This was unlike anything I had felt before. It was an anger that shook me down to my very marrow. The abandonment, the fact that she had changed, the verbal abuse, the fact that I was nothing to her now—all of it made me shudder. I had been misread, and with a flagrantly incorrect interpretation.
Akiyoshi had misread me.
That was all it took. Others might think this an incomprehensible reason, but that was all it took to make a sack of dark, venomous poison erupt from within me. Before I even realized it, that poison began gushing from my open mouth.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I shouted, in a voice so loud it startled even me. Akiyoshi’s shoulders quivered in shock as well, but she quickly fixed her posture, scowling back at me.
“That’s what I should be saying. I can’t believe that you would get in our way over something like that. Something as stupid as that!” she spat. There was no trace of the old Akiyoshi left in her face.
I knew it then. I finally realized it—Akiyoshi was one hundred percent correct.
Mistaken.
I was mistaken.
I was mistaken in trying to do something about the twisted, new Moai, much less trying to set Akiyoshi in the right direction. It was already far too late for that. Would I ever have made it in time? No, I never would have.
I was already too late the moment I met her.
“I was wrong.”
“…Yes, you were.”
“I should have never made room in my life for someone as irritating as you.”
Had I not, my past four years would have never been so wretched.
Akiyoshi appeared utterly bewildered. What was she so surprised about?
“You’re just a monster who craves the spotlight. You only chose me that day at random just because I happened to be sitting beside you, because you needed someone to help you tend to your wounds. It didn’t matter who it was.”
“That’s n—” she started to say, but then, Akiyoshi swallowed her words. I could see her slowly paling. My poison was seeping into her. Loathing the fact that she would dare to make such a face, I began spouting poison again.
“What the hell was all that about ideals? What about the greater good? You got me all wrapped up in your little plots when you were only ever in it for yourself.”
I knew then that I had always wanted to say this. It wasn’t just Akiyoshi; every single one of them talked about ideals. They spoke of kindness for the sake of others. But when you peel back their skin, all you find underneath that is pure selfishness.
Akiyoshi, Tousuke, Ten, Pon-chan, Kawahara-san—they were all the same. When it came down to it, they were all just in it for themselves, just using others to fulfill their need for attention, or money, or their sexual desires, no matter who or what it was.
Using Moai as merely a place for them to affirm their sense of righteousness.
Using a senpai in place of a lover out of mere loneliness.
Using a gathering of friends as a tool for job hunting.
Using a kouhai as an outlet to sate one’s desires.
And perhaps even…
“I was just an easy excuse for you. It didn’t have to be me. I was just a stand-in, someone who would pay attention to you.”
No, but if it was Akiyoshi, then those feelings, even after all this time…
“…You’re probably right.”
She nodded with a pained look on her face, as though all of my poison now ran through her veins.
That face burned itself into the back of my skull.
I couldn’t hear.
I knew that her lips were quivering, but that was all.
It felt as though my ears had been cut out entirely. Then my heart, then my stomach. The wind blew through that hollow, chilling me to the bone.
I was struck by a sense of danger. I felt an impending doom. I had to get out of that place before my legs were cut off too. However, I felt that there was still one last thing I had to say.
“I would have been so much happier without you. And so would everyone else.”
I could not even hear my own voice, but I’m certain that those were the words that came out of my still remaining mouth. As half of my head was already gone, I had no idea if what I wanted to say had gotten across. I looked at Akiyoshi though my remaining eye and turned my back on her.
I got the feeling that at some point in the distant past I had wanted to see her face, but I no longer cared.
That was the last time we ever saw one another.
The next day, my missing ears grew back, but a heavy wind was still blowing through the hole left behind from my heart and innards. In the over twenty-four hours since that meeting, I had not so much as had a drink of water, certain that anything I ingested would just slip right back out through that gaping hole.
I had no desire to even get up from the floor of my apartment, but I was not so anti-establishment as to skip out on a scheduled work shift. So, I dragged my underprepared body out to work.
Though I had not slept the whole night through, somewhere deep down, the day before felt like a bad dream. I only knew that it was not a dream because I hadn’t slept at all.
As I had not managed to listen in on the debriefing the day before as I had intended, what I should be doing next was to go to work and ask Kawahara-san about it. However, I could not recall the last time when what I should be doing matched what I wanted to do. I had already lost all interest in the matter. All my anger and frustration had fled from out of that void within me sometime during the night, as if even they despised me.
When I embraced the void, it only opened even wider. All that I had done in my fight against Moai and the group itself, all the name-calling, and even the fact that I had defied my very own key principles, all rang hollow.
In the end, I really was nothing more than a convenient stand-in for Akiyoshi. It felt as though Moai and everything that went along with it had been nothing more than a lark. My feelings were never even necessary. With time and my own memories rendered utterly meaningless, even my own existence felt pointless. Actually, no—maybe I had always felt that way about myself. I had just been mistaken in ever considering myself to be anything of consequence.
I was back to normal now. It was just a temporary nuisance that I had ever had any illusions otherwise. I now understood clearly that this was fruitless.
And because it was fruitless, it no longer mattered.
I was not hurting for money, and I sought no recognition from my part-time work. There was no one who I was hoping to meet. This was just practice, so when the time came, I stepped outside and rode my bike to the drugstore.
The dregs of the midday sun warmed the air around me, but strangely I did not feel the heat at all. I arrived at the drugstore parking lot, not really certain how I had gotten there. I remember feeling my feet slipping from the pedals a number of times along the way, but I could not recall what sort of people I had passed by, nor even how many traffic lights I had stopped at.
I dismounted at the usual spot and entered through the back door into the locker room. As soon as I entered, my eyes met Kawahara-san’s. Normally, I probably would have wondered about what sort of mood she was in following the Moai debriefing. However, that no longer concerned me. I simply looked her in the eye and greeted her.
“Heya.”
“…Hey.”
I was not even particularly concerned that there was a slight unnatural feeling to Kawahara-san’s usual curtness. There were only a few months of this left anyway. When I left this job, she would just forget me. I, nothing more than a senpai she could chat with on her work shifts, would become but a phantom in her memory. I was certain that we shared about an equal level of non-awareness of other people’s emotions.