Lining Your Vision
More than ten years after Yukari graduates from Seiei Academy, she finds the rusted bottle of sugar-stars Miwako used to eat by the handful. They're flecked with blotted eyeliner and unshed tears.
"Magic medicine," Miwako had once laughed, a flurry of pink skirts and curls and pouty lips. "Caroline, wouldn't you like some?"
Back then, trays of Isabella's candied kiwi and almond-paste marzipan had paled in comparison. Not even Miwako's favored banana parfait could come close.
It doesn't seem very special now. Not in the slightest. Since, you know, it was just kompeito, nothing more. The stars are faded and crumbling; they look like those cheap sweets that lie on tops of every ordinary drugstore counter, flatly adjacent to tapered boxes of candyfloss and chewing gum. Who would want them?
Because the world of Paradise Kiss seems distant: so grotesque, gauche, and unimaginably freakish. The real world is different. Real people don't go around parading their false eyelashes or unnatural color contacts. Real people don't have hair dyed like a bag of Skittles. Real people don't wear piercings on torn studded sleeves or sequined pinstriped suits. The dreams of real people aren't bright enough to give off their own glow. Practicality is the order of the day, and real people are content to live without that nonsense.
She straightens her skirt.
She's just fine on her own now. She is. The money she makes from modeling is more than enough; luxury, fame, and hordes of admirers abound. Whirlwinds of fervent love letters arrive with the same frequency that exams once did. She doesn't need Paradise Kiss anymore: not Isabella's soft alto and not Arashi's fixed scowl and not Miwako's cheer, which all blur together as one. And not George's piercing blue gaze.
Especially not that.
The world of Paradise Kiss seems distant: full of oddball patterns meant for oddball clothing, music ricocheting off of bubblegum walls, metal racks clustered by a pool table, and bolts of silken brocade and Venetian lace stuffed messily into every crevice. Florescent, glowing, with jazz spinning off the walls. Glamorous and extraordinary. A swirling kaleidoscope of color, its dizzying leaps of light on a golden spectrum thrown back and illuminated upon her monochrome lifestyle.
Even George had tried Miwako's 'magic medicine'. To humor her? Who knows.
The world of Paradise Kiss seems distant--the hallucinogenic dream that should have come true. She unscrews the cover, shakes a few faded stars into the palm of her hand, and swallows them. The clink of each flavor slips up, ice-cool against her mouth.
A thread of hope plucks at her like a fleeting string: slender and lightly dancing, washing away burden and twining through her senses like wind chimes. She normally considers her nostalgia an irritation, but it feels like air to her right now. And if she allowed herself to think further, she'd admit that she doesn't fully associate them with that gust of regret (and sadness and emotion too layered to quantify) anymore.
Privately, she considers that the candy might not be so ordinary after all.