Chapter 4: A Tiny Prayer

Chapter 4:
A Tiny Prayer

 

GIVEN HOW MUCH I liked to sleep, I probably experienced more dreams than the average person. Would this prove useful to me in any way? I didn’t have the answer to that. But in order to find it, I would need…to go back to sleep.

Zzzzz.

 

***

 

I forget who it was, but someone once said that dreams are adventures that take place in the dark of night. Indeed, only during the night am I spared the judgmental voice scoffing at me for sleeping. Night is when my heart can truly roam free—a dark, endless expanse, but every now and then, I catch a glimpse of light. These tiny twinkling lights are what people call “memories.” Without them, the darkness would overtake our hearts, pinning us in place.

In the darkness, someone calls to me: Shima-chaaaan! I turn around, only to be met with the clear blue sky.

If you wish for it, your dreams can always be bright. They’re packed with fresh memories, after all.

A much younger Tarumi comes running up to me—and right past me. Ahead, I can see a younger version of myself, but I can only vaguely remember her. Back then, I didn’t think too much about keeping up appearances; no, I was more interested in everything else around me.

Is this what it was like back then? I chase after them, but I don’t need to run. A few quick strides is all it takes to catch up. Then it hits home just how small they are. Was it ever frustrating to have such stumpy little arms and legs? Was everything I wanted still within my reach?

We’re walking down a street not too far from my house. There are no cars, and upon further inspection, the buildings all match how they look in the present day rather than an accurate reflection of how they used to be. The only difference is that the sky overhead is pure blue. Experimentally, I reach out to it. Nope, it’s just as untouchable as it’s always been.

Taru-chan! Ghshsh!

Little Me is making some kind of weird noise… Is that supposed to be a giggle?

Shima-chan! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Tarumi starts cackling like something is hilarious. Then I remember all the conversations we used to have that were just like this one. Somehow, we understood each other perfectly through our laughter alone. At least, that was what it felt like.

When I’m awake, I can scarcely remember what Tarumi used to be like as a kid, so I only ever see her in my dreams. Little Tarumi always has a runny nose, so she looks pretty derpy—but if I mentioned it to present-day Tarumi, she’d probably deny that she ever looked like this. Not that I’ve seen her in a while… Come to think of it, I haven’t heard her voice since the last time I hung up on her.

Drawn together, pulled apart. Approached and pushed away. Will the two of us fall out of contact again? If we do, then I guess that’s life. After all, if I hang out with her in secret and Adachi finds out, she’ll get hurt.

These days Adachi’s really settled into her role as my girlfriend. But what about me? Am I going to be able to handle it? I’ve been giving her a reasonable amount of what she wants, so I think I’m probably fine. But every now and then, her feelings for me feel intense to a frightening degree, and I’m just not sure I can reciprocate. I’m not starved for love like she is—I’ve already experienced it with other people in a variety of ways.

Shima-chan, where are you going today?

“Good question.”

Umm, I’m going to play on the field at school.

“Oh, yeah… I sure did that a lot.”

Tarumi and I would always go to the local elementary school, stand in the field, and play catch. There wasn’t a lot of crime back in those days, so we were allowed on the premises on weekends, even though we weren’t students there. And I loved to play catch. Frankly, I’m lucky Tarumi tolerated it as much as she did. I guess she really cared about me…not to toot my own horn or anything.

But I won’t be able to stay with Taru-chan forever.

Little Me looks over her shoulder at me.

Then Tarumi turns back, her bright smile gone, and says in a flat voice: Yeah, I know. Once you find a new friend, you’ll throw me away.

She’s as cold as the spring water I once touched at a tourist attraction somewhere. I feel like I’ve been frozen solid in the middle of summer. Without any trace of emotion, her youthful face is flawless and robotic.

“Throw you away? Is that how it felt?” Smiling evasively, I tilt my head at this phantom visited upon me by my guilty conscience.

Interpersonal relationships aren’t a one-way street. If people didn’t always make me carry the whole thing on my shoulders, then maybe I wouldn’t keep accidentally dropping it. Do they really think I know how to juggle? Me, the same idiot who always ran around slamming face-first into walls?

It’s sad, but true, Little Me answers unprompted. But it’s okay, Taru-chan. As a kid, I can stay with you forever.

Forever?

Yup, forever. ’Cuz we’ll always be little kids. Then, Little Me takes Tarumi by the hand, and Tarumi sniffles happily. How very philosophical of you, Little Me.

