You stand in a small room.
A lonely, dimly lit room, without even the slightest hint of sound......
You stand stock-still in a daze, as if you haven’t yet grasped the fact that you can move.
Those childish braids in your hair.
Your clothes, the raw color of exposed entrails.
Your head hangs low, keeping your expression out of view.
You begin to move, trembling, starting from the tips of your fingers, turning around slowly.
Then, with the tiniest movement, you awkwardly step forward. You gaze about at your surroundings. Taking everything in like a newborn baby.
Eventually, you make your first bold move and hesitantly begin to explore the room in which you stand.
You approach each item you lay eyes on, touching it and bringing your face close, as if to discover its scent and flavor.
It’s like you’re anticipating the start of a delightful and fascinating new adventure.
You seem convinced that there should be some sort of reaction to your movements.
But no matter how much you move and walk about, it has no effect on your surroundings — not one thing changes. It’s almost as if you aren’t even alive.
It’s just like you’re dreaming, isn’t it?
Isn’t it so empty?
As if to express those thoughts, you stubbornly continue to walk along. Walk, walk......
Walking about the little room, as if you’ve been possessed by a malevolent spirit.
At some point, you find a sliding glass door that connects the room’s interior to the outside. After ruefully looking back at the room several times, you head for that door.
You pass through the glass door, which slides open with no resistance, and step outside.
However—
Even out there, there is only emptiness.
It is a cramped veranda attached to the little room.
There are no houseplants, or even a little bird stopping to rest its wings. It is barren, as if everything has gone extinct.
As if the previous owner took what they could and fled, only such necessities as an external air conditioning unit, drainage pipes, and a barren planter were left behind.
You approach the handrail and glance back at the little room you were in until a short time ago.
Somehow, it seems like a narrow apartment building or condo. You cannot tell how tall the building is, and you can’t see any neighboring buildings — or maybe there is just nothing nearby.
There are only the thick, sordid clouds and the moonlight shining dimly through them.
You seem to realize that this isn’t the outside. The outside is supposed to be a world overflowing with positivity, with feelings such as freedom and joy. However, this veranda is like the visualization of a depressed heart, the clouds and the handrails and this mysterious feeling of being cooped up serve to disconnect one from everything else — to cut off the outside world, to close it off. You return to the room, seemingly to escape that suffocating feeling.
Perplexed, you gaze about the room with disinterest — looking around at all the objects that may or may not hold meaning, with heavy-lidded eyes that make you seem half-asleep.
The rug bears an unsettling and graphic pattern that looks as if human flesh has been peeled away and lined up like the pieces of a puzzle. You stare down at the face sneering up at you, as if it belonged to another person, standing out against the carpet’s backdrop — as if to say to it that you’d like to talk.
But of course, there is no reaction.
The room overflows with emptiness.
There is an extremely old CRT TV. There’s also a game console, one capable of handling only the simplest of games, not enough to satisfy your boredom. It’s unlikely any guests would ever come, so the cushions on your floor are strewn about haphazardly. Books are situated on a bookshelf at about your height, as if they might have been put there by you — but the dust is so thick that you can’t clearly make out the titles.
A diary lies abandoned on a desk, the nondescript type of desk you might see in an interview room.
An extremely charming and soft-looking bed stands in the room.
As you totter toward the bed, you discover the room’s interior door. But your movement becomes uncertain. It’s as if you’re afraid of something. With a great deal of difficulty, you approach the door and touch it. At that moment, you hang your head as if trying to stave off nausea, and shake it weakly.
You cannot go outside — or perhaps, you don’t want to.
You head for the bed right away, as if to escape. Escape the unending boredom of this room and isolate yourself in the world of dreams. You crawl wearily into the bed, still in the same clothes, and pull the comforter snugly up around your head.
It’s like you’re hiding your eyes from anything and everything.
After only three seconds, you slip into your dreams.