3-0

I was having another dream. Maybe it wasn't a dream at all. I don't know what the differences between dreams and reality are anymore.

I was watching Kyosuke play at a recital. It's nothing special; he's just supposed to play for a panel. For him, it must be something short of the most important thing in his life. I don't share his feelings, though.

Madoka was with me, watching. But she was saying something too. I know they're words, I know she was saying something important. But her voice is so far away, as if she's speaking into the darkness of an empty well. The Me who is talking to her looks exactly like me. She speaks like me, moves like me, cries like me, but I know it's not Me. It's somebody else, someone who's crawled into my skin, taken it, speaking to Madoka with my own voice.

But it's not Me.

That Me told Madoka many things. Told her that I will be happy, that nothing bothers me anymore, that I will be happy for the boy playing at the stage, the girl hiding behind its curtains. This Me sheds tears, happiness at them both, happiness that she's finally being taken away by Madoka.

Somewhere far away, I—the real Me—was watching all of this. I was in an unbreakable glass box. I was sad. I was angry. I was a lot of things.

But I knew this: everything that Me said were lies.

Indignation was crying out.

"LIAR!"

Xxx^.^xxX

The Girl opens her eyes, sees her Mentor sitting at the side of her bed, her naked back in the blue light of early morning. Seeing her like this, from the golden head of hair that went past her shoulders, the small of her back, down to the softness of the skin on her thighs,it is only now that the Girl realizes it—she had never seen such a beautiful human in her life.

She wants to touch her Mentor, let her fingers slide down from the top of that back, draw warmth, draw a connection. She lifts her hand up. She's hopeful that today, she'll let her touch it.

"Don't touch me," she says.

"Why?"

"Just… Just don't."

The Girl is left on her bed, helpless as her Mentor hurries putting on her clothes. Buttons a blouse, pulls up a skirt, but forgets to make those curls. No time for curls, apparently. Anything excess she takes up in her hands, before rushing out of the door without another word.

The Girl is finally alone. She muses on this thought, before a great emptiness comes over her. It is fleeting, as if it were cutting her off of vital air. For a few moments she had lost herself. The emptiness had left her not knowing what to do. She knows that she should do something, but what?

The Girl frowns at the sight of the closed door. Her eyebrows crinkle, her lips form a frown. She covers herself in blankets. They shudder amidst soft wails.

3-1

I waited for an hour, but Madoka hadn't come. She never stopped coming here for breakfast, not even once. If she had to skip breakfast, she would've told me the reason why beforehand. Her absence had struck me dumb. I was seeing a different side to the absolute image of Madoka I had in my mind. I had nobody to share my morning with.

It wasn't as if would have anything to share; nobody had replaced the food inside my fridge. In fact, there wasn't any food at all. Just instant coffee, and memories full of regret.

I spent the rest of the morning thinking of why Madoka hadn't come. Maybe she was doing something. Maybe she already ate breakfast. I didn't know. All I did know was she wasn't here. Of course I was lying to myself. I knew of some things that could've happened. She must've found out how I talked about her with Kyoko and Mami. Maybe she sensed the game of pretend we played every morning. Maybe she read my thoughts and played along out of the goodness of her heart. There were thousands of possibilities. Even if I didn't have to think of what exact one it was, in the end the only important fact was that she found out what I was thinking.

I wished that I perfectly understood what I felt that morning. Sipping my coffee, empty plate on the table, I kept sipping, letting the warmth spread through me. The warmth was like an underline made to emphasize certain words. What were those words? Shame? Hate? Anger? Loneliness? Sorrow? I just knew that I was feeling something. I tried thinking of what it was, but I wasn't an organized thinker; my mind flew to other places I didn't mean to bring it to, bringing up other thoughts I didn't mean to ponder on.

I ended up thinking of my dream. Kyosuke up on the stage, Madoka and I sitting there, talking. It was another Me, and the real Me was far away trapped in a glass box, screaming something. Almost crying out. I wasn't much for deciphering dreams, but it did mean something to me.

