Maki Sonomura (P1) 04/01

"The past, the present, the future, are all a glittering dream there is nothing for me, that is why I am going to-" Deva Yuga (Arrange version)

You dream of a world, where all the things you want are possible. Your body is healthy, you are popular and have good friends. Your paintings are beautiful and you are a hero.

This world is filled with monsters, and you fight them. You still dislike doctors and hospitals, and in this world you do not need them. You can heal yourself. And you do.

You save your friends.

Mark likes to look at your paintings. He likes the incredible sense of atmosphere you give to them.

"You can really feel the mood." He tells you.

You like his sense of humor he portrays through his graffiti work. Little observations of life, in picture form.

He's a funny guy. An emotional guy. And you like that. You like that he smells of paint. That he hasn't forgotten you. He's your friend. And you like him.

But for all he says that he feels the mood of your paintings he never wants to talk about it. You are angry. You are so angry.

With the world, and the people who live in it, by the people who just pass it by living in it. By the nurses who take care of you, and pity you, and then they get to go home, and see their families, and you don't. You hate your body for failing you with this illness that never stops.

What do you do with that anger? What can you do with that anger? You want to scream and cry and make a scene, except you did that once, and it didn't help anything, you are still stuck in this hospital! All it did was get people worried, upset, and pitying, and it felt ugly. And sometimes you let it out in remarks and comments to people that you just can't hold on anymore, as they slip from your lips like poison, tainting the air.

What do you do with that anger? You paint. You make something they can see, can interact with, on their terms.

And their eyes see the meaning in it, and they just don't talk about it. Art is supposed to make people feel, and they refuse to engage with it.

Mark is your friend, your best friend, probably. But sometimes, you kind of hate him too.

Some days, you imagine a world where you are sick, and you have a mother who is never there for you. She leaves you alone, and you create paintings with that anger and loneliness, and resentment.

You try to channel that into your own paintings, and you must succeed on some level. People tell you your paintings are really good at creating a mood and they relate to them.

Sometimes you dream of another world. And you have a father, who is present in your life, and who loves you. You would do anything for him.

And he protects you, and cares for you too. The world might be fake, but he isn't. And you would end everything for him.

Truthfully one world isn't more real or less real then the other. There are millions of statistical probabilities that never happened, that all came together to make up the universe you live in the one where the probabilities did happen.

In some universes the world ends. The nukes go off. The conception came to fruition. Climate crisis rolls past the tipping point and off of a cliff to a point the planet is irreversibly changed.

There are millions of people you could have been, all with different opinions and faces they wear to interact with the world. Maybe in one world you were born a boy, maybe in one world you were born healthy. Why not be there instead of here.

They find a meeting place in their hated of humanity. He is tired and bored, and she is tired and angry.

It forms a bridge. Nothing matters. He is the accomplished man everyone said he should be. He has fulfilled his destiny and found it hollow.

She feels she has no future. Just more hollow days of being in the hospital.

Maybe I can change that, he tells her. We are the same.

And one day the worlds collide, and you meet alternate versions of your friends. You can help them, so you do.

You lead them into your world, where the rules make sense again, and the stores sell guns. You have to fix this, so you do.

So you fight to the center of a maze, where your friend has made a monster out of herself. And where your words don't reach her, someone else's does. And you are happy that you helped, that you repaired a friendship you didn't even notice cracking.

And maybe they can help you too. These friends from the other side are ready to fight the little girl at your side.

So they follow you, and the deeper you go, the more the world chips away.

(This world is your creation. And the man who made it possible for you finds it just as empty of meaning as the first one. Just like you do. Just like you did.)

The mask shatters on the floor into a million pieces.

And this time she finds that maybe all he says is true, that there is no meaning, that change is a waste of time, that she still doesn't know what she is living for.

But where he has lost hope of trying, she hasn't. She would like to change. She would like to try.

He thinks it's all pointless. And maybe it is, maybe life is chaos and boredom, a lot of confusion and not a lot of meaning in it. No point, nothing matters. But maybe they can try together, to find something worthwhile in it anyways. They are the same.

A moment is all it takes. To start something. Or to end it.