21 - Accumulation

After homeroom, Ruri-chan left her seat and came over while I was still stuffing the textbook into my bag.

"Let's go, Tateha."

I caught a glimpse of a smile sprouting when she held out the palm of her hand. I slipped the bag over my shoulder and stood up. As I was about to walk out into the hall, Ruri-chan squeezed in front of me. Was there some hidden meaning behind the order we left in? I stared at her face while we walked down the hall.

"Did you listen to the music I recommended a while back?" The curtain of hair that followed the contour of her jaw bounced in sync with her expressions.

"I didn't." My voice, unlike hers, didn't bounce. It was more like dropping a rock. I wondered why. I'd seemingly forgotten how to talk recently, and it felt like the words leaving my mouth weren't my own.

"Cool cool, just give it a listen when you remember. It's not like you need to go out of your way. It's one of those things where... well...you scare people away if you're too passionate because it sounds like you're preaching to them, you know what I mean?"

"I don't care."

My head felt hazy. A better response was hidden in the mist. As I tried to go down the stairs, my right leg suddenly lost its strength and buckled. I thought I was going to fall, but then Ruri-chan caught me under the arm.

"You should take it slow. Hold onto the handrail."

I couldn't pick up my right leg just the one time, and yet Ruri-chan had given me her full attention and walked at my pace. She was acting like a nurse.

The members of the basketball club came running up the stairs in the middle of a dribbling exercise. They were playing around as they came towards us, talking about how amazing it was they could dribble on the stairs. Ruri-chan came to a stop and tried to shield my body. As they passed, she tracked the direction of the bouncing balls with a glare. She backed away once they were gone.

Leaving through the school gate, Ruri-chan cut in front of me again. This time, I realized it was because she always tried to stay on my right side.

"You don't have to do that."

I ground my teeth at her drowning me in sentimentality. It scared me. She reminded me of the self-satisfied smile people wore when they took care of a fledgling that couldn't fly. Thinking you can be saved by saving something yourself is weird. Like, you save scraps to make soup stock to your own taste, right? Egos that stew in that are fragile enough to break with chopsticks.

"I heard hospital food is pretty flavorless. What did you think?" Ignoring what I said, Ruri-chan struck up a conversation.

I looked down at the cicada corpses around my toes as we walked under the trees along the roadside.

"It didn’t have any flavor."

"I seeeee... Maybe they’re worried about how much salt there is in it and stuff. But do they really need to worry about that for someone who was hospitalized for an injury, you think?"

"Um.... maybe?"

"What kind of food did they serve? I take it curry wasn't on the menu?"

"I think they gave me meat and potato stew. There was also stuff like grilled fish."

"Ahhhh, meat and potato stew."

"The one you make tastes better."

The hospital food was offputting. There wasn't any sweetening in the stew, and the mushy potatoes had a faint, earthy taste. What Ruri-chan made was so much better in comparison.

"...cool cool." Ruri-chan puffed her cheeks and fiddled with her blouse ribbon. The outer corners of her eyes twitched like she was trying to hold something back.

When we got to my house, she stopped at the entrance. "Well..." she blurted out, then put her hands behind her and swayed side to side like a scarecrow. "If you're headed in...."

I really didn't know how I felt about this. It seemed like it would be a hassle to invite her in, but I did anyway. She was standing so straight that she was on tiptoes.

"Well, thanks for having me." I sensed anticipation buried in her shy expression. She took off her shoes in the entranceway with a look of relief.

"Hey, Tateha," she said the moment we entered my room.

"What," I replied bluntly as I laid out cushions beside the round table.

"Yesterday, I know you said... we can't change, but..."

A subtle sound filled the room. Was it the wind, or my humming in agreement?

"Ruri-chan, you said you wanted to stop. With the pain."

She sat on the cushion I'd put down. I sat down across from her and leaned back against the bed.

"Yeah. I do," she replied with a firm nod, not beating around the bush.

"Pain's important to me, though. Do you really want to take that away?"

"I do."

"Even if I end up jumping again because of it?"

"I won't let you."

"I'll jump again. I absolutely will. Pain is something I absolutely have to ingest, after all."

"What are you talking about?"

Ruri-chan still hadn’t learned how it was. How humans—living creatures—existed in this world. The processes we go through step-by-step from birth to death.

I opened the lid of the insect enclosure I'd left sitting by the window. The smell of rotten dirt immediately wafted up. I waved Ruri-chan over, and her brow furrowed when she got close.

"This... is the swallowtail you said I should keep."

"...That?"

Had it already been two months since it died? By now, the swallowtail's head and legs had rotted off; its body was dull black. The skin had bloated and sloughed; it dangled like it had grown out. There wasn't a trace of life left in it.

"Crazy, isn’t it? This was an incomplete emergence. That's where something happened to the imago, say, it got hurt or had a hormone imbalance, before it came out of its chrysalis. This swallowtail, even though it became a butterfly, it... it still had a caterpillar's head."

I wondered why Ruri-chan was looking away. Maybe she couldn't bear to see it?

"Long story short, since it had a caterpillar head, it didn't have a proboscis to sip nectar, you know? So instead of eating nectar, it could only eat leaves. Even then, it couldn't digest them because it had an imago's digestive system. It died because its stomach swelled until it popped."

"Okay, and what does that have to do with you?"

