As I struggled under the weight of both Akira and my own mental anguish, I heard a voice inside my head, confronting me with the same question I’d been asked so very many times throughout my life. But there was no simple answer I could give that made my condition any easier to understand. Some things were just triggering for certain people but not for others—there was no deeper reasoning to it than that. Surely everyone had at least one or two things that they felt extremely uncomfortable with, things they would never consent to under any circumstances. Anyone who said otherwise probably just didn’t know what those things were, likely because they simply hadn’t experienced them yet. And if they were really lucky, they might even go their whole lives without ever finding out. Those were the ones I envied most of all.
“Aw, don’t be such a baby. It’s not gonna kill you or anything.”
Yes, this was a sentiment I’d heard many times before as well.
Imagine, if you will, having a big fuzzy caterpillar in the palm of your hand. For me, touching another human being brought forth the same visceral discomfort and emotional distress you might feel if you were to clench your fist and crush that little insect to death. Or if you preferred an example that did not involve snuffing out a tiny life by your own hands, then replace the caterpillar with a dead rodent carcass or something. Either way, the point was that it was a purely involuntary response, not one based in reason or logic.
“Huff…huff…”
A large bead of sweat dripped from my brow. I could feel Akira slipping down my back, so I jostled her upward to readjust my grip—but the kickback from shifting her weight caused me to twist my ankle and fall forward to the ground.
“Owww… Ugh, goddamn it…”
Luckily, I managed to brace myself in advance, so I only suffered a few scrapes on my knees and elbows. Akira was still safely secured on my back as well. Even so, it took everything I had to force myself back up to my feet and keep moving forward, rather than succumbing then and there to the pain and exhaustion.
My mind was a total haze. I had no idea how long I’d even been walking—it might have only been a few minutes, for all I knew. If we couldn’t find somewhere to rest soon, I didn’t know what the hell we were going to do. We should have been more prepared for the rain before we came this way. Or, at the very least, we should have taken ample breaks to dry ourselves off. Though thinking back on it now, Akira had already seemed a little under the weather even before she charged headfirst into the rain. Man, we really should have talked things out in advance… And while I knew hindsight was always twenty-twenty, I couldn’t help but think about all the things we could have done differently.
“Oh, hey.”
Just down the road, I spotted an old wooden house—still in use, by the looks of it. This was a sight for sore eyes, to be sure, yet it also filled me with a strange sense of trepidation. Not once on our journey thus far had we ever resorted to staying the night in a stranger’s home. Mainly because it felt unethical, but also because there was basically no way to hide an intrusive stayover in someone else’s private domain unless you were very meticulous in covering your tracks. But this was an emergency, so we had no other choice. I summoned forth whatever strength I had remaining in my rickety, wobbling legs and made one final push in the direction of the house.
After trespassing onto the property, I said a little prayer to myself as I reached for the sliding front door—which thankfully rattled right open with a single tug. Phew, thank goodness. In the lowered entryway, I spotted some women’s shoes as well as an old pair of those therapeutic massage slippers with the little bumps all along the insoles.
The place had that distinctively foreign lived-in smell that you only ever seemed to find in strangers’ homes. I set Akira and our backpacks down in the entryway, then took my wet coat and socks off before heading inside to look for somewhere we could rest. With every wet footprint my bare feet left on the floor, I felt a fresh pang of guilt surge through me, but all I could do was promise myself that I would clean them up later.
When I walked into the living area, I found that the TV had been left on and there was a newspaper spread open on the low dining table. Farther in, I could see an elderly woman with gray hair standing with her back to me in the kitchen, apparently in the middle of cooking herself something for lunch. While we could certainly rest out here if we had to, it would probably feel a bit unsettling to do so right under the nose of one of the people we were intruding on. I decided to check out some of the other rooms.
As I searched through the rest of the house, I eventually passed by a traditional Japanese-style sitting room. I caught a glimpse of a little shrine to the deceased through the open screen door, so I stopped and took a peek inside. In the center of the altar was a portrait of an old man, whom I could only assume had been the husband of the elderly woman in the kitchen. If so, then it stood to reason that the widowed old lady was probably living here alone, which meant there had to be at least one room somewhere in this house that wasn’t currently being used for anything.