@ki-sa*721

somethings been bothering me

@ki-sa*721

theres an unknown road in front of my bfs place lol

@ki-sa*721

@gial☆star im not talking about our relationship

@ki-sa*721

where does it go? its under construction lmao

@ki-sa*721

takkuns amazing

@ki-sa*721

a walk on an unknown road

@ki-sa*721

@gial☆star im so scared im not scared lol

@ki-sa*721

takkun

@ki-sa*721

huh?

@ki-sa*721

its too dark

@ki-sa*721

wtf is this. i dont like this at all. nope.

@ki-sa*721

@gial☆star

@ki-sa*721

so soft and pretty

Haruma-1

The breeze had been cool and refreshing earlier, but now it was slowly blending into the damp and muggy air. The ever-distant, overcast sky weighed down upon me as the air became hotter and more humid.

It had been one week since Chigusa and I had stopped seeing each other. This suffocating feeling coincided with my relief at my long-awaited return to a calm and peaceful lifestyle. Even the train bound for school felt hot and sticky on the inside. My inner sense of discomfort only exacerbated my outer sense of discomfort.

The reason it gets more humid as the early phase of summer goes by is not just because of j.a.pan’s climate; it’s because of humans. A whole new world (AKA the new semester) starts in April, and it exhausts anyone who lives through those days whether they adapt to it or not. This causes the world’s humidity level to rise.

Do you understand what I’m getting at?

The spittle flies out of one’s mouth during a diligent attempt to make friends in their new cla.s.s. A cold sweat slides down one’s face as all the conversational starters they desperately came up with slip away from them, and on the way home from school they heave a deep sigh: “Today was a bust as well, huh…” Then, while that person is sleeping, their misery leaks onto their pillow and makes it wet. And later on, during the dead of night, the trauma of one’s middle school days rears its ugly head, causing that person to wake up drenched in sweat—that’s the way the world works.

If a mere body can release so much fluid, then no wonder the world gets damper.

Plus, there are heaps of people here in Tokyo. When you take the Yamanote line, the suffocating feeling pervades even during the commute to school. Since there are woman-only carriages and all, I reckon they should make fatty-only carriages for summertime. That being said, making exclusive carriages doesn’t exactly make quarantining possible. Women normally rode the carriages I went in, after all.

Shrinking away as much as they could in order to avoid bodily contact with other people, the generic-faced high school girls would hold onto the hanging straps and stand together as they chatted away to their generic-faced friends.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

“The news headlines. Uh oh, all the birds in the world are, like, dying.”

“What the h.e.l.l? LOL,” the generic girl shot back in almost no time flat.

I also thought that what I was hearing next to me was funny. Birds of a feather drop dead together, eh? (lol) Er, that’s actually not funny…

The generic girl must have thought the same way because she smiled back awkwardly in an attempt to be sociable. “Ahaha… Eheheh…” Then she turned back to her smartphone screen. “Wasn’t it the fish that were dying last time?” she spoke up in an attempt to fill the silence that had come upon them. This prompted generic girl #2, who had probably been thinking the same thing, to turn her gaze outside the window in deep contemplation.

“Ohh, what was it again? Kasumigaseki? You know, the pond… Isn’t it freaky?”

“I know, right? LOL how freaky.”

Kasumigaseki is a government district, not a pond. What the h.e.l.l was up with these high school girls? LOL how freaky. Fish were dying in large quant.i.ties in Kasumigaura, the lake. Not a pond. What the h.e.l.l, high school girls? LOL how freaky.

You hear about loads of birds and fishes dying every day. Not that it’s such an unusual thing, though. If you go back to the news of yesteryear, you’d a.s.sume a bunch of conspiracies were going on. Some religious shaman would link all those news stories together and come up with something like: “A guardian spirit spoke to me! This world will perish! Now in cinemas!”

People like them would have been treated like a complete joke till now, but since there’s been no end to the extreme weather and ghastly incidents, it seems they’ve been gaining a bigger following of late. Still, I’m pretty sure they’ll end up becoming a joke this time as well. Like Nostradamus’s prophecy, which was the talk of the town long before I was ever born, or the Mayan calendar—neither of them came true.

Honestly, small earthquakes happen every day and so do ma.s.s deaths of birds and fishes, so it was all nothing more than picking up a set of coincidences and linking them all together where it was convenient. There are always accidents and mishaps happening that we don’t know about.

Basically, meaning is only created because people link individual events together. We only see what we want to see; we only perceive what is right in front of our eyes. That’s why people are aware of the prelude to destruction when they are convinced that the world will perish, and so they set their sights on the end of the world.

At long last, the train reached its destination. With an ugly creak, the entire train slowed down.

“Y’know, speaking of freaky stuff, have you heard of the Random Crossroad?”

“Oh, that…”

Generic girl #1 and generic girl #2 went on talking, but they were drowned out by the wave of people exiting the train, so I couldn’t hear the last part of what they were saying.

The Random Crossroad. Oh yeah, there was that dumba.s.s story. When I got out on the platform and whipped out my smartphone messaging app, I saw that this was indeed what it was called.

As soon as I caught sight of the account name Johanne, the face of a beautiful girl vividly came to mind. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I just imagined her face, but when I remembered how she had given me such a piece of her mind, the effect was like a depressant. On top of that, I experienced a teensy bit of regret at showing her the sc.u.mmy side I was so careful to close off from regular people, so it all felt like a bad trip on acid. They really ought to put a “dangerous drug” label on her.

It had been one week since I had gotten away from Chigusa, and since then I hadn’t heard a peep from her. Even her haemorrhage-inducing popup notifications had come to a complete stop.

As I closed my smartphone and started walking, I could once again sense the humidity rising, bit by bit.

Seriously, what was up with her?