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Jyushi woke up with the sun every morning. He had since he was a kid. Sun’s up, Jyushi’s up and he was usually running or swinging his bat or laughing with his brothers or scribbling down letters to Homura that he didn’t send and he ran ran ran and swung swung swung and laugh laugh laughed and scribble scribble scribbled and then the sun went down and Jyushi liked to go to bed early sometimes so usually he went with it. Everything big, everything full force, even going to bed, and all of it with the sun. When he’d first moved into the flat above Mr. Dekapan’s lab he’d stared up at the big skylight on the ceiling like whoa— he could remember standing in the patch of sun and holding out his arms and his mother laughing at him and telling him to focus on unpacking, dear— he looked at it and got so so so excited because he knew that the sun would come right through the skylight and it would be just like at home and he was really really glad about that.
But it wasn’t like at home, the way he woke up was changing— a lot of things were changing, like the way his side hurt when he laughed and the big heavy shoes he wore to work that felt like fifty pound weights on his feet and the way he felt when he was out of the house and— and anyway, that was changing now because every day Jyushi slept later and later. Some days he thought that if Mr. Dekapan wasn’t so loud in the lab downstairs he wouldn’t wake up at all. He would wake up sweaty and kick off his sheets and hop out of bed like everything was the same but it wasn’t, the sun was high in the sky and Jyushi didn’t go outside to see it. He didn’t like leaving the house anymore even though it was hot, hot, hot in his room and his feet stuck to the tile floor he couldn’t turn on the air conditioning because it buzzed really really loud and the buzz felt like someone yelling in his ear so he just sweated a lot instead and sat around and sometimes did push-ups in the middle of the room and then he would take a shower and stand under the water with his hands over his ears because if he turned up the water too much sometimes the shower head would squeal like a tea kettle and he really didn’t like that so he took cold showers or he covered his ears and sometimes he did both and he missed going to the public bath with his brothers, he missed that, but he didn’t want to go alone and he really didn’t want to go with Mr. Dekapan and Dayon because nobody likes a third wheel, right?
The time he went to bed was changing, too, he worked at night now so he didn’t get home and climb the back stairs that creak creak creaked into the flat until the sky was pale purple like the color of his favorite brother’s hoodie and he didn’t feel like running and swinging his arms then because he was too tired, too tired, way too tired, and Jyushi had never been too tired to do anything in his whole entire life. So he laid in bed. And he slept. And slept. And slept.
And then the next day he would wake up and the sun would be way ahead of him and it made him feel guilty. He tried not to feel guilty. A lot of things made him feel guilty lately, like when his co-workers noticed him swinging his arms at work and the way Mr. Dekapan sometimes looked at him like he felt sorry for him and the sound of his mother’s voice on the phone when she told him Ichi was too tired to talk right now. He tried not to think about that stuff, though, he was good at not thinking about that stuff, or at least he’d thought he was before he was alone alone alone all the time.
This day was just like any other day in recent times, Jyushi woke up when the sun was high in the sky and he hopped out of bed like he was going to do something fun even though he wasn’t and walked toward the kitchen to make himself a bowl of cereal— he was eating a lot of cereal these days, and not the gross fiber stuff his mom bought at home but like nice sugary cereal like the kind he’d eaten in front of the television with his brothers, it made him feel like things were normal even though they weren’t and he liked that— but he stopped short in the kitchen doorway.
In the middle of the kitchen was a big, beautiful bug, a cockroach, really really massive, honestly, big enough to take up the palm of his hand and so so so pretty, orangey-brown and he gasped aloud. “Hey!” he whispered, standing very still.
The bug didn’t say anything back of course, though Jyushi did say in a low, grumbly voice, talking out of the corner of his mouth, “Hey there, Jyushimatsu, I’m yer roommate.”
He took a small step forward and started to lean down to get a better look at his roommate, but just like that the cockroach scampered away, and he yelped and tried to stop him but he was just way too fast and Jyushi had just woken up after all and his roommate slid in the space underneath the fridge and Jyushi got down on his hands and knees to look under there but it was too tiny, even for him, and he sighed and put his cheek against the tile floor, mumbling to himself about how he was getting slow.
