Introduction Solo
It's been almost two years now, since I first moved to this strange, brightly colored country. I didn't really hate it, at first, but I didn't like it either. I felt nothing for it, like everything else in my life before it. I felt nothing for my new apartment in the city, and nothing for the parents I left behind in Idaho. I felt nothing for the new friends I'd gotten from the single short year of school in this country, and nothing for the perfect job I'd wanted for so long.
But now...now there is that chill. That freezing, biting darkness right on the edge of my vision, clawing silently at the very corners of my consciousness. I know it grows worse when I close my eyes. Though, strangely, it is at it's most piercing under the glow of the fluorescent lights and street signs of Tokyo, where I live. I can't tell if this is some sort of sign that I should be heeding, or if I'm just missing home without realizing it, but I can't help but be a little afraid. For once, I really hope that it's all just in my head.
Dain moved quietly back into his apartment, coming home from a long five hours of playing piano for a crowded bar. It didn't really pay so well, and the walk to get there was long, but being paid to do one of the things that came so easily to him was well worth all of that. He tossed his old backpack into a corner, and moved into the kitchen, passing his mother's old floor-length mirror on the way.
In the poorly lit night-time gloom of his apartment, he didn't notice the wisp of shadow that flickered past after him.
I quietly wonder if this feeling is anything important. I have never been one to sleep much, but lately, it seems when I do want to sleep, my peace is disturbed by a cold, prickling feeling that something is watching. Something crouching in the corner of the room, glaring at me but unable to touch me. Is this all in my head?
He sat down at his keyboard, passing the mirror once more on the way back with his coffee, paying it little attention. The keyboard had all the octaves and sound quality of a full-sized Grand, and had been a Christmas-slash-going away present from his mother and father. Like any good kid, he thanked them for it, and informed them politely that he loved them.
He didn't.
To him, he had always felt that his parents were vaguely friendly acquaintances. People who happened to live in the same house as he did, and know him by name. It wasn't that they did anything wrong, nor were they bad parents in any way. It was just that, like everything else in his life, Dain felt nothing for them. A quiet, calm void that didn't lean one way or another. It would have upset him, if he'd cared enough about it. He didn't miss feeling though, as he'd never quite felt anything for anyone. He did get angry, and he did get sad, and he was happy at small intervals in his life, but never directly about a person or object. He was like a stranger in his own world; and he didn't care.
Some days feel more aimless and lonely then others. It's not that I care, just...at times, I begin to wonder. I wonder why I can't seem to attach myself to this world. Does everyone feel this way? Is everyone lying when they tell a friend they've missed them, and tell their family that they love them? It's like asking someone if the blue they see is the blue you see. For all you know, they could be seeing a color you can't even imagine; feeling a feeling that you can't comprehend.
It doesn't make me as sad as it should. But, then again, should it? It'd be nice, some day, to get the answers. Just all nice and neat, easy to understand and simply worded. But I have no one to ask. I know my parents feel the distance between us, like some sort of chasm or void, and they wouldn't know anyway.
Without realizing it, his fingers had begun to coax a quiet tune out of his keyboard. Like all the other songs he knew, it was a song he had taught to himself.
Dain's talents never seemed to be learned. One day, he sat down at a piano, and simply began to play. It was that way with everything he was good at. Guitar, violin, bass, cello, and basically any other instrument he could get his hands on. When asked how he did it, he'd reply that it just 'came out'. But, although he felt no emotional attachment to the instrument, he always seemed to gravitate back to the piano.
The quiet, tinkling little tune slowly died down, Dain's fingers slowing on the keys. He wasn't looking at the keyboard, eyes instead peering drearily at the wall above it. This happened, from time to time, other people would point out. He seemed to just slow down, and eventually stop, quietly observing some empty point in space with little interest. When told of this, he'd simply look mildly confused, and say that he didn't quite recall it happening. People who falsely considered themselves close to him would giggle, jokingly saying that he was 'off with the fairies', or something to that effect. Dain blandly referred to it as 'thinking too hard'.
I can’t help but feel that I’ve been trained, by creatures with opposites values and beliefs to me, to act and think and feel a certain way. Whenever I’m nice to someone it’s out of habit. Whenever I use proper etiquette or routine it’s like a trick pony jumping through hoops. Or, at least, that’s how it feels, to me.
