Boom Town, USA

There are many ways to say goodbye to someone.

A letter.

A handshake.

A slow, tearful wave from a train station platform.

Or, if you’re the Cult of the Forgotten Streak, you lock a guy in a llama costume in a rocket held together by grammar glue and spite, and you launch him into orbit while chanting “TO SPACE! TO SPACE! TO SPACE!”

I didn’t expect to spend my morning watching Kaito Sasaki become a shooting star.

But there I was.

Standing at the edge of the cult’s backyard-turned-launchpad, hidden behind a rack of retired motivational posters (“Don’t Quit Until You Do It!”), watching the final bolts get twisted into a rust-covered rocket affectionately labeled:

PROJECT: DUO COME BACK

Kaito’s face was pressed against the small, fogged-up window of the capsule. He looked pale. Shaky. Like a man who’d just realized “space” wasn't a metaphor for being sent to the corner of the class to think about his actions.

A cultist did the countdown in Esperanto.

The rocket wheezed.

Sparked.

Farted loudly.

Then—somehow—lifted off.

It scraped the treetops, banked wildly left, and disappeared into the sky like a scream wearing a tin can.

Silence followed.

One cultist whispered, “He ascends…”

Another coughed.

A third took out a notebook and quietly wrote, “Launch successful. Sort of.”

I stood frozen.

Still masked.

A paper plate still glued to my chest.

I hadn’t jumped in after him.

I’d frozen.

And now he was gone.

But… that couldn’t be it. Right?

This wasn’t the end.

There was no way that a banana-shirted weeb in a llama pelt just got written out of the universe like punctuation in a group chat.

No. Sota and Hana were still out there.

They were smart. Strategic. Motivated by equal parts chaos and passive-aggressive teamwork.

They were for sure already cooking up a plan to bring him back.

They had to be.

Yeah, that's it.

I'll just go and find Sota and Hana. They surely are already halfway to bringing him back.

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America was—

No, scratch that.

America was Boom Town.

Shops were either abandoned or boarded up, with replacement signage written in emojis, chalk, or straight-up interpretive dance. At one point, I saw a man on a unicycle trying to pay for groceries with a drawing of an eggplant, a rainbow, and a thumbs-up.

He was escorted out by security.

In a mall parking lot in West Virginia, I passed a pop-up “Grammar Restoration Tent” where three former English teachers were giving desperate TED Talks to passing civilians. Their projector only worked in Comic Sans. Their slogan was:

“PREPOSITIONS: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO CARE.”

And at the center of it all, walking like two tourists who had accidentally booked a vacation in the apocalypse: Hana, Sota, and a parrot with resting judgmental face.

What were they planning? What was their big game to bring Kaito back? I didn't know. But I followed.

They passed a gas station labeled only with ⛽❓💸💀 and no one questioned it. Not even the bird.

Sota looked rough. Hair puffed out like he’d been electrocuted in his sleep. He hadn’t said much since North Carolina. He walked with the slow, uneven shuffle of a kid who had lost something—but wasn’t sure what.

Hana didn’t seem fazed.

She moved with sharp, deliberate steps, like the road owed her something. I noticed she never looked back. Not once. Her eyes were always forward. Calculating. Focused. A general without a war—yet.

“Should we… stop?” Sota asked.

Hana shook her head. “Too risky. Also, that symbol might mean ‘you pay, we explode.’”

Sota nodded like that made sense. And honestly? These days, it kind of did.

They kept moving, passing through a neighborhood where people spoke only in emojis.

Not used.

Spoke.

They made the sounds out loud. Vocalized them. Like spells. A woman shouted “Smiley face! Smiley face! Sad face! Firework!”

A man proposed using the words “Eggplant-eggplant-sparkle-heart,” and someone slapped him with a loaf of bread.

Even street signs had been rewritten. I saw:

The further we went, the worse it got.

Schools had become barter hubs for crayons and words.

Libraries were now holy sites, guarded by English majors armed with thesauruses on chains like morning stars. They were probably the most respected people in town. Which, if you think about it, might be the most ridiculous things we've seen so far.

A teenager threw up gang signs made entirely of finger-drawn emojis. Someone responded with a sandwich and ran.

There was no order.

No language.

No logic.

“No one here speaks anymore,” Sota whispered, visibly scared.

“They speak,” Hana corrected. “Just not in ways we’re used to.”

They just walked through the madness like it was a museum exhibit—cautious, unimpressed, and weirdly quiet.

No one batted an eye.

This was normal now.

This was America.

A place of burnt buildings, emoji grammar, and watermelon-scented madness.

And somehow—just barely—these three still walked in straight lines.

