The Clocks Struck Twelve, Part Two: I Just Wasn't Made for These Times.
I am in pain. I am in Hell. My clothes are torn and what isn't torn is covered with mud, mud everywhere. I'm not sure what's going to happen next; all I know is what led up to this mess.
It all began when I was boiling some ramen noodles in a fire Miroku had started. Inuyasha had recently come back from his bath and his ears were twitching wildly, unknown to him.
Most people can hope to find water at the bottom of well, pennies if it's a wishing well. I went into my well looking for a cat, and I came out with a dog boy. Do I have some bad luck or what?
Miroku tells me that sometimes he likes to go to my house during the night. What he doesn't know is that I'm awake most of the time.
I used to have this pair of false-bamboo wind chimes, gaudy-looking things I had bought at some flea market. Once, I was lying awake in bed, as always, wondering whether or not Inuyasha would come that night. It's hard to stay still and pretend to be sleeping when you know he's literally in the room with you, he's so graceful, he makes it seem almost effortless. It's like walking on air, you need to keep moving or you'll fall right out of the sky. When he leant in close to my body it was a miracle he couldn't smell my staccato heartbeats or feel the heat from my blushing cheeks. His hair smelled like smoke, but not the cigarette kind, more like a campfire smoke, it was beautiful.
Then those bleeding wind chimes have to barge in with their bargain-price clinking. It wasn't even a very windy day, and before I could think. Those obnoxious plastic things had scared away my favorite dog demon.
I threw them away the next morning.
The ramen had come to a slow simmer and Shippou was looking eager.
Sometimes I think I'm sick. Sometimes I feel like a bullet trapped in a gun barrel, staring at the rifling on the walls, waiting to be told to do what I do best. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy.
I felt a pull on my soul, it was a jewel shard. Shippou once asked me what is was like to sense a jewel. The energy flows around the jewels in a sort of concentric circle pattern, growing more powerful as one gets closer to the center. It's like a huge, three-dimensional target, and the shard is the bull's eye.
Inuyasha was looking severely amused at Miroku's misfortune; Sango had no doubt slapped him for some petty sexual offence. The thing is, I think that Sango actually likes the way Miroku treats her, judging from the way she blushes.
I love the feeling of being caught off guard. I love the feeling of sleeping under the stars, the sky being clear as crystal, then around one-o'clock in the morning, it starts hailing and you have to move to cover (I use that as a excuse to sleep next to Inuyasha).
Sometimes I feel more at home in the past than in my own time. One thing I always think is that when you've been lost for so long, where you're lost in becomes home. I'm only a visitor in my own time.
There was this news report on the T.V. the other day, a girl with short brown hair crying and being carried to a police car. She had this pullover on with NEVADA in big letters on the front; the broadcaster announced that she had killed one of her classmates with a box cutter.
I'm always cautious whenever I sense a jewel shard. Once I believed I sensed one but it was in reality an ant hill that I had stepped directly into the center of.
That's what sensing a jewel shard is like- being eaten by billions of ants. Whenever I get home, I always take a bath, first thing, and the reason is to wash off all the ants, but they always come back eventually.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, my voice tattered from screaming.