Why is it that the real world seems so dreamlike, and my dreams feel so real?
I don't know that I can ever answer that to myself. Not in an honest way at least. I've speculated once or twice about what it could be, and it feels disgustingly true when I come to THAT conclusion, but the way these strangers have trained my mind to behave won't allow me to think that way. Instead I sit, beg and roll over for a scratch on the belly.
It may not be surprising to learn that the detached manner of thinking Dain had was very dangerous. As a young teenager he was very reckless, and often took to self-harm as a way of validating things about his current state of existence to himself. It was the same apathy that drove him to this that saved him, however, and none of the cuts were ever too deep; none of the threats ever too deadly. He didn’t want to die. Just…fool around a bit, and see if he could make anything change. After a year or so of behaviour like this, he simply decided that it was too complicated to deal with the repercussions of those sorts of actions, and would rather dwell quietly on his own emotions internally then flash them around for his parents and teachers to see. He didn’t care that they worried, no, it was the hours of therapy and concerned lectures he had to sit through which he had disinterest in.
It was near the end of this destructive bout that he came across Them. ‘That-of-who-he-shall-never-speak-of-again.’ His lover.
Very, very few details about this mystery lover were ever revealed, and it was so short and so secretive, that not a soul but Dain and the Other knew of it. It was two weeks, give or take a day, that they were together, and at the end of that time the other simply left. There was a small note, with words to the effect of ‘it’s over’ scrawled on it, however it wasn’t the meaningless scrap of paper which Dain's boiling emotions over the whole mess clung to. It was later, in his thoughtful and heartbroken state, as Dain quietly contemplated how he had felt, that he poured that emotion into something he could cling to.
His journal.
'It was like dreaming while awake. Sleepwalking, wandering around in a daydream, able to grab and hold and keep that feeling throughout the day and night and day again.' Dain had written, somewhere far back into the pages of the heavily overused and leather-bound book. 'Though for me, of course, a daydream is like the ‘real world’ to all these strangers around me. Who knows which of us is feeling it in reverse, and which is experiencing true reality? Whichever way it was, up until I met them, I hadn't expirienced anything so strong, or real. Despite the bitterness...I have to thank them.
'I miss ### so badly...' Here a name, or perhaps a gender is stricken through repeatedly in black marker. It appears that way back several pages, and forward two or three more, every time a name or gender-association had been written. It appeared that Dain not only wanted the reader to be unaware, but wanted to forget himself.
***
‘### was what I wanted, and needed so badly. Having ### here makes everything feel like…like maybe I’d just been under some sort of tired delusion before. Despite everything I said about disconnection from this race…I just feel so real with ### here.’
***
‘### was what I wanted, and needed so badly. Having ### here makes everything feel like…like maybe I’d just been under some sort of tired delusion before. Despite everything I said about disconnection from this race…I just feel so real with ### here.’
***
I feel stupid for having ever felt that way, looking back at those pages. I just want to tear them out viciously, clawing and ripping at them, then pile them up and light them on fire. But looking at those stupid pages allows me to feel what They gave me. That passion, that feeling of something real in this world that I could feel hurt over, feel anger for, feel...regret. To attatch an emotion to an object, and a person.
Dain didn't have to have the journal with him, to rememembr what was on its pages. He knew the book right down to every last fibre of it's yellowing old pages. Down to the very last punctuation point in his own familiar handwriting, which was somehow wholly alien to him as he looked back over it in his mind. And he was still sitting at the keyboard, staring at that spot on the wall, fingers rested motionlessly on the keys as he turned the pages backwards through his own heavily documented life. He both hated and loved that journal. It was everything real, to him.
It's been two years, now. But something's stirring. Something that I both hate and fear, right on the very corners of both my concious and unconcious mind.
What is it waiting for?
Slowly, his eyes dropped back down to the keys, and once again Dain began to coax a quiet tune out of his expensive and beautiful keyboard. Perhaps by selfishness, or maybe some measure of intuition, he knew that all he had to do was watch and wait, and everything would be revealed.
~*~