They were headed west. Through a town that used to be American, now barely even a rumor of itself. Buildings leaned like tired teeth. Billboards blinked emoji nonsense.

🚫💬➡️🔥

📖❓= 🎉💥

The kind of messages that meant nothing… or too much.

They hadn’t mentioned his name once.

No signal check for the rocket.

No hushed talk of breaking him out.

And then, as they paused on the edge of a street where a few libraries still managed to exist, Sota stopped walking.

He stared down at his shoes for a moment.

Then looked at her.

“Do you really think he’s gone?”

The silence between them stretched.

A beat too long.

Hana didn’t turn. She just kept scanning the road ahead, like a soldier calculating trajectories.

“We’ve talked about this.”

“Yeah, but—”

“He’s gone, Sota. You heard the news too.”

There wasn’t bitterness in her voice. No pain, no hesitation.

Just concrete.

“All we can do now,” she said, “is find the man who made that post. Pittsburgh’s the only lead that still matters.”

She adjusted the strap of her bag and kept walking.

Sota followed.

He didn’t argue again.

I stayed still, hidden in the shadow of the broken glass sign that once read “We Fix Phones.” I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe too loud.

They weren’t going to save him.

They believed the news.

The fax.

The death report.

But I didn't get to fully internalize what I just heard.

Because my thought process was stopped by a very aggressive scream.

From the left alley, a mob burst into view. Flags on fire. Shouts echoing. Someone with a megaphone screamed, “LANGUAGE IS CONTROL, I FREE,” while dumping a bucket of shredded thesauruses into a storm drain.

People in ripped suits smashed a storefront marked "Books & Bibles".

A man wearing a cape made of dictionary pages shrieked “GRAMMAR IS VIOLENCE!” and body-slammed a library cart.

“Move!” Hana hissed.

They bolted down the sidewalk, weaving past a melted mailbox and a half-toppled statue of Abraham Lincoln wearing a paper emoji mask.

The crowd surged behind them—chanting, shoving, waving burning books and neon emoji flags.

🔥📚🔥

“WE WON’T BE CONTROLLED!”

“FREE YOUR SYNTAX!”

One man was screaming at a streetlamp.

Another was using a keyboard as a flail.

The parrot zig-zagged above them, squawking like a winged panic attack. “LEFT! GO LEFT! NO, YOUR OTHER LEFT!”

Hana grabbed Sota’s sleeve and yanked him into a side street.

The alley reeked of rotting fast food and singed grammar posters. Someone had drawn a massive crying emoji on the wall in what might’ve been ketchup. Or something worse.

Sota stumbled, his foot catching on a pile of alphabet soup cans.

“We’re going to die in an alley full of expired nouns!” he wheezed.

“Shut up and keep running!”

They burst out the other end of the alley and into an abandoned parking lot.

A man in an American flag poncho screamed “YOU’RE NOT MY LANGUAGE!” and hurled a flaming Oxford comma at them.

Hana deflected it with her backpack.

The parrot divebombed the man’s face. “NO PUNS FOR YOU, DICTIONARY DAD!”

Sota and Hana sprinted for cover, dodging smoke bombs made from torn dictionaries, cascades of shredded paper, and a suspiciously organized group chanting:

“SEMI-COLONS EQUAL OPPRESSION! EMOJIS FOREVER!”

Sota dove behind a tipped-over vending machine. Hana slid next to him a moment later, out of breath but steady.

They were safe. For now.

Kind of.

The sound of something exploding could be heard nearby.

The parrot crash-landed beside them, coughing. “I think I inhaled a whole MLA handbook.”

Sota peeked out.

More protestors. More smoke. A man duct-taping "😢💥" signs to his chest and running headfirst into a mailbox.

“This place is insane.”

“No,” Hana said, pulling out her map, voice calm. “It’s America.”

She looked ahead, into the chaos.

“Come on. Pittsburgh’s still that way.”

From the roof of a burned-out pet store, I watched them disappear through the smoke.

Hana, calm and unreadable, already calculating the next ten steps.

Sota, shaken but still following, still trusting.

And the parrot, muttering curse words in at least three languages, trailing close behind.

They didn’t know I was here.

They didn’t know Kaito was alive.

And I didn’t know if I should tell them.

Because this—this was supposed to be journalism. Observation. Documentation. A neutral eye in a collapsing world. That was the whole point. That was my whole point.

But as I watched them vanish into another ruined neighborhood, toward another lead that wasn’t going to bring their friend back…

…I started to wonder.

How much can a Narrator talk before becoming part of the story?

What if I already passed that threshold 3 countries ago?

And if I did, should I stop reporting and start… helping?

For now, I’ll keep following them.

But I don’t know how long I can keep pretending I’m just watching.

And I don’t know how long Kaito has left.