He laid down on his stomach for a moment, trying to hold still as still as he could anyway which wasn’t very still his feet were kicking but he was mostly still, tile cold against his belly, and maybe if he laid there long enough his friend would come back out.
“Come back,” he whispered underneath the fridge, kicking his feet.
He laid there and laid there until he couldn’t take it anymore and his stomach was grumbling so he gave up and hopped to his feet and made himself some cereal, rustling with the bag for a little while to get it open. He poured some in his mouth and then chased it with a long drink of milk straight from the carton which he did at home too but there Choro used to get mad at him for it, he would always be all “ooh, but your mouth germs” and Jyushi thought, like, they were all the same so they had the same mouth germs, right? Besides, Choro wasn’t a doctor, or that was what Ichi always said to him when he got on Jyushi about drinking from the carton. He imagined them sitting behind him at the table, Choro’s watch ticking and his keys jingling in his pocket, jingle jingle, and Ichi was sighing and scratching at his chin, scritch scritch.
“You’re not a doctor,” Ichi would say. “Hop off, Fappy.”
“I don’t have to be a doctor to know what germs are, dumbass,” Choro would respond, and Jyushi would just turn around and probably drink the rest of the milk and maybe squirt it out of his nose and Ichi would laugh and Choro would smile a little but he would mostly act annoyed and surprised which Jyushi was okay with because sometimes when Choro did that it made the joke funnier and he was pretty sure Choro knew that and then they would take turns throwing the little marshmallows into each other’s mouths and—
Stop.
He stopped.
He focused on pouring the cereal, took a few marshmallows out and put them in his mouth, poured a little more. He added the milk and looked up because he heard a bird outside and so he took a few quick steps to the right and leaned over his sink, trying to find the bird in the window, echoing the chirping. He didn’t find the bird. What he found instead was the lady in the building across from the lab walking around in a sports bra. He stopped chirping and sunk down a little so he was just peeking over the bottom of the window, eyes wide. She scratched at her stomach, stretched, and sat down on her couch, leaned forward to pick up the remote and her boobies were really big, okay, the kind of boobies Oso would call “juuuuuuugs” and he’d draw out the “uh” real long and make it all guttural and growly and everyone would laugh except Kara who would say something about the human body and love or something that Jyushi wouldn’t listen to and, and— his cereal was getting soggy, he realized, but he didn’t want to look away, so he tried to reach out and grab the bowl without moving from his spot at the sink and without looking and the bowl was just out of his reach and his fingers barely touched the rim and he reached a little harder and this time he caught the rim but he knocked the bowl off of the counter altogether.
He yelped and jumped and covered his ears at the crash and the bowl shattered all over the floor and milk and cereal went everywhere and there was milk in his socks and he groaned and flapped his sleeves and peeled them off first before he did anything else. He tossed the socks over his shoulder and got down on his hands and knees, wiping it up with his hands at first because he was so ready to have it cleaned but then he thought about what he was doing and got paper towels, duh. He gingerly picked up the shards of the bowl and threw them away and wiped up all the milk and marshmallows and cereal and then he sat there for a moment and mourned what was lost. He kind of half-expected Dekapan to come check on him but he didn’t and honestly Jyushi was kind of grateful for that because he didn’t feel like talking and he really really didn’t feel like talking about how he broke a bowl because of boobies, he didn’t want to talk about boobies with Dekapan. The list of people Jyushi didn’t want to talk about boobies with was pretty short but Dekapan was definitely on it. He put his palm to the floor and it came back sticky and he mumbled to himself and wiped his hand on his pajama shirt. He didn’t want his feet to get sticky so he got up to put on a pair of shoes.
He looked at his house shoes. Well, those were too important. He looked at his tennis shoes. He wore them too often to deal with sticky soles. He couldn’t wear his work boots, he hated them.
He paused for a long moment, then pulled a box out from under his bed and dug around until he found a pair of dress shoes. He didn’t know who they belonged to, but they weren’t his, he thought his mom might have packed them. They looked new, so maybe she’d even bought them for him thinking he might need them now that he was on his own or something? But he didn’t, so they were perfect for standing on a sticky kitchen floor.