It was me being a total liar, and someone was crying out inside me to let me see what I had become.

Had I always been such a horrible person? Even in my past life, I was exactly who I was. I couldn't believe that I had managed to live so far ignoring it. I felt queasy. The heat above my ear was there again. I felt it, under my hair. It was like a car seat you left baking in the afternoon sun for a while. Now I knew what it was, why it was there. And it pissed me off to know both facts.

Self-loathing, no matter how it comes to you, always comes brutally, always ruins your mornings in nothing flat. My eyes were open, and my plate was on the table intact. I closed them, and then opened them again to find that my plate had been shattered, 8, 9, 10 jagged pizza slices. My right hand was bleeding. But I closed my eyes a second time, and neither was plate shattered or hand bloodied. For a good while I kept staring at my palm, right in the middle where a thin line went from the left to the right unbroken. I tried to see some red circle or bloody wound in the middle of it, stigmata, but the image wouldn't solidify. Become real.

Terrific. I'm seeing things.

Xxx^.^xxX

Nothing in my stomach and nothing to do, I made myself go to work earlier than I did yesterday. I sat on the lazy-boy in my office, wondering where things went wrong. But I couldn't pin it down to just one cause. It seemed that any major problem a person had was caused not by a large event, but an interconnection of small, seemingly meaningless ones. There were now too many for me to count, and I gave up trying.

I did everything I had to do—papers signed, re-signed, signed in triplicate; bio-data forms organized, desk cleared, secretary's desk cleared, floor vacuumed and windows polished and shined. I was consumed by a feeling that I had to do something, anything. I got jittery just seeing a piece of paper not inside a filing cabinet or a folder. When everything was done, I felt sadder than ever. I even considered leaving a note for my secretary so I could go home, say I was sick.

Then this happened.

"Momoe-san, you look like a mess. What happened to you?" I asked.

"I was… busy at home. I had a lot of things to handle."

Momoe did look like a mess. Well, as far as the definition of the word 'mess' went. Her eyes were a bit sunken. It was obvious that she wasn't getting enough sleep. I knew that Momoe was always busy. But what was she being busy about? Being too busy was bad, though. It was affecting her performance here at work.

But I wasn't up to telling people off that morning, because… you know.

"Well, okay," I said. "That's fine. Momoe-san, just, um… please make me some coffee."

She was putting that oversized bag behind her desk, and she noticed the papers I had organized. In reply, she muttered something I barely heard.

"I'm sorry?"

"…We're all out of coffee," she repeated.

That reminded me that the Logistics Department hadn't brought in that request yet. It only added to the number of things I was mad about that morning. "Then um… please make me some tea."

"We're all out of tea."

"Then what do we have around here?"

For a few moments, Momoe was silent. She sat on her desk, shuffled a few papers, and stood up again. She couldn't settle in just one place. Again, she said something, but her voice was so low that I didn't understand any word of it.

"You know, Momoe-san, you gotta raise your voice when you speak. What was that?"

"…Cheese."

Huh?

"I'm sorry? Did you just say cheese?"

"Yes. Cheese."

"What about Cheese?"

"That's all we have."

"Wait, how am I supposed to drink Cheese?"

When I said that, she looked at me with her eyes. Tired, yes, but there was something else in them that moment.

They burned, brightly. Like fire. I never had the idea that a person could store that much anger in a stare.

"Because that's all we HAVE!" she yelled.

None of us spoke when she made that outburst. It was as if somebody broke an expensive vase; both of us didn't know what to do. It was the only time I had seen Momoe like that.

After a few moments, she cleared as much paperwork as she could from my table, stacked them all neatly as she carried them on her chest, and stormed out of the room regardless of whether they were signed or not.

What was that all about? I stared on as my door closed, before looking at whatever was left on my table. Nothing more but a few receipts in the last few months I kept on file. Weird. It wasn't just me; it seemed that everybody was becoming weird somehow.