So how does this work, exactly? The parts from my old memories make sense, but what about Tarumi’s anachronistic comment just now? Where did it come from? If this was a dream, then my brain must have penned the script, but I can’t find it anywhere. So who created this dream?

I look up at the sky. Is someone else out there, beyond the veil, spying on my memories?

But as I gaze upward, my consciousness gradually rises to the surface.

 

***

 

So ended the, uh, “dream” I had. As I suspected, if I immersed myself fully, I could watch a little longer. But the reason I couldn’t confidently declare my dreams “illusions” was because of the way they sometimes showed me my past. I refused to believe I was hallucinating all that time.

The room was still dark, and I was drowsy, so it was unusual for me to wake up partway through. I lay back down and attempted to go back to sleep.

Zzzzz.

Yep, it worked.

 

***

 

I return to what looks like the same street, as if un-pausing a movie I was in the middle of watching.

“But if this is a movie, then I doubt it’s a good one.”

From an outside perspective, I’m just walking down the street, uninterested in anyone who passes me by. I can only imagine how dreary it must look. Little Tarumi and Little Me are both nowhere to be found; they must have faded away into the background, hand in hand, like good friends.

My memories safely retain all the things that no longer exist in reality.

I’ve sensed for a while now that my friendship with Tarumi just isn’t going to work out. After everything it took to bring us back together—to restore our bond—now it’s all falling apart again. Even a blind idiot like me can see that much. If I want to keep it, then I need to take action, fast. But there’s an invisible force holding me back.

Adachi. Adachi is the problem. Adachi has single-handedly destroyed one of my personal relationships. When I think about it logically, it’s insane. She just kicks the door down, tramples all over my feelings and my life, and tries to make me play by her rules. She’s not fair to anyone, least of all me, and it’s this bias that fills her with red-hot passion and spurs her on. To me, this raw intensity is enviable, exasperating, and endearing, all at the same time. I know it’s contradictory, but it’s the honest truth.

These things we call “emotions” are rarely ever consistent. They’re supposed to be complicated and mysterious and all that. But Adachi isn’t contradictory in the least. She cares about one thing and one thing only; her emotions are unpolished and unfiltered. Maybe that, if anything, was what drew me to her.

A white shadow shoots past my feet, as if the wind itself has taken form. As I watch him go, his wagging tail seems to brush against my eyes. It’s Gon, fully grown, but with all the energy of his puppy days—the best of both worlds. The distance grows between us as he dashes off.

“Heh heh heh. You sure are feisty today.”

He’s big, strong, and healthy. Dreams sure are great, aren’t they? I find myself torn between the urge to chase after him and the urge to cry my eyes out; after a bit of waffling back and forth, I decide to do both at the same time. Not like anyone else is here to see it. This place belongs to me alone, and I’m allowed to cry in private. Especially since I’ll probably forget it happened once I wake up.

So I run as fast as I can. My body feels weightless, like I left my lungs behind, but since I don’t need to breathe, it’s hard to tell if I’m making any progress. No matter how hard I run, I never seem to move forward. The distance between myself and Gon never gets any smaller. One would think I would run out of road eventually, but that never seems to happen.

But that’s okay. I don’t mind if I can never catch up.

The scenery swirls around me in a vortex and starts to fade away. Along with Gon, the city skyline burns into pale, pointed shapes. Even the ground beneath me starts to curl in on itself, like a sheet of notebook paper slowly being crumpled into a ball. I can no longer chase after Gon. He’s disappearing, and so am I.

But I don’t want either of us to vanish. I don’t want to go anywhere at all.

 

***

 

The next time I awoke, I could see the faint gray light of daybreak streaming in through the gaps in the curtains. Soon, a new day would begin. I could always get dressed, go for a jog, and wait for the rest of my family to rise, but…mehhh. I rolled over. My eyes and cheeks felt warm and damp—soaked in the tears from a good yawn, perhaps.

I guess it probably won’t work this time…

I zoned out for a while. Then my eyelids slowly drooped.

Zzzzz.

As it turned out, I had underestimated myself.

 

***

 

This time, no one is waiting for me when I arrive.

“Guess I’m all alone.”

Story of my life.

Sure is ridiculous just how much I can sleep, I think to myself with a sigh as I look upward. If I sleep for thirteen hours of the day, does that make sleeping my default state? That would mean my dreams are my reality…and in turn, I would be freed from all the worst parts of the waking world, which would be awesome. Just one problem, though: in the dream world, I can’t sleep. I’ll lose my favorite pastime.

But enough about that.

