"Chihiro, it's time for breakfast." A slightly concerned mother knocked quickly on the slim door as it creaked open and sighed; she didn't have time to be waking up her seventeen year old daughter.
"Are you okay?" still, she didn't want to be rude to her, the girl had never been a problem to her (if slightly annoying), and she was always been more respectful since the day they had moved six years ago.
The reality was, the teenager was not okay, she hadn't been entirely that way since she visited the Spirit World, and had been plagued with strange and sometimes disturbing dreams. That day had been no exception, but that night's vision had been especially disturbing, and the girl was exhausted from it. She'd been tossing and turning since three in the morning.
"Chihiro…" repeated her mother, "What's wrong, do you not feel well?" the woman peered into the sparsely furnished room to glance at her daughter.
"I'm fine, mother. I just got… a little dizzy." She replied simply and she rolled onto her stomach to slip her legs to the cold floor.
"As long as you are okay…" she left and continued on her way to leave the blue house they resided in.
She never really cares… the girl stood up, finally untangling her long legs completely from the thick beige and green covers of her bed. She flexed her toes and reached up to the ceiling with a sigh. It would be just another almost uneventful day in the life of Chihiro Ogino.
After fixing her bed sheets and taking out her high school uniform quickly, she resumed her exactly timed routine fifteen minutes behind schedule. Ever since her not so clear experience with Yubaba, she had become very different from whom she had been back then. So now, every day Chihiro knew exactly what to do and at what time to do it, and had enough experience to know that if one strayed from such a planned path, things could go quite wrong.
Another sigh escaped her full lips and she went about her way in the quick fashion she usually did and still arrived at her school ten minutes earlier than most students.
She stopped at her locker and put her blue bag in and slipped the thin books out from it then placed them onto her forearm. The lean girl pressed her palm against the cold door full of diamond slits in it and started her day with a tired mind.
Her first class took forever to start and end, just like the class after that and that. When it was finally time for her break time, with quick and long strides, she took her small bento from her locker. She sat in her usual corner on the top of the stairs with a book and a pencil and waited for the last couple of girls wandering the halls to disappear from her view.
The young woman dug into her lunch after grasping the chopsticks with her left hand dexterously and writing in the journal with the other. She began once more jotting down endless details of her 'adventure' in the land of Spirits. This had begun the day she got back; she had needed something to hold her memories or dreams or whatever they were in a desperate attempt to ground her mind.
She never told anyone about what she saw that day after the sun went down. There was an innate feeling that no one would believe her, and as the years went by, she was right. Nobody believed in fairytales about giants and princesses with miles of beautiful hair, much less would they believe she had interacted with beings as precious as spirits.
A gentle bell rang once to remind her that her time was almost over and that is she didn't eat up the rest of her rice it would spoil in her locker by the end of school. Without another thought about the endless amounts of food in the hallways of the baths of the other world, she took a large amount of the soft grains and opened her mouth wide to fit.
Still chewing on the moist rice, Chihiro closed her lunch and book and stuck her pencil behind her ear. She stood up and walked to drop off her box and hid her precious book deep behind everything else.
In the afternoon she changed her a-line skirt and button up shirt for blue shorts and a white t-shirt. The shorts were revealing, shorter than the salmon ones she used to wear half a decade ago, and they made her slightly uncomfortable, even after three years of wearing similar ones.
That day they were staying inside since it had started to rain outside, and they were doing recreational sports or walking. The girl wasn't one to surround herself with friends, and the only good acquaintance she had was absent that day, so she decided to walk and watch the others have a good time.
With a comfortable sigh, Chihiro left the school after her last and unusually boring class, her home was a long while away from school so she took the train to avoid tedious walk. She flipped open her blue cell phone to call her mother, when no one answered she tried her father, with a really sad sigh, she shut the electronic and dropped it into the bag at her side.
No one ever answered after school anymore, not since the deaths of both grandmothers. After that happened her parents slowly started to spend less time with her, she reminded them too much of them. But they still loved their daughter and had breakfast and dinner with her on work days and went out as a family on Sundays. Yet, nothing really could replace the longing she sometimes felt, it's not like it was there every minute of the day, but twice a year it crept up on her and made her sad.
She shook those thoughts from her head and finished her walk to her large blue house and unlocked the door.