Work Text:
者の哀れ—noun. 1. a gentle appreciation for the passage of time, the pathos of ephemera, and the sadness of finality. 2. how sunflowers always die in the end. 3. later, you stand on a street corner and look up into the sky.
Ephemera
In the end, you die in the ash.
The death of a sadomasochistic psycho1 like you is no tragedy, so you might as well feel good about it. It's like when Niina chokes you out or Hiori just barely manages to hold back from slicing you open. The destruction is as cathartic as taking every piece of china out of your mother's cabinet and smashing them on the ground, one by one, until you're left with bed of shards to sleep in.
It's as cathartic as sleeping in it.
1. That's what everyone2 always calls you, anyway.
2. image description: A glossy five-by-seven inch photograph of a man, a woman, and a young girl. The man is wearing a business suit and tie and has his right hand on the woman's shoulder, displaying his gold engagement ring. The woman is wearing a simple floral dress and an absent expression, looking away from the young girl, whose piercing blue eyes are directed towards the camera. None of the three are smiling.
Her
From the window of a train you see the shadow of cranes stumbling and pecking their way through fields of shipping containers. Each bird is hundreds of feet tall, covered with plumage of metal girders and oil, with brains full of people and a beating heart of diesel. Watching them brings regal, sobering awe to the otherwise mundane thrill of fulfilling a promise.1
Aside the platform you find an empty plastic bottle of milk tea that smells of dried fish and seawater, having expired three years, one month, and twelve days ago. Further down the stairs are the viscera of a dead shrimp and the splatter of seagull droppings. Bamboo fences separate each sand dune from the next until, in all its wasteful beauty, you've found the ocean.
You aren't sure what it really means to remake the world from your own memories. You aren't sure what you've forgotten, or if there's a missing hand that might be shaped like the empty space in your own.
It's an absence that makes as much sense as the hole in your heart.
Saving the world is an immense responsibility, more fit for kings and queens, or heroes, or the gods themselves (if such things were real—the world system might have a name and a tangible appearance but it's hardly fit for comprehension, and you're really just a girl).
Perhaps a world existed where you were a magical girl and not just the reflection of everything that was done to you. Now that you've been stranded in time and survived the end of everything long enough to perceive the reconstructed world as the falsehood it is—it isn't really that you're broken. Systems of ableism and oppression and whatever secondary systems enabled your parents to call themselves "parents" are broken. The garbage on this beach is broken, your memory is broken; seashells and charcoal and whatever falls into the water on the other side of this bay become broken. Snowflakes are broken upon encountering the surface of the ocean, but, ultimately, they're just water.
Sometimes you cry and it's also just water. Sometimes you recall an expanse of water so vast that there's nothing past it: an eternal ocean; an oasis, a girl.
You dip your feet into the filthy water and savor the cold.
Like in death, no hand finds yours.
Seaweed wraps around your ankles. You breathe exhaust and listen to birdsong.
1 "Let's promise each other then," you remember saying. "That we'll look out over the ocean in winter someday. Just the two of us."
Information Believed Complete
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"Uta isn't like other children," the doctor is telling your mother. He's holding a picture of your brain in his hands, and your mother is holding her hands on her forehead. "She doesn't feel things the way you and I can. She doesn't have the capacity for empathy." "I know," your mother says. She has wavy black hair and an empty expression on her face. She would be crying but she says she can't. Your father keeps looking over at you so you keep playing with the toys under the exam table. That's what you're supposed to be doing. He knows you can hear but he doesn't care. "What do we do?" your mother asks. "Raise her the way you'd raise any child," the doctor explains. "She won't be able to respond in—" "No," your mother interjects. "This isn't about her. What do we do? How do we raise a child that can't feel? How can we be a family?" The doctor responds in murmurs, and the rest of the evening is filled with paper handouts and psychologists and the soft accumulation of snow on the outside of the windowsill. When your father has finally had enough he walks over to where you're kneeling and wrenches you up by your arm. Later, you watch as streetlights cast sharp and angled reflections over your parents' shoulders in the front seats of your family's car. "What do we do?" your mother asks again. Your father doesn't respond. "So she's just broken?" your mother continues. | |
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"I hate you," you whisper. |
The car lurches forward. "What was that?" your father says. |
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"I said I hate you!" you scream. It's not the full truth. You both don't know what's going on, and you know exactly what's going on. You know what bruises feel like and you know how your mother looks at you during family photos. You know how to talk and eat and turn twelve; you know what an abortion is and how your mother didn't get one; you know what foster care is—but you're the one who doesn't have empathy. You're the one who doesn't know what "want" means. You don't even know what the absence of "want" feels like. |
The car swerves wildly in response. Your mother is crying. |
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There is a reason why your parents insist on going to this doctor in particular, and why telling this doctor what you think and what you want always communicates so many things that you didn't mean— |
"You don't even know what hate is," your father says, turning around in the driver's seat. "You don't even—" |
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The moment the car hits the van stopped at the light, you already know it's your fault. The seatbelt digs into your throat. It feels good. You almost feel free. |
The windshield explodes into the car as your mother's scream is cut short by the airbag. |
Days later when they're asleep, you walk into the dining room, grab the papers the doctor gave your parents off the table, and hesitate before you rip them to shreds. Some of the words might escape you, but if there's anything you do know—it's what this all means.
