White

When I woke up I found myself staring at the white ceiling again.

It was morning.

I think.

It was hard to tell what time it was in this world without going outside and checking whether or not the sky was visible, but such was the way of life.

Standing up, I made my way to the black wall and passed through it into the outside world, looking up to see that it was in fact morning time. I stared out into the white emptiness and did my daily routine of deciding which direction I should head in first, but this time it was different. This time, there was a voice of a girl echoing in my head.

“I hope we can meet again,” it said.

I stood in front of my house, processing those words as they repeated over and over again. They were different from other words somehow; they held meaning—something I probably needed in my life—but despite not caring about whether or not meaning was needed, I ended up finding myself caring about those words anyway. They were enticing, and made me think that having a little meaning in things could be fun.

As I stared into the white canvas, I made a decision I never made before.

Today I’m going to head in the same direction as yesterday, I told myself.

It wasn’t that I never headed in the same direction twice before. It was that if I did, I probably never noticed because everything looked the same in ‘not home’. It was just a practiced tradition that I never headed in the same general direction as the day before, but that never guaranteed that I didn’t end up in the same place anyway.

I began walking down the same path as yesterday, following the movement rules that dictated where and how I should move, turning every so often and stopping here and there before crossing something. After a few minutes, when I was finally approaching the place where the bus was, something blue appeared in the corner of my eye.

The lady, I realized.

She was a different shade of blue than she was yesterday: lighter, but still blue, and not quite white. I also noticed that she looked a little different as well. She was more detailed and I could make out her hairstyle a little bit now—a short, messy ponytail—and her figure seemed more humanoid unlike the weird, blobby, half-humanoid form I saw her leave in.

The changes to her appearance to me were weird, but I could still tell it was her. Kind of. It was easier to believe it was her anyway. She was blue and that’s all that mattered to me. As I approached her, she turned and noticed me, her hue lighting up a bit and scaring me for a second, for I thought she was going to fade into the white world.

“Oh hey it’s you,” she said waving her arm over, “I didn't actually expect to see you again.”

“Was… I not supposed to come back?” I asked, feeling a little discouraged.

“No, no, I’m just surprised that’s all,” she said. “I’m here almost every day, but yesterday was the first time I saw you. I thought it was just a one-time coincidence.”

“Well…” I said, “I don’t normally visit the same place twice, but I remembered that you told me you hoped to see me again, so I decided to break that rule just this once.”

A strange expression formed on her face—one that I didn’t recognize. She flinched back a little as if taken aback by what I said, but in a way that didn’t seem bad.

What kind of emotion is that? I wondered.

“I see…” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Come to think of it, I didn’t catch your name last time. Would you mind telling me what it is?”

A name? I thought, what was my name?

When I didn’t respond for a few seconds, she tilted her head curiously.

“I don’t know,” I finally replied, “I don’t think I have one.”

“You don’t have a name?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

“Hmm…a person without a name… ” she murmured before looking up and snapping her fingers, “Well then, it seems we’re just going to have to give you one! How about… Nanashi…? I think it's kind of fitting.”

I shrugged.

“Sure I guess.”

“Really? That’s it?” she asked, “you’re really just going to go with that?”

“...Yes? Is there something wrong with it?”

She snorts and breaks into a smile, her color lighting up a little once more.

“No, it’s just that most people would’ve argued against it,” she said. “It’s a silly kind of name, and most people wouldn’t want it as one because it’s kind of weird.”

“You gave me a weird name?”

She smiled.

“Weird, but not necessarily in a bad way,” she explained, “...kind of like you.”

I paused for a moment. I didn’t know why, but for some reason I could tell that the words she said just now had meaning to them. It was kind of like how I knew that the words from yesterday had meaning, except this time it felt a bit different. This time, the meaning behind the words seemed heavier, but I couldn’t decipher it. Thinking nothing of it, I decided to ask her for her name.

“What about you?” I asked, “what’s your name?”

She made a disappointed expression and I noticed that her hue began to turn a little darker.

“Emuru,” she said, “it means ‘precious, smiling dream’. My parents gave it to me because they wanted me to be happy, but I really haven't been that way lately...”

“Why?” I asked, “what’s wrong?”

“I had a falling out with someone I really really cared about recently… as recently as yesterday actually. It was why I was crying.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh?” she asked. “Is that all you have to say? Shouldn’t we girls stick together on things like this?”

We? I wondered.

“I’m a girl?” I asked out loud.

“Are you?” she said, sounding more confused than me.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I am actually.”

“Well… you look like a girl to me.”

“Do I?”

“I mean, you have long hair, a feminine face, your clothes are girlish, and your voice is higher pitched—I would assume you’re a girl, but it’s perfectly okay if you’re not.”

“...do I???” I asked, as I heard her describe my appearance.

“Do you what???” she questioned, sounding even more confused than before.

“Do I look like that?”

She paused.

“Do you not know what you look like?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve never seen a mirror before?”

I shook my head again as I wondered, what’s a mirror?

“...What a strange person you are,” she said. “I’ll show you one tomorrow, but for now I should get going. I don’t want to keep other people waiting in line.”

“Other people?” I ask, “there’s other people here?”

For some reason, this question seemed to shock her the most, as she stood there in a stunned silence for a long time—long enough for the bus to pull in front of us.

“I see…” she finally said, “so that’s how it is…”

She reached over and grabbed me by the shoulders before forcing my body to look away towards the invisible horizon in the distance.

“Look,” she said next to my ear. “Look and see the people around you.”

As I continued staring at the horizon, one by one, little white blobs outlined in thin black lines began to appear all around me, sprouting into existence with a pop. Despite being blobs, each and every one of them was different, varying in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some were tall, others were short, some were rounder than others, and some were thin—but they all shared the same trait in that they were white with black outlines as if they had been sketched into life with a pencil.

I looked around the place, observing how each of them moved, and watching as some of them climbed into the location that Emuru had called a ‘bus’.

“You see them now, right?” she asked, noticing my changed expression.

I nodded my head in awe.

“That’s good,” she said.

Have these creatures always been around me? I wondered.

Seeing their existence and their movements was almost overstimulating, replacing the boredom that filled up the void in my mind—but most importantly, it had also begun to fill up a hole that I didn’t know had existed inside me; the hole that held an overwhelming loneliness that built up over the time I spent wandering this blank white canvas of a world alone.

Emuru, who was a little less blue now, finally let go of my shoulders and stood behind a few blobs waiting to enter the bus.

“I have to get going now. Let’s meet here again tomorrow okay?”

And as she disappeared into the crowd, I came to realize one more thing as I felt the hole inside me reopen a little: perhaps it wasn’t the appearance of the blobs that filled up the loneliness inside, but rather, it was the ‘existence’ of her.