—Yumeji Satsuki (?)
This is a story from a long time ago, before I became the way I am now.
With a jumble of uncertain memories and the ability for them to be distorted up to 90%, my past appears in my mind as nothing but a tangled mess.
Didn't someone once say that the only real thing for humans is the life they are living right now?
Indeed. For small beings like us, it's hard to imagine the full picture of life.
Because we are characters living inside the painting, living inside the story of some painter or author.
We worry about the future because it is something we have never known; so we fear it, long for it, and imagine every possibility for it.
There will always be great people who act and strive in the present to secure a happy future.
They may have struggled a lot in the hell called life to increase their chances of achieving happiness in the future.
They may prepare knowledge and opportunities by studying and entering a prestigious university to lay the foundation for that future.
After that, they might build countless connections to secure a safety net for themselves. Sometimes they might also learn and do all sorts of unrelated things to prepare for unexpected situations—like not reaching their dream, failing to get into the company they wanted, discovering their actual speaking ability is worse than they thought, or even facing the risk of being fired.
At that time, the side skills they accumulated in the past will kick in, prolong their lifeline, and give them more chances to rise again.
With such preparations, they've secured about a 60% chance of a happy future.
Sometimes, for people with a good starting point—appearance, talent—their future becomes even more guaranteed. Perhaps for such people, they may have already had a thrilling, complete romance with some boy or girl in their early twenties.
With such conditions, they may achieve their wish of a happy life by the time they are thirty.
In many ways, most people in the world think they can achieve happiness this way.
To have a happy life, be ready to spend the first thirty years living in hardship to reach it.
Perhaps the majority of people think like this.
But as I said, the future is uncertain, and humans are creatures who live for the present.
You can't predict that you won't suddenly die one fine day for some ridiculous reason.
Indeed, just in Japan alone, thousands of people die every single day.
Why would you think you could be the exception to that?
You might survive today, but what about tomorrow? And the day after?
How can you guarantee that you won't get hit by some random car tomorrow, or die from a flowerpot falling on your head the day after?
Wouldn't all your preparations for happiness end up in the trash then?
What guarantees that when you step outside you won't bump into some random killer running around with a knife? Nothing, right?
Be honest—unless you're the luckiest person under heaven, you'll never have a life that flows exactly the way you want.
What's that? You successfully endured thirty years of hardship and achieved happiness at thirty? So what! What guarantees that after one perfect, fulfilling day you won't die tomorrow? Isn't it precisely those at the peak of happiness, who've let down their guard, that are most prone to misfortune or sudden death?
Dying is easy. Very easy. Especially when you can simply be run over by a truck driven by some drunk driver right after the happiest day of your life.
You had a happy wedding? Wonderful!
You have a good spouse and a cute child—in short, a happy family? Wonderful!
You have a stable job and a life free of worries about food and money, and even the people around you love you? That's wonderful!
But even then, you could still die before you get to fully taste that heaven of happiness, for some random reason like falling down stairs, food poisoning, or a traffic accident.
At a funeral where countless people who loved you weep for you, I thought to myself:
"Sure enough, I was right."
That was my thought as I laid flowers at the funeral of my homeroom teacher from junior high.
Everyone can aim for the answer of living in a way that will achieve perfect happiness in the future. But I will choose the opposite. I will live for myself, live for the present, and be happy until the day I die.
You only get to live once, right? So what's the difference between living twenty years in happiness and living thirty years in suffering to then reach some vague happiness?
It's the process.
If every life is a story, then what would you think when reading the story of someone who lived twenty years in happiness?
It's a strange story but with a happy beginning, a happy progression, and a happy ending—at least for the main character. Because he or she lived fully and happily from birth until death.
As I said before, death comes easily. It is not the antithesis of life but the period at the end of a person's story, and it can arrive at any moment.
Therefore, death is not a tragedy. It only becomes a tragedy when you look at the process leading up to it.
If you think you'll meet unmatched misfortune from a life of decadence, living only for yourself after the age of twenty, then just end it before that—after all, dying is the easiest thing a person can do. Simply shut your eyes tight, run at full speed across the rooftop of a high-rise with no guardrails or fences, and you'll die once your body is crushed and your skull shatters like an eggshell after the free fall.
Deaths you can still stop halfway are incredibly hard, because the human instinct is to live.
That's why seppuku is so difficult.
Hanging yourself is also so difficult.
Slashing your wrists or your throat is the same—if your resolve isn't strong enough, your body will stop you.
But free-falling is different because there's no way to change the outcome once it's begun.
Unless…
Unless you're extremely unlucky, and out of nowhere there's a rescue crew waiting below.
Aaaaghhhhh!!!
The sense of anticlimax is overwhelming—no matter how much I'd steeled myself, I still didn't die.
That was my thought at fifteen, on my way to the end of my life.
The luckiest person is the one who attains happiness most easily.
Then conversely, the unluckiest must be the one who's hardest to kill.
I remember the moment when I wrote an essay about dreams, and in it I wrote that I wanted to live happily until the end of my twenties.
As you know, living a happy life doesn't mean that person has lived a useful life to society—because happiness is an extremely vague thing and it shifts according to each person's view.
So in some ways, the most selfish and cruel person is the one who can most easily obtain happiness in this world.
Is that why?
Is that why that teacher shouted at me that the person who wrote this essay was a lunatic whose empathy for his fellow man was lower than an insect's?
But clearly I wasn't wrong, was I? Especially when that very teacher was the one who struggled with life until thirty, only to gain a fleeting happiness followed by death right after—clearly I'd chosen the better path, hadn't I?