What This All Means
Autism Spectrum Disorder 299.00 (F84.0)
Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive, see text): Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.
Accident Report
| Type: | Injury (you laugh and keep laughing) |
|---|---|
| Case No: | 17121309 (because they don't believe you) |
| Date/Time: | 12/13/2017 17:52 (because this will always happen again) |
| District: | 240 (no matter where you go) |
| Location: | E16 near Karibacho (no matter where home is) |
| Vehicle Count: | 3 (no matter how much damage is done) |
| Description: | The Toyota Camry was driving north on E16 near Karibacho and hit the Nissan Vanette that was stopped at the exit. The Camry rolled multiple times and entered the intersection, where it impacted the Honda Accord. (this is all your fault) |
| Status: | Information believed complete. |
The End
The sky is missing and the world is as gray and soft and sick as you are. You've been wandering the ash fields for days when you stumble onto the stoop of a house and finally can't get up. The city around you is the color of absinthe and ichor and you think about:
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memories and muscle and the combination thereof that turned your delicate fingers into sharp instruments and accusatory things;
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how even the word 'defile' can itself be violated when used to describe the actions of indescribable ontological evil; for example, the act of pulling flowers out of a girl's chest;
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how philosophizing in the face of death really doesn't and didn't and never meant a goddamn thing when you were only ever a hedonist, a broken girl, a lie, a deceiver, an evil—
The myth of absolution through death is nothing like the reality of jumbled thoughts, prosaic certainty, blood from your lungs on un-beautiful skin on the lip of this place that used to be called a home.
Ash falls like acid snow, like antimatter dissolving the world whole. If there was a song in your heart beautiful enough to justify your name,1 you die with it.
If there was love in that home—the missing, unquantifiable plasma shared in clean air between a grandmother2 and her grandson, perhaps wearing his loud striped t-shirt among the normalcy of soft, cracked voices3 and tea—you die without it. If the walls could talk they would have been accepted as part of the family along with the framed pictures nailed into them. Cats walking through the garbage with intestines full of worms would have had the misfortune to be brought inside and saved to live a life of confined stability. Besides the family itself, you're the only thing that's ever died here without at least someone trying.
If your father were here, he'd buy a coffin shaped like his ideal image of a daughter he never had and fill it with your bones. You'd mar one last beautiful purchase and live forever under a plot of earth as your parents cried the same tears as always, only ever mourning the girl you weren't. If you had a heart at all you might even feel something about it.4
Death is a long, drawn out process. Everyone you were ever connected to is gone, the annoyance is gone, Niina is gone, your parents and the city and the world are all gone and now the rest of your body is going to be gone the same way your heart always was, and that's okay.
It's soft here. It burns and it's cold and, even transformed into the reflection of someone you're not, you're here, wretched and angry.5 This isn't the death you wanted to die but you're here and you're sick and the world is sick and—
1. "Uta,"
2. she
3. says, "Do you like sunflowers?"
4. "I hate them," you say.
5. It's a tacit admission that you're a person that feels.
Framed Pictures Nailed Into Talking Walls
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"How can we be a family," your mother1 sobs to your father,2 "If she can't feel anything? Is she even human?"3
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"I hate you!" you scream again. You aren't sure why you scream that but you mean it and it means something.
Later, your mother forces you to sit at the table and eat the meal she cooked until you tell her you love her.
