Yuka Ayase 03/03
"All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination" Earl Nightingale
You are bored. School is boring, and work is liable to be more of the same. Still, you don't feel like anything you usually do after school appeals to you.
It's one of those days where nothing interests you. You don't know what you want, just that nothing you can think of appeals to you. So you are just kind of hanging around school, not really sure what you want to do, and too bored to want to go anywhere, when Eriko asks if you want to play a game.
For lack of anything better to do, you say yes.
Eriko leads you to a park where another woman and Reiji Kido are waiting.
Eriko asks the woman what game she is going to teach them.
She tells everyone to get into a corner.
"Persona, Persona come here!" She walks down to tap Eriko.
Eriko walks down to you saying the same thing, and with trepidation, you walk over to Reiji. "Persona, Person, come here."
When Reiji walks over to the starting position, you see a woman walk through the middle, who is wearing a combination of traditional and gothic clothing. When you look again, there is only a butterfly.
"Wow!" Eriko exclaims.
Reiji Kido leaves, and you decide to leave too.
Emica asks you where you have been when you catch up to her.
"Oh, around." You tell her. "Eriko wanted to play some kind of game."
You have a strange dream that night. But it's not hard to put out of your mind. You don't think of it again until Eriko comes back from America, and teaches it to Brown, who in turn dares Maso to play it.
Unlike last time, this time you see a crying girl, and Lightning comes out of nowhere and knocks a bunch of people to the floor.
You notice that the lightning only hit people who hadn't played before. You don't know what that means, but you decide to skip hanging out with Emica, in favor of getting out of range.
The day only gets weirder when monsters attack the town, and proves your thoughts wrong that it couldn't get weirder when you discover you can fight back.
Your teacher is possessed, Eriko is ecstatic to be fighting monsters, Brown and Maho are your unlikely companions on a treasure hunt lead by Yukino to save your teacher, and somehow you feel more present in this moment than you have in a long time.
You fear the future. You don't know what, if anything you want to do for the future, so you figure you will be a housewife. The thought of giving birth terrifies you, yet you want children. You are a tangled mess of contradictions. And maybe that's ok.
Maybe you don't have to know everything you want to fight for your future. The future of the world. The future of one of the teachers you do care about.
The future doesn't have to be scary if you plan for it. The future is something you take for yourself with each and every step.
So when you get out of here, you have every intention to start walking on that path.