Looking at the process, the teacher's story is pure tragedy, isn't it? That person had no clear happiness until thirty, and all before that was a story of grueling effort and endless worries. You'd think in the end they'd get a happy ending, but with the world's uncertain punctuation, their story turned from a Happy Ending to a Bad Ending with a silly death at the end.
So of course my thoughts at that funeral weren't wrong. But wasn't there someone who once told me that humans are the most easily changing creatures under heaven and earth, because our nature is to always try to adapt to circumstances?
That's why there's no such thing as an immutable mindset.
And feelings are what most easily change your inner thoughts.
Because human hearts are so easily shaken, the affection they give the world is naturally easily changed.
No love lasts forever, no hatred lasts forever, and therefore no cruelty lasts forever either.
The first evil in my heart—the evil of wanting to be happier than others—was shaken at some point.
And so, I decided to put a period at the end of my life before that evil collapsed, in order to secure myself a happy ending.
But I failed.
Someone stopped me.
My body was numb and my mind foggy after the free fall, sprawled across the rescue net. I tried to turn my head to the side.
There I saw a girl walking through the bustling crowd with an air of arrogance. The crowd that had gathered to watch my failed suicide silently parted for her after she said a few words.
A tall girl with long black-purple hair as beautiful as the starry night, wearing an outrageously stylish, cocky outfit, sunglasses making her look like some Hollywood actress.
"I knew it. The second my crazy little brother had the chance, he'd pull this crap. So I prepared in advance."
"How?"
"How? Oh God, did the fall from that ten-story abandoned building scramble my dear little brother's brain? You forgot who I am? With the information and connections of Tokyo's top gang at my fingertips, there's no place in this city I don't know. How long do you think your amazing sister's been running circles around the clueless cops of this town?"
How could someone talk so over the top without a shred of shame?
"Need I even ask? Because your big sister is the Queen of the Underworld—the greatest person under heaven!!!"
My crazy chuunibyou big sister whipped off her sunglasses and proclaimed this to the world, staring at the sky reflected in her amber-colored eyes.
"Sayaaa-nee!!! I hate you!!!"
"Ahahahahaha!!! Hate me all you want, little brother!!! Who doesn't want to rebel a few times in their life?!!!"
…
Humans are creatures who live for the present. They can only imagine the future, and the past exists in memory. And memory is the thing most easily distorted by one's own perspective—the worse the memory, the more it twists, sometimes no different from a nightmare.
Unpleasant memories become strangely warped to make them easier to swallow—especially memories tied to a first love.
And so the most vivid memory rising like sea foam in my mind right now is my worst nightmare.
The memory of the day the evil in me collapsed, replaced by a childish rage—like playing a game to the final boss and then having your family pull the plug, leaving you with a Game Over.
....
…
While still immersed in my memories (that nightmare), I suddenly felt the whole world around me tremble violently. Then a gigantic hand descended from the sky, grabbed me, and began to pull me upward.
Up, up, higher and higher.
I was being dragged toward the heavens.
No—more precisely, my consciousness was being pulled out of the blue planet called Earth, flung into outer space, racing past the solar system, then past other star systems in the blink of an eye.
Wait a second—this is a dream, right?
Even if it's a damn nightmare, does it really need to be this detailed?
What is this—a lucid dream?
As I tried to wake up by surrendering my consciousness to that massive hand, I began to see countless strange things far beyond the comprehension of any ordinary human mind.
After passing innumerable star systems, my consciousness was dragged out of what we call a galaxy, then kept going until I could see countless clusters of galaxies within my field of view.
Immediately afterward, my consciousness began to bubble and flicker as it brushed up against something along the way.
It gave me the sensation of touching soap bubbles, slime, or wet mud—generally, a very unpleasant feeling.
And then I started to be dragged through it.
The endless spectra of light I'd been seeing from stars and galaxies vanished without a trace.
It's hard to say I was "seeing" what came next with my eyes at all.
It felt more like information was being piped directly into my brain without passing through any of my senses.
Now my consciousness had sunk into a murky realm, like grayish soap bubbles without any clear roundness, edges, or points.
It felt like I was peering at billions upon billions of pencil sketches through the most advanced microscope on earth.
So what I was looking at was "everything"—a realm where you could see the entire world, and at the same time, the entire universe.
I think I knew then what was pulling me along. It was time itself, the thread of light stretched from beginning to end. Which makes speculating about past or future meaningless here.
All possibilities were happening simultaneously. I was inside and outside the universe at once, playing on Earth, drifting through space, wandering an amusement park in some hidden corner, and watching the end of the cosmos—all at the same time.
Because time was carrying me out of the world, all the rules tied to the axis of time were simply bypassed.
I went straight from an unborn past to an undefined future where I knew everything and surpassed everything.
This was the phase shift of time, while enduring the ceaseless tremors and sketches of space.
At that moment I realized how lonely I truly was—because to time and space, the chronicles of countless lives are nothing more than meaningless drops of water.
You and I live among countless people and yet also live alone in the world.
In this world, there is only me. Every relationship is merely the crisscrossing communication of characters belonging to different painter–authors of spacetime.
We have interacted and yet not interacted. We have seen each other and yet not truly seen anything at all. You, me, and the world—the neighbors who seemed like good friends but in reality never were—just self-absorbed people talking to the walls in their own apparent worlds.
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…
Wait—what kind of ridiculous "enlightenment" is this!? I don't care—get me OUT!!!
[That's right, brother. The truth of the world is the most ridiculous, nonsensical thing there is. Sure, there are some interesting bits, you can peek behind the curtain, but screw it—they've got nothing to do with you right now. Come on, my brother, time to step off that cramped little stage.]
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And then I woke up and found myself sitting in a pitch-black movie theater with that damn kid sitting next to me.
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