the many tools the common artist uses to, in his words, escape the custody of the body in which he is pent up. In order to create.”
My glasses were filthy with miscellaneous shards and powder. It felt odd to speak of creation at a time like this. How did she even get in here?
“You can change your body according to the whims of your spirit,” she continued. “But can you separate them?”
Lacking the energy to dismiss her, my eyes sought rest on the ground. Ironically, some ambiguous light source I certainly hadn’t wished for myself cast both of our shadows onto the floor. Spinning a book on the vertex of its spine on top of the usual pile, her head seemed to taunt me. Your listlessness won’t save you—look! Take a good look at me!
What an unhappy turn of events.
“Warm and welcoming as always.” Her shadow brought its index to what I could only assume to be her mouth. “Besides, can you really call it a turn? I get the feeling that for the longest time, it was just Tsukishima-chan and I.”
“I hardly remember you.”
“That’s your own mistake. We were classmates, after all.”
Still caught up on that…
“Try graduating.” Might gain you some perspective, I had meant to say, but assuming all of that reading was doing its job, lack of perspective certainly wasn’t her problem. What was her problem, then?
“Graduation at a time like this…” She twirled around the landscape of rising dust and electric arcs. In typical shoulder-shrugging Yomikawa fashion, she went on to bug me for an answer. “Well, if you were to tell me you can, in fact, separate body and spirit, I suppose everything else must be fair game.”
It can’t be helped. I brought my knees to my chest.
“If by ‘separate’ you mean having my body disappear, your answer is no. It would always take the shape of something, if not an air molecule.” As hoarse as my voice was, she stood still and listened. “Now, as for what counts as a body, even data would suffice… I’m just not quite ready to let go of my hands yet.”
“Manual work at a time like this…” Admittedly, it was weird.
Patting down the lab coat where it draped over my knees, I rid my hands of mushroom spores. “... Just some last-minute tweaks.”
We fell back into silence. Yomikawa was just a little further away now, having yet to move from the position her last half-hearted pirouette had granted her. As she set her arms down, our encounter was burning the end of its match.
… What was that all about, earlier? Wine, narcotics and whatnot?
“Ah, Emerson’s essay.”
An essay on psychoactive substances?
“Again, you’re wrong.” She laughed. “If anything, it’s precisely the opposite, an essay on the person who doesn’t need any—hey. Asking out loud won’t hurt you.”
Forget I said anything.
“I will still talk, whether you ask me to or not.”
Of course you will.
I might have accidentally bought us some time. The next second, Yomikawa was speeding towards me. She wielded a home-printed stack, kept together by a set of binder clips which she ditched without a word. The cover page reads Essays: Second Series.
As promised, she began to speak.
“Everyone wishes to reveal their own painful secret. It is human nature. What is also human nature is to struggle with a phlegm of sorts, a damper on verbal communication—we are all impaired by this, to some degree.” After a quick flip-through, she tucked the title page alone behind the others. “All of us but The Poet, that is.”
For a moment, she leaned by my side. She left as quickly as she came, but not before I heard the clear click of something being unclasped. My reflexes weren’t usually this slow.
I watched in defeat as she used my fish hair clip to secure the printout.
“The Poet is the man without impediment. His eloquence and sensibility make him representative of the society in which he is inserted—its mouthpiece, if you will.” I failed to pay attention to anything but that googly eye as she waved the papers about. “But that is not all that he is.”
Another verb ‘to be’ essay. Shijima might have liked it.
“He’s responsible for creating notions—no, baptizing might be a better term. He identifies his society’s most pressing needs, and turns them into principles. Can’t follow it if you can’t name it, after all.”
You have some terribly lengthy lines, you know that?
Yomikawa didn’t laugh. Gradually, her shadow came to a halt. It disappeared into mine as she stood in front of me.
“In that sense, The Poet is a wheel of cultural evolution. He is the catalyst. No society can stand to be without one.”
Out of all the books in her head-stack she could’ve used to coach my chin up, she picked the sole softcover. There are many ways in which one can be considerate. I had a front-row view of her loafers, then her skirt, and soon she was down to my level herself.
During particularly cold winter nights, when ice crystals froze in the atmosphere, a coppery green halo would surround the moonlight as it pierced through a cirrus-clouded sky. It wasn’t all that rare, but given my lifestyle, I had only seen it once.
In that moment, her eyes were the moon, shining through ice crystals of infinite dreams. Infinite stories.
I stared into infinite knowledge.
“Tsukishima-chan is our poet.”
A catalyst. Both a prophet and a witness.
“The meter-making argument was freedom. Western Yomogi, this computer—you are its true poet.”
But this wasn’t what any of us had needed.
With such a vast assortment of realities to stroll through, allegedly of equal importance, I struggled to pinpoint in Yomikawa’s words, in her gestures, in her thought process which would fortunately never bleed into mine—where exactly entertainment ended and commitment began.
Which was why I had been able to disregard her words so far.
“I’m… going to need that.” I extended my hand towards the printout. Yomikawa looked hesitant for a second—surely, she knew I meant my hair clip? Her fingernails scraped its fins softly. Her smile began to dim.
After a long minute, she extended the front end of the stack towards me. I took the ornament back.
As the book underneath my chin retreated, my head fell along with it.
“... Yomikawa.”
I expected her to leave for good.
“Back when you collapsed everything into words—when you talked to my sister through the page, you still couldn’t understand what I was writing.” In the middle of getting up, she gave me a curious look. “... Somehow, that’s a relief.”
I never expected she would, outside of the context of pestering me with her unwanted rehabilitation services, bring her fingers to my hair. She stroked it lightly, much like she had the fins.
“It’s a relief that you are you, it’s a relief that I am me…” Yomikawa hummed absent-mindedly. “It’s a reason for great happiness, if you think about it.” She didn’t stop there:
“Your calluses mirror my paper cuts—where your skin hardened, mine tore. Our hair measures down to around the same length—while mine flares and curls towards the tips, yours appears to have been bluntly chopped off. We host libraries on different platforms—my pages, your files. We host worlds like this, too. Our uniforms are inadequate, without a doubt—but mine is significantly cuter.”
The branch would always split into two segments. It was a relief.
The fact that we could never become one.
I felt torn as I thought of everyone for whom this hadn’t been possible.
“You’re touchy.”
There was a pause to her movements. Another faint smile. “If not now, then when?”
And yet, contrary to her words, she broke off contact. “... I hoped we could continue being not one. Together. But I figure you won’t let the world go on like this. Not if you can help it.”
I didn’t need to confirm her suspicions. At long last, she faced away. As she did, I was sure I had found the answer.
Nostalgia. Nostalgia was her problem.
Hers, and everyone else’s.
Senior year of high school, the classes from A to H, our shared classroom—none of them had been worth my attention as much as finding a way out of them was, and even that which I retained had mostly deteriorated away from the back of my mind. There was no way I could remember Yomikawa’s seat, or how she might’ve looked while reading. So, I think of fake memories. I think of what I missed.
It might just become my own problem, too.