P4 Protagonist 01/03
Title from -Reach out to the truth, P4
You never needed a dungeon to confront the thoughts you don't like about yourself. You see them every day in the mirror.
Some days you are a million miles away, on a distant starship piloting a body through remote.
No one notices. Maybe you are a good actor. Or maybe no one cares. After all, you are just another face in a sea of people.
Maybe it's depression. But that seems like a strong word for something that may have been around forever, in low doses. Happiness is fleeting, after all. A forever of just happiness would be stale, so they say. Your life is very normal, and it feels like something's broken about it.
You show up to school, and do all the things that you are supposed to, and go do homework. Like a robot, only disturbed by the occasional classmate asking to hang out with you. Then they realize you are boring or something, and stop asking beyond group socials. You go home, and you stare into the night, and you don't scream, that would disturb someone, and you don't want to do that.
That would mean someone would notice, and the bubble of disconnect would be disturbed, and you don't know how to deal with that. You fear what the truth would mean.
When you wanted attention, you dyed your hair. Last time it was pink, but it has long since faded. You wonder if you should switch things up and dye it again.
Probably not, if you're going to do well in Inaba while your parents are overseas on work. You wonder if it will be different here. Well, besides the TV thing.
You are a new kid, and therefore interesting for now. Will it wear off? Will they get bored of you when the shine wears off, and the TV thing ends, and they realize you are a weird and kind of boring person? What if you do somehow solve the murders, and then just walk out of each others lives? What then? Would the time you spent be worth it?
In the past, you tried not to get too attached, and that's just left you feeling distant and lonely. You remember you tried to connect when you were younger, and the pain of having the roots ripped up and replanted again.
You wonder how to start caring again, if it's a fake it Until you make it change, or if it's something that's going to happen with time? You wonder if you can keep the connection, or if it's going to fade when you lose yourself in your head.
You wonder if you are willing to try?
You think you might be.
Some people say to get anywhere in life, you have to be willing to get burned.
You don't need a Shadow Self to hear the thoughts you don't like about yourself. But maybe in this new town, this fresh start, free from the old patterns you lived by, you can face them differently. You can change yourself. And maybe you can look at yourself in a better light.
And hey, it promises to be different, even if that ends up crashing and burning, it's only a year.
You can do a year.
(You don't know that in a year, you will wish you could do the same thing over again on a fresh slate. It will be so very worth it.)
And if it falls, you can just leave. It it goes well, maybe you can come back.
Maybe