He slipped on the dress shoes and clomped back into the kitchen, the sound of the hard soles on the tiles reminding him of Choro for some reason. Clomp clomp clomp. He stood in the kitchen, looked at the sticky floor, and thought about what Choro would do in this situation. He slumped his shoulders a little and slicked down the cowlick at the crown of his head, pulled his mouth down in a taut little frown and tapped his toe on the ground the way Choro did when he was getting impatient with the rest of them, which was most all of the time.
He would probably swiffer the floor.
Jyushi looked from the floor to the box of cereal and then at the floor again. His stomach growled. He stared longingly at the box of cereal and flapped his sleeves for a moment.
He could deal with a sticky floor for now, he wasn’t Choro anyway, he was Jyushi and he was going to make his cereal right now. So he stood in the sticky patch and made another bowl, but when he went to the window the woman had put on a shirt, which made him sigh loudly, like, come on, come on, come on, first his bug friend went under the fridge and then he dropped his bowl and now her juuuuuugs were away and it was just a rough start to his day.
Jyushi walked back into the living room and sat down on the floor in the middle of the patch of sun coming in through the skylight, ate his cereal and tapped the toes of his sticky shiny shoes together and pulled at his collar because he was sweating a lot now, like a lot a lot, like he was actually kind of starting to get gross. He wiped his forehead and finished off his cereal and laid down on his back, the tile cool against his skin. He set the bowl of cereal on the low coffee table with a few other dirty dishes, eek, he probably should pick up every once in a while, he knew that, but on the other hand, well. He didn’t want to. Picking up was boring, and he was used to having sensible Choro or picky Totty or dutiful Kara there to do it anyway.
The heat was, like, like like like sitting on the sidewalk, on blacktop, in the middle of summer, like kickball in elementary school when he scraped up his knee real bad and the teacher told him maybe he could just watch this time because he gets really into it and sometimes he gets hurt and it was so hot, hot, hot in there and ugh ugh ugh he was sweating so much. The heat was his least favorite thing about living in the flat above the lab. Well. Maybe not his least favorite but close. He had a lot of not favorite things about living in the flat, like he hated the buzz of the air conditioner and the squeal of the stupid stupid shower and the way the door to the closet creeeeeaaaaked when he opened it and the way the bed sometimes squeak squeak squeaked when he was trying to focus on jacking off here like stop it. In fact he didn’t like the whole sleeping in a bed thing very much at all, and not just for that reason, even though that was a pretty big reason, though honestly it was nice to sometimes be able to hook one leg over the bed and put his other foot on the floor and rub against a pillow instead of using his hand because it was too hot for that almost and and anyway he was getting distracted, this wasn’t about getting off this was about the flat. He had a lot of not favorite things about the flat, but his real least favorite thing was that his brothers weren’t there and it was quiet, quiet, quiet. He didn’t like any of the sounds the apartment made but he really didn’t like when it didn’t make any at all, when there was no idol music blaring in Choro’s headphones sounding tinny across the room while he click-clacked away on his laptop and no pings and dings and beeps and buzzes from Totty’s phone in his pocket and no Kara playing guitar somewhere upstairs and no Ichi’s cats purring and meowing and no Oso giving a big loud belly laugh he could hear rooms and rooms away but whatever, fine, whatever, he was fine, he was happy there, and it was all okay. It was okay, it really was, everything was okay and he wasn’t unhappy and he wasn’t lonely and it was fine, fine, fine, and there was static in his head and in his hands and he flapped his sleeves to try to get it out but it didn’t go away so he flapped harder.
He pulled himself up to his knees and then laid back down. Satisfied by the way it made him feel less jittery and manic and nervous, he did it again and again and then he was just doing sit-ups and looking at the calendar on the wall in front of him and counting the little X’s on every day since he’d moved out of his parents house and into the flat with the squeaky bed and the squealy shower and the buzzy air conditioning and the creaky closet and for every X he did a sit up and then he did it again, and then again, and then again and then again, again, again again, counting and counting up and up and up until his lungs were burning and the muscles in his stomach were starting to ache.
