Academy Monologues

Prompt 3: Dark Days – Kokoroyumi

Genre: Angst

Everyone has dark days, days when nothing in the world seems right and everything going on just seems so meaningless and inconsequential. It's when you start wondering what you're meant to be doing with the incredibly short time you've been given to be alive. It's when you start searching for purpose and when the feeling becomes too overwhelming, you succumb to defeat and just lie where you are because moving around and trying to make something of yourself is pointless when you already know you're going to fail. Dark days happen to everyone. It's not a phenomenon. It's a slump, a dark hole you just trip and fall into one day and if you don't have anyone to pull you out of it or if you can't do it yourself, the pit just goes on and on and on.

What most people don't know is that sometimes people have dark days at the same time. It's pretty logical. With only three hundred sixty-five days in a year it's only rational to believe that several people all at once could feel lost, inadequate and despised. Still, it seems like everyone is more eager to believe that what they're feeling is unique, as though being misunderstood is a source of comfort. That's because when you find out that your emotions are basically a replica of that of a million others, you start feeling even more ordinary than you already do.

I'm not 'most people' so I know that persons at a time are being swallowed up by their personal hells every day.

There's the girl in Math Class who thinks she's too stupid to pass anything and that the only reason she's still in the Academy is her Alice. There's the boy I pass by every morning who keeps getting bullied by his classmates because he's overweight. There's the girl who's trying very hard to fit in so she keeps hanging out with the wrong people and is treated like a doormat for it. There are so many of them and sometimes I just want to tell them all to shut up.

Quit moping. You need to study harder. Just stop eating all the time. There's a reason why our food is rationed. Your friends don't really like you. Why can't you see that? Just go hang out with someone else.

These are things I know, but these are also things I'm not allowed to say out loud because it's not my place and if I try to help every person in my vicinity by acting like a real-life sounding board, there would be nothing left of me by the end of the day. That is the pitfall of my Alice. Instead of feeling powerful and influential by knowing all these things, I'm just another passive-aggressive teenager with his hands eternally tied behind his back.

So instead I smile all the time. I grit my teeth and fight back tears when someone's pain gets too sharp. I tell a joke and laugh with my friends instead of blurting out someone's secret. I sleep in class and try to shut out the rest of the world because really, sometimes I know more than anyone else that whatever's waiting for me in the real world just isn't worth staying awake for.

This story isn't about me though. It's about Ichigo Ueda, a second-year student in the high school division. I'm sure you've never heard of him, until maybe two days ago. I met him only once. We talked on the day that he died.

What am I even doing here? This is bullshit. Everything is bullshit. I shouldn't be here. Everyone would be better off if I didn't show up.

I spun around and my gaze latched on to a boy that was walking away from me. I recognized it at once. He was having a dark day. So I followed him and forced an encounter. He had paused at the water fountain when he turned the corner, I ran into him.

"Hey, sorry."

He looked up at me and for a moment I got scared because his mind was suddenly wiped clean. There was nothing there and the void that met me was frightening.

"You're Koko. You read minds."

"You know who I am?"

"You're from Class B, with those popular kids."

"Yeah," I said. There was no point denying my friends were well-known. "You're Ichigo Ueda." He nods and I quickly scanned him for a conversation gambit. "You like baseball?"

"It's okay."

I'll be okay. You can leave me alone.

The added thought at the end of his sentence was enough for me. I nodded, resisted the urge to shake his hand then walked off so that we could both return to our business. Sometimes that was all it took. I'd orchestrate a scene and talk for a few moments with the person and it would be enough to pull them out of the darkness. It's like breaking their bleak rhythm somehow. I guess I should have known it wouldn't be enough this time because he had cut me off before the encounter was complete.

The next time I saw Ichigo, he was falling down a building, plummeting to the earth after leaping off the viewing deck of the science department. He hit the ground and people started screaming. I had just arrived at the area. I came in time to see him jump.

That's why I'm standing on the roof deck of the same building he had leapt off. I'm standing here pacing and mourning. People are sad and miserable and guilty about what happened. I feel all those things too but mostly, I'm just pissed off because he killed himself. He committed suicide just because he was having a dark day and I want to hit him for it. I honestly want to punch his lights out if only he wasn't dead already. Because shit, what the fuck did he do? He wasn't supposed to jump off the building. That wasn't what he was thinking about when I saw him last. He was supposed to still be alive.

I was supposed to save him.

And maybe I was able to save other people that day. Maybe I was able to talk to someone so that they didn't meet the same end but that offers me no comfort. You can't just save one person and lose another and be okay with it, because when you talk about lives it's not a fifty-fity, splitting the odds, numbers game. It's one hundred percent all the time and when someone dies, there's nothing that can compensate. So you just grieve.

For god knows how long.

Ichigo Ueda wasn't the first person I was unable able to reach and I know he won't be the last. When I think about other days that might turn out like this, I sometimes want to pitch myself over the ledge too because god, this hurts. And I didn't even know him.

Everyone has dark days. I know that more than anyone. Today, it's my turn.