Kasumi closes and locks the door and starts taking off her shoes.

“People don’t change that easily! Why’d you have to be all dramatic like that? See? Now you’re headache’s gotten worse!”

The return train whipped the lesson into Isamu.

Isamu-far ahead of her- replies as he hastily climbs the stairs, “Lay it off now, little sister. I’ve got to get to bed now…”

“Hey, hey, drink some water before crashing!”

Nearing the top of the staircase, with the words getting more and more muffled as he heads towards his room, he says, “I’m not thirsty. Besides, I don’t want to wake up just to take a whiz.”

Isamu hears his mom’s shouting from downstairs-something about glasses and water- as he closes the door.

He empties his pockets on the table. Leaning on the wall, he messily takes off his shirt and rolls onto the bed.

With all ten fingers pressing different parts of the head, he hopes that sleep will be magnanimous enough to visit him. Or this headache will be, to let him welcome it.

He pulls his eyelids down. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes. An hour. Nothing.

He turns over every few minutes- the ticking of the clock mounted on the wall both made him anxious and afraid- soon getting up to take out the batteries.

He doesn’t turn on the lights. The room is pitch black. He lies with his eyes open and can see nothing. His headache has not ceased, but has eased a little in the past few minutes. His neck feels less tense.

A superposition of anger, frustration and fear makes him feel like it’s ripping him apart. And a welling urge which he is both afraid of and tries to desperately push down.

Once faced against an unbudgeable wall, even the strongest falter in their stride. For Isamu, the wall is one he had been creating for himself. His body is giving out. He no longer has the strength to keep pushing it down and it wells up to the forefront of his mind.

Give up. Stop.

There were never any voices in his head. That was the little lie he had to tell that girl-what was her name again?

But if there were thoughts - ones telling him to stop running after this ‘pipedream’ of legacy and remembrance- they were not anyone else’s but his own. Part of him had become apathetic towards this obsession, tired of the overambition.

He can’t keep chasing mindlessly after it and hoping for a miracle. He needs to stop. For so long he had been casting everything aside and thinking of any way he could pursue this, and he is giving up just like this? Can he allow himself to be disillusioned so easily?

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“Emotions don’t and don’t need to make sense all the time. Who cares? You’re only 15! I can see that you’re special! You can do what you want if you go about it the right way.

“Go, try! Failure is something you can only afford when you’re young!

“I can’t rush off anymore, you see? My mom needs my help now that dad isn’t around. She’s moving into this town and opening a bookshop. Well… at least we can live together now. Wait, what was I talking about?

“Ah, yes, sonder. Not a particularly pleasant realization at all.”

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Isamu springs up with a need to rush to the restroom. For a second he sits straight- too straight- looking around.

“Early morning? When did I fall asleep?”

His head feels light. He leans onto his arm. Nausea hits as he tries to get out of bed.

He stands up and his head feels too heavy. He can’t stand straight. The world tilts, bends and takes the floor along with it.

He is awoken by his head hitting the floor. Pain isn’t a variable to be considered now. He stands back up. He can’t seem to walk properly either-he balances himself holding onto anything he can. Like the feeling after spinning at one place too long, but worse. He limps his way out of his room.

Blink. Again, awoken by the collision of his skull, with the floor. He tries to take deep breaths. But can’t. A guttural urge to cry takes over him. Is this some punishment? Is he going to die? One of the biggest elements that pushed him towards this was his fear of death and fading away soon after.

“Is this what they mean when they say that people always die alone?” He sheds a few tears in fear. But the difficulty in breathing eases and he slowly tries to get back up.

“Wake someone to ask for help? Or run to the toilet first?” He pushes himself up again. “But if I faint inside…No, this isn’t a time to feel embarrassed…”

He makes it to his parents’ room and only manages to say one thing before trying to rush through the corridor: “E-everything…. is spinning.”

He does trip inside the restroom, trying to open the door to get out. His dad helps him back up and to his room.

-------------------

Measurements showed that his blood pressure had dropped too low. And it didn’t take his mother long to see that he was severely dehydrated.

He spent the day sleeping, drinking water, eating, cautiously visiting the restroom and took the time to realize the extent of the damage he had caused for himself.

His health- declining, his studies- a mess, his command over his memory- gone and so on.

He doesn’t want to talk to his parents about ‘why’ he did this to himself- he tried once or twice before but it didn’t get across. The limits of language were to blame there, although the only justification then and which he’d taken for granted was be that the greater the sacrifice, the greater the reward- equivalent exchange.

“When did this obsession start?” He asks himself lying on his bed, only to realize he’s said it out loud when his mom, sitting by him, replies.

“You remember that task you were assigned back in… whichever grade you were, to make a family tree?”

“No…”

“You don’t remember? You were shocked!”

“Why?”

“Because the farthest back we knew was your father’s grandparents… So, four generations.”

“Why was I shocked?”

“How would I know? But that, and after an outing with your friends from junior high… you started rambling about this stuff all day!

“Stuff like would it be a bad thing if you wanted to be remembered… and did questionable things. It was a good thing you stopped. Or so it seemed.”

“I…uh… When did I stop?”

“A little while after you went to high school.”

“Do you remember why?”

“First, drink this water.” She fetches him a glass of water from the table.

As he drinks it, he says, “Do you?”

“No… you didn’t talk about any of it. You looked pretty bad those few months, till you started talking about Fuuji-kun and I thought things got better.

“You gave me the scare of a lifetime, you know that?”

“Sorry about that."

“Seriously, you need to talk to us about things more! Nobody’s going to try to help more than us!”

“I know.” But he also knows how hard it is to get it across how it feels to be crushed under the weight of his own goals.

“Now get some sleep, okay? If you need anything-”

“I know, I know.”

He closes his eyes once more. It’s now the afternoon of the next day. But unlike the previous one, he doesn’t have a splitting headache and awful dehydration caused by his own callousness. Neither does he have grand goals anymore.

Feeling like he almost died punched that out of him. If he ever goes after anything big afterwards, he will consider his own abilities before choosing what to aim for. That, he learnt from feeling like an insect any time he saw or was in any crowd-which only got worse since getting admitted to a school accepting only exceptionals- he was nothing special, he never was.

--------------------------------

He looks at the clock. He’d only fallen asleep for a brief few minutes.

He had to ask his mother where it started, but he knew where the ending of his unrealistic and wishful dream began- the moment he saw that silhouette in the park. And even though it was an accumulation of all his foolishness, he feels grateful for it.

A deep exhale, and soon he drifts off.