Later, a bird flies into the window and snaps its neck.
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By the time you turn eight, your father stops recording your height on the post near the dining room.
1. image description: Printed film photograph of a woman in a floral-print dress sitting on the stairs in front of a family home. She is facing away from the camera, smoking a cigarette while she looks across the street towards an abandoned, dilapidated home covered in ivy and an empty lot full of damaged, overgrown automobiles. A child's thumb is visible obstructing the camera's lens in the bottom corner of the photograph.
2. image description: Printed film photograph of a man with short graying hair, thin stubble, and a tough stature wearing a brown cardigan as he sweeps broken china off the wooden floor of a small, cluttered family kitchen.
3. image description: Negative of a young girl covered in bruises, reflected in a dirty bathroom mirror.
Blue Reflection
An odd effect of reversing an apocalypse is that the life you lived before is compacted into one experience. It's no longer an extensive, detailed string of ideas, just an efficient summary dislocated from the trauma stored in your body. It makes as much sense as it doesn't.
In the old world, there was a point at which you became evil. You were unrepentant and in love with pain and it felt good—not because you actually liked pain, but because you deserved it. In this reality your father is still an abuser, but this time you're free: not because you managed to conjure a living situation that isn't under the sordid, festering hoard of emotion and shit that fills your parents' house, but because you've had enough alternate realities to explore yourself whole and confident.
There was, of course, her—the frustrating girl whose presence has been erased1 from this reality, whose name was synonymous with the ocean, whose memory remains as opaque and polluted as the actual ocean.
The point is, you have friends2, 3 now.
You go to fake school with fake, imaginary people you made up with all the rest of your best friends,4 and—
That's it, really.
1. image description:
2. Rena and Yuki are still together; and how quaint, that their personalities were shaped by inevitable death and now they're stuck in a false, safe heaven together. Sometimes you wonder if you should ask how love feels when it can't end. If it still feels as fleeting and earned as something that's a sustained choice made with the awareness of risk and mayflies—but they watch the stars together, and tending a lighthouse away from the rest of humanity isn't much different when the world is fake.
3. Hiori and Mio sometimes tease you, yet. Hiori most of all; and there's a certain emotion that occurs between you and her, not in the sense of denied sapphic attraction, but in the sense that whatever you did to her in the past was real, and whatever she did to you in return was real. She's like a time capsule from the old world, filled with everything you forgot about yourself and didn't remake. Human beings have fallible memories (which is exactly why construction of realities should be left to gods instead of the collective consciousness of eleven multiply-traumatized high-school girls), but you believe Hiori, and you believe Mio. Sometimes you eat mapo tofu in the cafeteria at school, and sometimes you lay in Hiori's bed while you try to dredge up memories of a girl who simply doesn't exist, and—
4. The rest, you aren't so sure. There's a new group chat and people keep in touch as best they can, some having adapted to falsehood more than others, everyone having admitted, in some degree of emotional distress or staunch indifference, that something fundamental is wrong. Still, having no idea what's wrong, you mostly just do crafts at sleepovers and kiss when it matters.
Tie
Even after everything, you still don't understand what compelled you keep living in the new world.
It wasn't despair. Niina and Shino held enough despair for a lifetime and as tantalizing as the fruit of their emotion was in the old world, it was never enough.
You never lived to be choked or berated.
At least, Ao1 never did that to you.
1. The memory makes your heart stop.
Ash Sick
The past and the present slam together. You no longer know who you are and you don't care.
The matter of dying on some grandmother's front stoop reminds you of sunflowers. Oceans remind you of Ao and lighthouses remind you of the inside of Rena's heart and living suddenly feels a lot more like pretending to be alive.
Flowers remind you of the inside of girls' chests. It reminds you of how it feels to pull something fragile into your hands and let your inherent evil dry it black until it fractures. At school in the oasis, you planted gardens and cared for the plants so much that Ao hugged you for it. Sometimes the sky is still falling. She's still not here.
You start thinking about doing it all again. Restarting the world, again. Restarting oasis, restarting from the ash and re-dying on a lonely stoop somewhere—it's selfish, because it means everyone else dies again.
You laugh, not because your friends might not believe you, but because this can always happen again. Because no matter where you go, no matter where home is, no matter how much damage is done, no matter if it's all your fault—what you feel is real.
It might as well be yours.