Ink Stained

80: why?*

どうして？

Life had proven time and time again to be the exact opposite of what she had thought or wanted it to be, yet still she had always assumed that if she ever fell in love, it would be pink clouds and daisies everywhere. Shy glances that gradually become bolder moves the more comfortable she got around whoever it was she felt strongly enough to say she 'loved'.

This came so far out of left field that she didn't realize what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. The signs were there now that she knew to look for them, but she hated that she hadn't noticed them until now when she usually noticed everything.

She felt empty, in a way. It was a hollowness that began at the base of her throat and extended to the centre of her chest dominated every thought, every dull emotion, until all she was capable of was sitting still and feeling oddly flat. It was like the world around her was round or spherical, revolving and living, but she'd been squished to a little blip of existence that wandered around aimlessly.

This doesn't feel real, she thought, tipping herself back to lie down on the tiled roof.

What doesn't?

Her lips twitched. For once, she would have liked to think something rhetorical without somebody else answering.

This, she said, too drained to bother instigating a fight. I don't feel like I'm really here. It's like, I'm physically here...but not.

Staring at the stars for as long as you have does that, Kuniumi muttered. The stars are unforgiving. What do you think they will do for you if you stare at them so?

Kuniumi was right about that.

The stars just sat there, brilliant lights blinking in and out of sight on the dark blanket of the night sky. It was clear, dotted with the bright, unrelenting stars, and without a cloud in sight to obscure their harsh light. People millennia ago used to pray up to the skies, pleading for the twinkling sparkles to grant wishes of greed, lust, sorrow, happiness. Love.

She wondered when it was that people realized the stars weren't going to give them answers to their prayers. She wondered when they saw that they would have to depend entirely on themselves and whatever means they had to get things done, with their own strengths and weaknesses as they tried to wring out of life something that could make everything they were doing for it worthwhile. She wondered when they understood that even if the gods were real, watching them from above, they cared little for the insignificant lives of mortals that could so easily be snuffed out with a mere gust of wind.

And still people loved them. Even with the disappointment and anger at the lack of response, they still loved the stars. They gazed at the diamonds of hot gas glittering in the sky like jewels of fire they could never reach, only marvelling at from afar, and they still loved them.

As she brooded like an angsty teenager (technically she was a teenager, so she figured she was allowed to brood every once in a while), she thought that was a perfect metaphor for what she'd come to realize only hours earlier. She was in love with Shin, but to her, he was a star. He seemed close, easy to reach, but the reality was that he stood further away from her than she could fathom. It wasn't even his fault that it was so. That was how life played – unfair and annoying enough that she wished she could drown it in the feelings it brought up in her.

But she did have a choice; she could ignore it all. She could pretend she didn't feel anything when he stood close to her, when his skin touched hers, when he smiled and she could fool herself into believing he wasn't seeing anything else but her, when he looked at her and she drowned in the ever-shifting seas of his eyes.