Now he was sweaty sweaty sweaty. He collapsed onto his back again and spread out his arms, breathing heavy, grateful that the static had sort of gone away a little but it was still there, even if it was a little softer. Maybe it wasn’t static really maybe he was just… sad. Not that he’d never been sad before, Jyushi had been sad plenty of times, sure, but he’d never been… he’d never been…
He’d never ached like this, in his stomach, like he thought he was gonna throw up, he’d never laid awake at night and tired to imagine he was sleeping between his brothers, he’d never felt so tired, so tired, so tired that he could hardly make himself bounce out of bed, he didn’t even know why he bothered bouncing anymore, there wasn’t anyone here to see it so why do it if it wasn’t so his brothers could see him and say oh good Jyushi is bouncing everything is fine he isn’t lonely at night and he doesn’t wanna cry sometimes when he sees the stray cat that lives in the alley behind the lab because it makes him think about Ichi and why hasn’t Ichi called him anyway, he said he would, and no it’s okay it’s all okay, you know, like they weren’t there to do that so who was he bouncing for? He wasn’t fooling himself, he knew how he felt, he knew that, he knew—
Stop it. Stop.
He sat up with a grunt and looked at the calendar again, flapping his sleeves so maybe the sound would drown out the static buzz buzz buzzing in his ears and in his hands and maybe his throat wouldn’t feel so tight.
Today was the 22nd. 22. 22. He liked that number because it was two twos. Two two. Two two. Two— RIGHT. RIGHT!
Twenty-two, his parents were coming. His parents were coming! His parents were coming today! He had totally forgotten in the rhythm of work and sleep and sweating sweating sweating in his flat that it was almost the 22nd, and the 22nd was the day his parents were coming and they were gonna be here and they were gonna see the flat and ew the flat was a mess but that was okay he could pick up he guessed even though he didn’t want to and and and and ICHI WAS COMING Ichi was coming with them and he was going to see Ichi and he wasn’t gonna ask him why he hadn’t called or why he was always too tired to talk when Jyushi was on the phone with their mom.
He leapt up from his place on the floor and started picking up, spilling milk from old cereal bowls and stepping right in it and feeling very grateful for his sticky shoes because if that had been his house shoes the whole day would have just been ruined. He dumped the bowls in the sink and turned on the water and went back into the main room to get some of the cups he’d left sitting on the bedside table and when he went back in he froze in the doorway.
His bug roommate was back!
Slowly, movements deliberate, Jyushi pulled his shirt over his head and set it on his bed, his eyes fixed on his new friend. He thought maybe taking his shirt off would make him… faster? Besides, it was too hot. He crouched down low and started to creep towards the bug, slinking low like a jaguar, wincing at the sound of his palms peeling off of the floor. The only sounds were his breathing and a strange drip drip drip, a rush rush rush, like water, like… like… like the sink was overflowing.
He froze, his eyes widening, about a foot away from his bug friend, and looked over his shoulder into the kitchen and the sink was overflowing he had left the water on and it was spilling all over the floor and he yelped and scrambled to his feet, falling over and getting back up and scampering into the kitchen and slipping in the puddle, where he fell hard, so hard the wind flew right out of his lungs and he had to lay there for a second and teach himself how to breathe again but he was okay! He was okay and he pulled himself up by the counter, slipped again, and then fumbled for the faucet and finally got it turned off and for a second he just sat there on his knees, arms in the sink, face pressed against the side of the counter, panting, water and old milk and bits of cereal soaking into his pajama pants.
Jyushi caught his breath and then looked down at his pants, uncomfortable with the squishy squishy sticky sticky feeling of his legs being all wet with water and milk. He flapped his sleeves— but he had taken off his shirt so he didn’t have any sleeves, so he just flapped his hands instead, good enough but not the same— and scrambled to his feet, sticky shoes slipping in the spill. He peeled off his pants frantically, hopping on one foot and struggling to get them over the clunky sticky shoes. He dropped the pants on the floor and then looked at the spill. It was a lot, lot, lot of water. He paused for a moment, scrambling mentally for the best way to soak up all the water. After a few minutes of hand-flapping and nervous bouncing on the balls of his feet he went into the bathroom and got his towel and threw it over the spill, watched the fabric darken and caught his breath, forehead in his hands, hopping from one foot to the other in a nervous little dance.
