Yuno had returned home a whole week and a half early before the end of winter break. The other girls in the complex wouldn't be back for at least another four days.
On the first night, she sat awake beneath the warmth of the kotatsu, basking in the glow of the television. She had brought her sketchbook and pencils out to the table, but she never touched them once. The musings on the TV and the figures on it could not replicate, for her, the warmth and ease brought by her roommates' aimless chatter.
Without them, she didn't have much to offer. Formulating original ideas was difficult without the voices of her eccentric and warm friends. The energetic rhythms of their speech - the lilting of syllables in their conversations, alone, brought her to life, got her pencil scratching fabulous shapes and characters onto the page.
Of course, she hadn't formulated any of these thoughts at this moment. At that moment, she lay transfixed, sinking like stone into the half-inch of cushion the carpet provided. She knew nothing was good on the TV, but something stopped her from turning it off. To turn off the TV would bring a momentary darkness to the room. All around her, dark and oppressive clouds - shapes of indescribable forms and geometries - encircled her. She could not bare it long enough to turn off the television, to face it entirely alone. And as she sat, she noticed something that she could only have seen through the irregular lighting of the television set in the darkness of the room. That, from the corner of the TV set to the corner of the kotatsu, was a cobweb. It was entirely likely. She hadn't walked between the TV and the kotatsu at all since she had gotten back. And before that, the apartment was empty for a week.
Yuno didn't go to bed that night, but she did finally drift off around 5 am, when she allowed herself to close her eyes and focus on the chirping of birds until she woke about 11 hours later. She knew she didn't have much food in the fridge. Or, she had food items, but none of them, when combined, constituted an actual meal. When she pulled herself out of bed about 2 hours later, she snacked on a pack of straight, dry ramen noodles. She enjoyed pushing the noodle in her mouth, breaking it down into segments with rapid-fire teeth-chattering, like some sort of machine built only to break things down to incomprehensible, unusable parts.
On the television, someone said something about something. Another guy did a thing, and it was certainly a thing. She forgets what happened. But Yuno didn't have much allowance left for the rest of this month, and she felt like maybe she deserved to go out for a meal. Well, she hadn't done any hard work or anything, but she figured that maybe she was being hard on herself lately, or something, and a nice restaurant cooked meal was juuuuuust the thing. Mostly, the convenience was irresistible.
Somehow, the first clear thought in a while had came to her just then.
Yuno wanted McDonalds.
Ever since she had first been given McDonalds - undoubtedly sometime as a child, her parents had taken her - she thought the McDonald's McDouble was perhaps the cutest, real-life depiction of a cheeseburger she had ever encountered. So much so, that more authentic cheeseburgers seemed messy and contrived to her. The McDouble's top bun, alone, was precious; the perfect convex curve alluding to something soft and fluffy beneath. Its shape fit right in her dainty hands. Seeing her own small fingers around the burger reminded her of being a child. Cradling a McDouble was a sense of security that couldn't be evoked by any other object. And when taking a bite - before even getting into the taste, with its perfect amounts of ketchup to fill the spaces between beef and bun, the warm cheese providing a hint of savory sweetness in a category entirely apart from the ketchup, and the eventual crunch of the sour pickle that offset the whole thing just enough to provide a brief and refreshing respite of contrast - the bite left a clean chomp mark, like something that could only exist in a cartoon - in a symbol of a burger - and revealed a perfect cross section of the burger's composition, layers of nutrients pressed together by heat into something timeless and ethereal. But aside from that, Yuno really didn't eat fast food all too much.
Another two hours passed in the bed. Yuno hadn't gotten dressed yet. Her hair felt greasy, and she didn't feel completely clean, but she didn't stink or anything, either. But the idea of getting into fresh clothes seemed bad, somehow. Body and clothes can only be combined at a perfect state of neutrality, and her body felt like something on the negative end of a number line. So she sat, half-debating if she should take a bath, but her mind had decided long ago that filling the bath was a hassle at this point. Yet, she still entertained the thought long enough to tell herself that she hadn't forgotten the importance of routines of common decency.
Of course, she didn't rationalized all this at the time; it was just happening naturally in her head. Constructing the narrative at one's convenience, from an elevated mental state, would be preferable. That, too, she only realized in retrospect, and had not occured to her at this moment. Yuno wasn't sure that any thoughts were her own, really. But, she did manage to put a scarf and coat on, and the leggings and skirt and boots came naturally afterward, and she began to feel ready. Having her clothes on felt like a white porcelain plate, with little floral designs printed around the rim, freshly rinsed through a sink full of dirty dishes. She felt ready enough to carry herself out of the complex, to lock the door behind her, to check the mailbox, to step out onto the sidewalk at a time of day she never had before in this light, alone, toward a destination she had known perfectly well of but never traversed to with this particular intention.
Yuno walked through the suburbs, the buildings bringing the sky much closer to the ground than they seemed. The power lines hung too low, gathering the dust of encroaching dusk, while a trick of perspective in the darkness allowed her to imagine the buildings as interconnected. What were cobwebs really made of, anyways? Yuno asked herself. Was it dust that had collected on the abandoned webs of spiders? That was probably it. And how they are usually invisible until the dust starts collecting. Only after the web is abandoned and forgotten, after flakes of dead skin and wandering motes of dirt and ash have time to settle, can the visage of the web even be seen and finally recognized.
Yuno walked to the train line against a crowd of business men and women and shoppers. The station was wide with low ceilings, the tile floors sleek and reflecting the lights from the ceilings, the entire scene to her draped in a muted yellow light, an ambiance lacking the quaint warmth of sepia, echoing the clip clop of heels and murmurs, all in synchronicity with the agreed upon rules of time, while Yuno felt completely off the rails but still tied down to her own tracks, coasting to a seat on the Keihin-Tohoku line.
In the train car, taking a seat, the car crowds. Lady with dog in a carriage made for children. Neglecting to see or remember the faces of anyone. An elderly woman denied a seat. Voice feeling stifled. Not sure when she spoke last. Not alone but feeling alone, all eyes transfixed on nowhere. Yuno intuits invisible diagrams where dust will soon settle, the webs always forming, if only for a moment.