I find myself enshrouded in darkness so dense, even the light of dawn can’t penetrate it. I can’t see my own hands waving in front of my face. I’m not even sure I have a body anymore. I turn my head and look around, but can’t see a single light source. This is a dream without any memories.

So I start walking aimlessly. My footsteps sound so distant, it’s hard to say if I’m even walking on solid ground. Kinda feels like my feet are sinking, or at least, the scenery sorta seems to be shifting up and down… Am I even moving forward?

If I had to guess, I’d say this is probably what Adachi’s dreams are like, since she doesn’t seem to have many happy memories. Or maybe her dreams are just a slideshow of still images of me… Honestly, the idea creeps me out, but she’d probably love it. That’s the kind of world she wants to be in.

As far as Adachi is concerned, I’m the only person she needs in her life—just me and her, forever. But if she asked me to go to the ends of the earth with her, I would say no. If she demanded that we create a world all our own, I would refuse. I mean, at that point, I might as well just be alone, right? That way I can be free from any and all hassle.

I’m only spending my life with Adachi if it’s in a world full of people. If it was just the two of us, our life would be as bleak as this dream.

But while it’s a pretty stark contrast from those other dreams, it’s still a piece of my heart all the same. It’s like the chill that follows a gust of warm air. Whenever I’m having fun, I can feel it waiting right around the corner; whenever things are going well, I start obsessing over the moment it all breaks down. The darkness produced by this state of mind keeps my memories at bay.

Time dilutes these old memories like water. This alone is inevitable. If you want to hold onto them, you have to keep them fresh—but if you condense them too much, they’ll lose what made them special to begin with.

Are my memories still pure? God only knows how murky they’ve gotten.

Then I see a round, pale light floating absently in the middle of nowhere. Curious, I approach it. It’s a familiar head of blue hair.

“How much longer until breakfast…?”

“Is that all you ever care about?”

“Oh! G’day, Shimamura-san!” Yashiro turns to face me. What’s with the bad Aussie accent? “Shima-moo-ra, Shima-moo-ra…”

“I’m not a cow. Anyway, how the heck did you waltz in here?” This is my dream, and no, I’m not going to make you breakfast.

“It was easy.” She flaps her arms up and down. Thanks to her faintly glowing hair, I can see her expression and everything. “Are you still sleepy?”

So she’s fully aware that this is a dream. What a weirdo. “Yeah, just a little.”

“In that case, I shall accompany you.”

She toddles up beside me, casting her dim light onto me, and it feels like I’ve gained a lantern on my quest. Now I can almost see my feet and actually hear my footsteps.

“Hmmm…” For some reason, this all feels a little too…crisp? For a dream, this sure isn’t very fuzzy.

“Remember that trip we went on last time?” Yashiro grins as we walk.

“Huh?”

“Remember? When I let you ride on my head?”

“Uhhh… Oh! Yeah, I remember now.” That time we were flying through space. “How do you know about that?”

“Because I was there, of course.”

Grrrr. That sounded kinda deep, but I know for a fact she isn’t actually trying to be.

Yashiro’s faint glow leads us to a hazy figure. One look at her clothes and bratty scowl and I recognize her instantly.

“Ugh.” It’s me from junior high—specifically, the early days before I mellowed out. “I don’t really want to see this part.”

But I can’t turn a blind eye to it. Yashiro’s heading right for her, and if I lose sight of Yashiro, I’ll be plunged back into the impenetrable darkness.

“Ah, so this is Young Shimamura-san.”

“That’s one way to put it, I guess.”

Frankly, she and I are both “young.” We don’t look all that different. But her expression is pointed, suggesting she’s unhappy with something. She’s wearing a basketball jersey and glaring in our direction. Sheesh, cool it. No wonder your friends all hate you.

“She appears to be angry.”

“Yeah…I wonder what I was so upset about.”

I was fighting a solitary battle, but against what? I try to remember, but it all blurs together. Mostly, I was dissatisfied with all the things that weren’t going my way, so I worked hard to fight it and tried to overcome it. Friendships, sports, schoolwork, parents… These were all obstacles that I plowed straight through.

Then Preteen Me passes her basketball to me. It catches me off-guard, and since I can barely see, I end up dropping the ball. The pass was so fast and hard, it makes me want to snap at her. This is probably how my old teammates felt whenever I passed the ball to them out of the blue. The thought saps me of any desire to criticize my younger, more reckless self.

Junior high sucked, and Preteen Me did the best she could.

“Gee, thanks for digging all that up again.”