He flap flap flapped his hands for a minute and then hugged his arms around himself and pressed his fingers into the tender spot on his side because it hurt a little and it was bad to hurt himself he knew that but it made him feel real so he did it anyway because besides there weren’t any of his brothers there to take his hand and go hey hey hey Jyushi don’t. He winced but he did it again, and the bruise ached and after a few minutes he felt a little better. He took a few deep breaths that sounded shaky shaky like he’d just run a race and then headed back into the main room. His bug friend was gone again, so he sighed and mumbled to himself about how it kinda felt like people leave a lot and he wanted to pick up more of the dirty dishes he’d left lying around but, but… but he was so sweaty and his legs were sticky and his knees were kind of shaking now so he decided maybe it was time to take a shower.
The shower just had a detachable hose sort of head thing and no normal shower-head which at first Jyushi had liked honestly because sometimes he put the shower-head right over his penis and that was nice but now he was starting to kind of get sick of it. It was too small. But whatever. He pulled off his remaining articles of clothing— just his socks and shoes and his underwear— and stepped into the shower, turning it on but being sure to make it cold enough so it wouldn’t squeal. He left the shower-head where is was hooked on the bar for a moment, trying to find a way to comfortably stand underneath it, but he was too tall and the stream was too small so he resigned himself to picking it up. He held it directly over his head and let the water stream down his face, over his hair in little rivulets, closing his eyes and holding his breath. The water was cold— he could feel goosebumps rise on his arms and legs. It made him think of sleet in the winter time, slushy roads and walking to school early in the morning with his brothers, the cold rain stinging their faces, like, in elementary school and Oso and Choro were being loud and shouting and pushing each other and laughing and Kara and Totty were holding hands so neither of them could fall in the slush and Ichi and Jyushi were taking turns wearing mittens because Jyushi had lost his and Ichi was saying how he didn’t want to go to school, Ichi never wanted to go to school, and Jyushi was telling him it would be fun which was basically true and and and Jyushi had to stop himself because he was kind of crying a little now and he didn’t want to cry so he put on a smile for nobody in particular and sucked it up. He was good at sucking it up! He always had been. That was why he was good at sports. No crying in baseball and all!
Besides, he didn’t need to cry over missing his brothers. Ichi was coming! Ichi was coming and it was all going to be okay and he was going to have a really really good reason for not ever calling Jyushi at all. Yes. Yes! Yes absolutely yes! They were gonna listen to music and Ichi was gonna laugh at his jokes and it was going to be just like before, only, only better! Only better because it was just them, which was really what they had always wanted, right? Maybe not, but Jyushi held onto that even if it wasn’t really true.
He scrubbed himself down, which was kind of an ordeal with the shower-head because he could only use one hand but that was fine and he felt better being clean but not super great not like Wonderful like Capital W Wonderful so he jacked off too just for good measure, his elbow against the wall and his cheek in his hand and that was nice but didn’t really help and besides he felt kind of silly because now his face and chest were gonna be red for a little while and his parents were coming what was he thinking this was stupid but whatever whatever whatever, he did it and there was nothing to do about the flush now so maybe they would just think it was a sunburn or something. He put the cold water on his face like maybe it would make the flush go down even though he knew it didn’t really work that way it was worth a try. He stood in the shower a little longer. The water had seemed so cold cold cold at first but now he was dreading going back out into the hot hot hot apartment.
But he had to. Reluctantly he turned the water off and pushed back the shower curtain, grinding his teeth at the sound of the metal rings scraping against the curtain rod. He stepped out onto the mat and wiggled his toes around, looking around the bathroom for his towel. Where had he put it? He had a habit of misplacing things so it wasn’t unusual but— he looked to his right, out of the door, where he had a clear line of vision into the kitchen, and he found his towel, crumpled up on top of the spill from the sink. Oh, right. Oh man.