"It has to do with both of us. We're in the chrysalis stage right now." I replaced the lid back on the insect enclosure and put it back where it was. "Our minds and bodies are the sticky goo inside a chrysalis. At this very moment, we're in the important stage of forming an imago. But naturally, we'll become imago that deal with incomplete emergences if there's any sort of impediment. We were caterpillars back in elementary and middle school, and now we're pupae. If there are any problems at this stage of preparing for adulthood, we won't come out with the right shape, no matter how hard we try."

"I don't really understand what you're trying to say, Tateha."

"I'm trying to say that's why it's impossible to change. Something's already gone wrong for me. I'm in my chrysalis, but I’m craving things normal people completely avoid, like pain. Something bad got mixed in with the sticky goo that will end up forming my mind and body. Can you imagine what I would be like as an imago? I'll have to exist as a societal oddity, just like that dead swallowtail. Even if you tell me I have to eat nectar, I can't. And well, what would I eat then? The answer's obviously leaves, right?" I rubbed my stomach. One day, this regular torso would bloat up and explode. I was sure of it. "Humans, insects, they’re the same thing! There's already no going back if you're in the chrysalis and you're messed up. No matter how much you tell me to love something besides pain, I don't have the stomach for it... Do you understand what I'm saying now?"

Ruri-chan's pursed her lips as she stared at the mug in her hand. I took in the rich aroma of black tea, then released my breath.

"I do."

"Really? Then stop acting like you can change me from now on, okay?" I leaned against the bed and thought about when to throw out the insect container and swallowtail. "And like, you're no exception either, are you? You're the type of person who can bully people without remorse, aren't you? You weren't eating normal things when you were a caterpillar. You thrived on suffering. And now look, you're stuffed full of the mushy black nutrients you stored up when you were little. When you turn into a chrysalis, that mush breaks down your body and shapes you as an adult."

A caterpillar raised on toxic leaves will either die in the chrysalis or suffer an incomplete emergence. It's easy to tell when they've been poisoned because their body turns black. It was the same with Ruri-chan. She could do things a normal person couldn't do.

"You crushed my right eye, didn't you? And after that, you choked me, right? You almost drowned me by shoving my head underwater, too! Ah, ah, right! You tore out my piercing! ...Hey, think about it. Seriously, think. People would normally refuse to do things like that, wouldn't they? Since you didn't refuse it, you can't be normal! You already turned black a long time ago. Try to feel it in your heart. You'll understand you're not normal either if you do, won't you?"

I hadn't said this to Ruri-chan before now, because I figured it would make her upset. But, I didn't have any reason to consider her feelings anymore.

Ruri-chan pressed her hand to her chest like I told her and closed her eyes. "You're right. I'm not normal."

"You aren't. You basically haven't changed a bit since elementary school. And well, you won't change as an adult either, will you? You can't change the instinctual urges from our own desires. Don't even think about trying to change mine."

"But I'm not a caterpillar, and I'm pretty sure you're not either, right, Tateha?"

A condescending sigh burst out from deep in my chest. Just what didn't she understand?

"Pain is the only thing that give me comfort in the first place. Pain is happiness. It's the only nice thing I have."

"Sure, but it's not like you have to hurt yourself."

"You're right. I don't want to hurt myself either. It's better if someone else did. I'd honestly prefer it if you did, but you said you’re not going to do that anymore, right? So, all I can do is supply my own needs."

"There absolutely has to be something else that makes you feel good. You say you have to hurt yourself, but there's no way there isn't something else you can do."

The sensations of violence being done to me would never be something I could create with my own hands. I understood that, but I was looking for something at the limits of what I could do to myself. I didn't even know if there was anything out there like it, but all I could do was keep groping around in the dark looking for the answer.

"If there is, then tell me. Please."

"Huh?"

"What will make me feel good other than pain?"

"Um...."

"You have something that makes you feel good too, right? For me, it's pain. It's a sensation that I want to get from other people, something I can do to myself to feel less empty."

Ruri-chan's hands slid down to her hips and stopped there. "There is, but..."

"Well, show me."

"Huh? But..."

"What should I do? How can I take care of my needs without involving pain? What do you do to comfort yourself? Show it to me so I can see. Teach me."

I understood pain doesn't bring pleasure to people. I really did. But while I understood that, I couldn't get away from it. My body craved it. If I could repaint my desires in a more normal color, I would.

"What do I need to do... to become a functioning adult?"

I wanted her to tell me. My fluttering voice wandered through the air, hesitating as it found its way to Ruri-chan. For a moment, my vision blurred and I couldn't see.

I didn't want to see incomplete emergences like the swallowtail, but I had no choice in the matter. That was just how the relentless circle of life paid out. Each life is a roll of the dice, and when there are these many lives coming into existence, a bad roll is a statistical certainty. That I was one of those bad rolls myself was just part of an unavoidable phenomenon. But what if every life came out the same way? If we could live in a world where incomplete emergences didn't happen, we'd be living in a much better place.

I had nowhere else to turn. The only thing I could do was give up. I would erase the things simmering in my heart one by one.

Hope might actually be the closest thing to despair. So I would crush that hope, let it gush out like juice from a fruit. With nowhere else to go, an accumulation of hope had built up in my right eye where I couldn't see it.

"Got it," Ruri-chan said as she untied her ribbon and opened her blouse one button at a time.