This period of my life was prime humiliation fodder. It gave rise to a feeling of intense self-consciousness that thickened and thickened, then slowly hardened, then dried, until eventually I turned into…this. When I walk past, I half-expect her to spit at me, but instead, she lets me go. Still, I’m sure she’s disappointed by the person I’ve become.

“Blegh, kill me.”

“How come?”

“Then again, if I hadn’t burned out back then, I wouldn’t have softened up.”

And so the Cryptid from Planet Lazy was born. Wait, am I a cryptid or an alien? Whatever. My point is, Preteen Me was trying to do the right thing.

Life is always a battle—in my case, an eternal struggle with my archnemesis, laziness. I know I can’t run from it forever, or else it’ll come back to bite me. So yeah, my bitchy, cringey preteen self still has the moral upper hand. It takes courage to confront your problems, but the great thing about dreams is that no matter how much you whine and complain and suffer and generally make an ass of yourself, no one else will ever see it. You can be your true, unpolished self.

“You have a lot of time on your hands, don’t you, Shimamura-san?”

Er…setting aside this one exception.

“Look, it’s peaceful here, okay? What, you don’t like dreams?”

“The sweets here don’t taste like anything. What’s there to like?” she scoffs.

“Yeah…I guess dreams are kinda bland.” But if I had to guess, she probably doesn’t mean anything deep or cerebral by that either.

Memories can never truly be sweet. They pierce deep into your heart. Of course, I can’t deny that there’s plenty of masochists who rejoice in that misery. But that’s not the same thing as true happiness.

At this realization, my hands clench into fists, and I face off against what lies on the other side of the darkness. Gradually, even that begins to disappear. The darkness is being cleared away.

“Looks like it’s time to wake up.”

Dawn is breaking, and the obnoxious world of light is starting to show itself.

“So it would seem.”

Yashiro shoots up to the ceiling, and I recoil. Hey! You can’t just fly around for no reason!

“I shall await you on the other side. Don’t forget the donuts…donuts…donuts…”

For some reason, her voice echoes. It feels like an eternal farewell, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when I wake up, she’ll be right there in my house like she’s moved in. Meh, I don’t mind it.

“After all, she helps me out from time to time.”

If I remember this when I wake up, I’ll buy her a donut. She’ll probably complain if I don’t get her more than one, though.

Then I wake from my dream and forget my entire train of thought. Everything in the subconscious layer is thereby erased—from my world, at least.

“Forever” only lasts as long as I do. Eternity is finite.

I turn back and see a dog, and a kid, and another kid—precious souls I once hoped to share my life with. But even in their absence, I don’t want to forget what they left behind. Something blooms in my chest when I think of them…something a bit more beautiful than what I’m used to. So I can only pray from the bottom of my heart that it will last for the rest of my eternity.

 

***

 

It felt like someone was squishing my brain. And so I snapped back to reality—back to life.

“Phone…”

What woke me was the sound of my cell phone ringing. Slowly, I sat up in bed. Luckily, the clock was right there against the wall, so I looked up at it…and realized that I’d somehow gone back in time an hour. I stared blankly for a minute, then realized: No, I hadn’t gone back in time. I had slept for eleven hours. What a great start to the weekend. More importantly, however, my phone was still ringing.

“Yes, yes, I hear you!”

I was sure it was Adachi before I ever looked at the screen. Adachi had interrupted my scheduled thirteen hours of sleep and dragged me kicking and screaming back to the real world. I could vaguely remember that this had happened before, but unlike last time, I was actually excited.

My head was heavy from oversleeping, but as I rose to my feet and took a few steps, the haze gradually cleared away. Maybe my blood circulation was improving. My fingers were still a little tingly, though. It felt like I’d gotten a lot of sleep last night, and had a lot of dreams…but it was all jumbled together, so I couldn’t remember what had happened in them.

Meh, probably nothing important. They were just dreams, after all. Normally, there was never any benefit to remembering them. But this time, I felt strangely at peace with myself. So if my dreams could help me keep my head up and face reality, then that was enough for me.

The real world was filled with inconveniences that I would inevitably have to confront, one at a time. The mere thought was enough to exhaust my will to live. But now I had someone around to help me. From now on, I wasn’t alone. And for the time being, I was actually pretty okay with that. It tickled my heart.

“…Hello? Adachi? Yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten about our d-date… Uh huh…”

To my ears, my voice sounded ever so slightly giddy. Would she notice? She was my girlfriend, after all. She always paid close attention.

Quietly, a tiny part of me prayed she wouldn’t tease me too hard.