Oh man! He hopped from one foot to the other and flapped his hands, then looked under the sink. No clean towels, no clean towels! How long had it been since he had done laundry anyway? Probably since the last time Mom came up to see him and that had been, that had been— he started counting days back to the last time he saw his mom, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 14, 14, 15, 16, 17— but he stopped himself and tried to focus. No towels! No towels! He was wet and now he was cold and he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror— face and chest flushed and his hair plastered to his forehead, naked and dripping water and his skin looked kind of unhealthy in the fluorescent lights but maybe it wasn’t the lights he just hadn’t been outside had he he was usually so brown but he didn’t have any color in his skin anymore, and he looked pale and sickly and and and and what was wrong with him, when had this happened and who even was he, he looked like just a generic Matsuno he didn’t look especially like himself and his stomach kind of hurt now and he was staring at himself, staring at his face and his eyes moved down to the bruise on his side, sickly yellow and purple in places still, gross gross gross and who was he anyway who was he who was he—
Stop it stop it stop it!
Before he even knew he was doing it he was pressing his fingers into the bruise on his side again, this time so hard he yelped out loud. He took a breath through his teeth and hissed it out, squeezing his eyes shut and lying to himself that he was feeling drops of water from his hair slide down his face and not tears. He balled up his hands into fists and pressed his fingernails into his palms, held his breath for a few seconds, and then let it out, letting his arms go all noodley. It was okay okay okay.
His mom and dad were coming and they were bringing Ichi and he was gonna figure it out.
He walked back into the main room and stood there dripping on the tile, looking around for something he could dry off with, anything, anything, anything and— the drapes caught his eye. They looked soft. Absorbent. Jyushi didn't give it a second thought as he crossed the room and wrapped the drapes around himself, toweling off his hair and his face first, working his way down his chest. Once he was mostly dry he just stood there with the drapes wrapped around him like a cocoon, periodically flapping them and enjoying the sound they made, like sleeves but big, big, bigger. He flapped them a little and then flapped them more and he could feel a smile spreading on his face, sniffling and grinning and feeling very pleased with himself. Everything was going to be okay.
There was a knock on the door, and Jyushi jumped. Already?
“Jyushimatsu, baby, we’re here,” his mother said through the door and he smiled and took off without thinking about the way the drapes were pulled around his body and just like that the drapes came down with a crash, knocking over a lamp and busting the lightbulb on the floor with a flash and he yelled and jumped and fell over in a tangled mess of drapes and everything and his head hurt and his heart was beating and he was so disoriented from the sound and the flash and he covered his face with his hands and he didn’t know what happened or how his parents got into the room and there was a hand on his shoulder and it wasn’t his mom’s and it wasn’t his dad’s so it must be Ichi and when he opened his eyes he saw
Oso.
Oso was crouched next to him, his hand on his shoulder, looking down at him like he was worried and Jyushi sat up in all his drapes and looked at him and looked behind him and there was no Ichi, just Oso and Oso was saying something to him but he couldn’t hear because he didn’t want to because why was Oso here he wasn’t supposed to be here Ichi was supposed to be here and what did Oso think was going on did he think they were friends did he think they were friends Jyushi didn’t want to see him and he didn’t understand and his head and hands were full of static and his heart was pumping pumping pumping fast fast fast and he was so mad he was so so mad he was mad mad mad he was and and and—
And.
Jyushi didn’t want to talk about that.
— — —
Oso left shortly.
Jyushi sat at the table.
A fancy restaurant.
White tablecloths.
His throat ached.
He didn’t want to eat anything.
He put his forehead in his hand.
He moved his food around.
He didn’t want to talk.
“How’s work?” Mom asked.
“Okay,” he said.
“Keeping you busy, I guess. You seem tired.”
“Yeah.”
He looked at the chair next to him.
Ichi was supposed to be sitting in the chair next to him.
Where was he?
Jyushi didn’t understand.
“Eat up, kiddo,” Dad said, reaching across and tapping next to Jyushi’s plate. “Not every day your parents come in and pay for your meals anymore, huh?”
Mom laughed.
Jyushi tried to laugh but it wasn’t good.
He tried to eat but the food felt sticky in his mouth.
Too big to swallow.
He choked it down.
He choked everything down.
Frustration with Ichi.
Anger at Oso.
Choke choke choke.
“You know,” Dad said, and his tone was soft.
Giving advice, like teaching Jyushi how to throw a baseball.
“Oso wanted to apologize.”
Jyushi looked up at him.
Didn’t say a word.
Dad sighed.
