/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Anon didn’t remember waking up. He stood in front of strands of pure light. The cold glow emanating from the anomaly waxed and waned as it coiled around itself, undulating with neither rhyme nor reason. There was nothing in the surrounding area. Nothing at all. There was nothing that existed save for the figure of light and the human. So he touched it.

The light swaddled his arm first, vibrating against his limb. As it overtook him, each strand weakened in strength, surrounding the man is a pleasant buzz. Though his body never moved, he could feel his place in reality shifting ever so slightly. Surrounded by the light, he noticed less and less as his displacement became greater and greater, failing to perceive the magnitude of travel over the simplicity of his existence. Finally, when all thought left his mind, Anon pictured a little girl holding a bouquet of flowers.

He could feel the connections between his neurons establish themselves as he moved his tongue, lips, teeth and throat, regaining the ability to speak. “Hello. Hello. A-hem. Hello, who are you?”

“I dunno. Who are you?” The girl didn’t move. Anon tried to, but forgot how. He had to remember how to do that too. One muscle at a time, impulses raced through his body to reawaken the slumbering functions of human ambulation. One stray surge of electricity in his brain created a question: Why did he have to remember to speak? Why did he have to remember how to walk?

The little girl disappeared from Anon’s vision. “Why are you asking questions?” Why? That question would have to wait until after he found the girl again. Anon remembered how to open his eyelids and saw the what surrounded him.

An endless expanse of stars were spread across the sky, nestled as far as possible from the bleak slate of rock Anon stood upon. Behind him was nothing, save for a drop into the swarm of stars and inky darkness dividing them. In front of him was a gray ziggurat that branched into endless angles, turning left and right, up and down, in and out. It resembled a hedge without its leaves, the tangle of stems left to thicken and wrap around itself.

From the base of the tree, the little girl walked towards Anon, holding a bouquet. As the girl began to move, so did the petals of the flowers. They swirled and shimmered, intersecting with one another as the whole bundle swelled and shrank. The girl, wearing a placid expression, turned her head upwards to look at Anon.

“You can’t just look. You have to remember.” Anon followed the command and remembered. He remembered to taste, touch, smell, feel, think, breathe, express- Everything piled upon itself as Anon explored every part of his existence. Looking down at the girl, he felt his expression shift from neutrality to curiosity as she began to smile at him.

“Where am I? What’s going on?”

As soon as the final syllable left his mouth, the girl answered him “You’re nowhere.”

“Is this this even real? I must be dreaming.”

“This isn’t real. But you aren’t dreaming. You’re nowhere.”
This was getting confusing. This conversation would be going nowhere, but apparently it was already there. “So, since I’m nowhere and nothing here is real, does it even exist?”

“Of course it does. You’re here, aren’t you?”

Despite expecting a nonsensical answer, Anon couldn’t help feel disappointed. Another shot in the dark. “Alright, fine. What are those flowers you’re holding? I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“They are. They were. They will. They aren’t. They weren’t. They won’t. Look closely.” With these cryptic words, the girl finally did something understandable and held out the bouquet for Anon to see better. It was hard to focus on the whole thing at once, so Anon focused on a single petal, shimmering in many colors. As he looked closer, the petal unraveled and lost it’s width. A flat shape, it soon thinned out into a line. That too collapsed into a singular point. As it did, so did Anon’s senses.
----
Rain fell indifferently as Anon’s body lay on the tatami floor. A bowl of spilled soup lay nearby, cold as the corpse. A woman could be heard screaming from a nearby room, anger and pain mixed with self-loathing and regret. Her life ruined and her lover’s snuffed out by her own hand. If there was no way to repair him, the only way to atone would be to suffer the same fate. She held the needle to her throat and plunged it in.
----
“This isn’t real. This didn’t happen!” Anon could still feel every ache in his legs, every thought in Reimu’s head and every creak in the house. He could still feel himself dead on the ground as the memory slipped away, incompatible with his current state of being. He looked at the girl in horror as he focused on her features for the first time. It was like looking at a thousand people at once. More. Like every person he knew and didn’t know existed at once in front of him.

"Did it?"