The Apartment

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CHAPTER 1: THE APARTMENT

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The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that had been built in 1998 and painted beige and never renovated.

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It had two rooms, a kitchen that was also a hallway, and a balcony that faced the train tracks. My mother had chosen it because it was close to the station and close to the school and cheap. She had not chosen it because it was nice. She had chosen it because it was available.

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We moved in on a Sunday.

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I carried boxes up four flights of stairs because the elevator was broken and because I did not have anything else to do. My mother carried boxes up four flights of stairs because she did not trust me to carry the fragile ones. We did not talk. We had not talked much in the last year. There was not much to say.

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By evening, the apartment had furniture and a working refrigerator and a stack of boxes in the corner of the living room that we would not open for weeks. My mother made instant noodles. We ate them at the kitchen table. She asked me if I was nervous about school. I told her no. She did not ask again.

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That night I lay on my futon and listened to the trains go by.

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The window was open. The curtains moved. The tracks were fifty meters away and the trains ran until midnight and started again at five. I had grown up in a quieter place. I had grown up in a house where the loudest thing was the silence.

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I did not mind the trains.

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They gave me something to listen to.

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The neighbourhood was called Suginami.

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It was not famous. It was not wealthy. It was the kind of place that existed between other places, the kind of place that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. There was a shopping street with a bakery and a convenience store and a ramen shop that was always busy. There was a park with a swing set that had been rusted since before I was born. There was a school ten minutes from the apartment that had a gate and a sign and a bell that rang at eight in the morning and three in the afternoon.

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I walked the neighbourhood that first night.

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I did not have a reason. I just wanted to know where things were. I found the station. I found the bakery. I found the school and stood outside the gate and looked at it through the bars. It was dark and empty and quiet. It looked like every other school I had ever seen.

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I walked home and went to bed.

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Tomorrow was Monday.

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Tomorrow I would be someone new.

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The room they gave me was the smaller of the two.

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It had a window that faced the train tracks and a closet that smelled like old wood and a desk that had been left behind by whoever lived here before. There was a scratch on the desk that looked like someone had carved a word into it and then tried to sand it out. I could not read what the word was. I did not try very hard.

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I put my futon in the corner and my clothes in the closet and my notebook on the desk. That was all I had. A futon, some clothes, a notebook.

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The notebook was black and utilitarian and stained with coffee and regret. I had been carrying it for three years. I had not written anything in it for two.

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I opened it that night and looked at the last page.

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There was a date at the top. And a name. And a single sentence that I had written and never finished.

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I closed the notebook and put it in the drawer.

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I did not open it again.

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The trains stopped at midnight.

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The apartment was quiet. My mother had gone to bed. The refrigerator hummed. The floor creaked. Somewhere in the building, someone was watching television.

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I lay on my futon and stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing.

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That was the thing I was good at. Thinking about nothing. It was a skill I had developed over years of practice. If you think about nothing for long enough, you stop feeling things. If you stop feeling things, you stop hurting. If you stop hurting, you can keep going.

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I had been keeping going for a long time.

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Tomorrow was Monday.

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Tomorrow I would be someone new.

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I closed my eyes and waited for sleep. 270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ72N78T8VvP

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