“I know.” and “I’m sorry,” he said.
Jyushi didn’t say it was okay.
Because it wasn’t.
Besides.
Like.
He didn’t know.
Whatever.
“Where’s Ichi?”
Mom shifted in her seat.
Sighed.
Mom always sighed when she talked about Ichi.
Mom had a crease in her forehead from talking about Ichi.
“He’s home. He’s not… up to it today.”
Bullshit.
Jyushi felt bad for thinking it was bullshit.
But only briefly.
It was bullshit.
Jyushi just took another bite.
Choked it down.
“He’s very tired.”
Ichi was tired.
Jyushi was tired.
Jyushi was tired tired tired.
Jyushi was so tired he put his hands on the table.
So tired he got up and said he wanted to go.
So tired he did go.
— — —
When Jyushi left the restaurant it was raining raining raining big raindrops pop pop pop that landed hard on his face and soaked through his shirt and he thought about taking the bus but then he didn’t want to so he didn’t, he walked. He walked and walked and walked and he didn’t know where he was going and then he realized suddenly he was at the park. He was at the park.
He could remember standing at the gate of this park with his brothers when they were small, keeping Chibita out and smacking his ball out of his hands, he could remember sitting on the stone wall of the park when they were teenagers, listening to Ichi talk about something sad while he smoked a cigarette and smiling and laughing and telling him to lighten up even though it was sad, it was sad and why was Jyushi always saying lighten up instead of mourning and being sad sad sad when things were sad sad sad.
He hadn’t been sad sad sad for long after Homura went away even though it was sad sad sad. He had his one big cry. And then he was happy happy happy bouncy bouncy bouncy and okay. But he wasn’t okay. He was sad sad sad. He wrote her letters. He had dreams about her sometimes. He woke up crying. But he just ignored it.
He hadn’t been sad sad sad when Oso had done what he’d done the day Choro left even though it was sad sad sad. He cried a little at first. But then he was happy happy happy bouncy bouncy bouncy and he was okay, nii-san, really, he was. Except he wasn’t okay then either. He was sad sad sad so sad because maybe he deserved to get kicked maybe he was bad maybe he was a bad brother he didn’t know and he was mad mad mad because Oso had to make everything about himself always didn’t he and it was Choro’s day after all and now it was about Oso and it was about Jyushi when it had been all about Choro at the start and it should have been it was important it was important it was important.
He hadn’t been sad sad sad living alone. Even though that was sad sad saddest of all. It was sad sad sad that his only friend was a bug. It was sad sad sad that he ate breakfast and lunch and dinner alone and didn’t have anyone there to stop him when he wanted to make himself hurt and it was sad sad sad he was lonely he was so lonely and Jyushi had never, ever, ever been lonely and didn’t his brothers care didn’t they know he would be lonely why didn’t any of them talk to him why didn’t Ichi, of all people, Ichi who had always been right there, always right there with Jyushi every day of their lives as far back as Jyushi could remember why didn’t Ichi call him, why didn’t Ichi visit him, why why why?
Jyushi started into the park. The rain was coming down in torrents. He turned right onto the path he’d taken Homura down on one of their dates. And he let himself think about that. He let himself think about how it was sad sad sad that she had been there and now she wasn’t and his hands felt empty when they didn’t have hers to hold.
His throat ached, but he kept walking down the path. He started jogging. He passed the little swing-set they’d played on as kids, pushing each other and laughing and running and jumping and that was when all of his brothers were his friends and not whatever whatever whatever they were now and he thought about it. And he thought about how it was sad sad sad that he didn’t know if he’d ever feel that way about them again. He started running.
He passed the lake. The lake where he and Ichi used to sit and feed the birds on days when Ichi felt bad which were most days and he thought about how it was sad sad sad that even though he was always there for Ichi when Ichi felt bad it didn’t seem like Ichi felt too responsible to uphold his half of the whole deal and it was sad sad sad because Jyushi didn’t know what to do with that, he didn’t know what to do, and he was sprinting and his lungs were burning and he ran hard and fast, as hard and fast as he could around the path and cried cried cried until his throat ached and, and, and he didn’t smile.
He didn’t smile.
He didn’t smile.