White II

I laid down on the thing I was sitting on, staring up at the black sky above me.

It was night time, and I wasn’t at home.

For some reason, I couldn’t move too far away from the spot I was sitting at, as if a movement rule was preventing me from going home. As the day went on, I noticed less and less blobs around me as they slowly walked away from the area.

I wonder where they’re going, I thought, watching them slowly disappear until there was none left, do they have a home too? If they do, where was it? There’s nothing but black and white for as far as I could see, and other than my own home there wasn’t anything else out there.

I sighed.

I was bored—otherwise I wouldn’t be wondering such weird things like this. Normally at this time, I would’ve been laying on my bed, staring up at the white ceiling as I thought over the events of today, but instead of a white ceiling, I was staring up at a black sky, and instead of my comfy bed, I was laying on something hard and uncomfortable.

Moments later, I suddenly noticed something familiar appear from the corner of my eye as I sat up to see the bus moving over to me.

The bus? I wondered, does it normally come here at this time?

I watched as it came to a stop before a black wall formed at the front, spilling out blobs in a single file line, and amongst them I noticed something else that was familiar—a figure that wasn’t a blob.

Emuru.

She looked different from the last time I saw her—the most notable thing being that she was blue again—but outside of that, her hair was messier and unkempt and her sweater was a little ruffled up.

Upon noticing me, her color seems to brighten up—something that I noticed was becoming a pattern—and she walks up to me with a confused expression.

“Nanashi, is that you?” she asked.

I nodded.

She breaks into a smile as she says, “phew, and I thought I was just hallucinating something that makes me happy. What are you doing out so late anyway? I don’t normally see you when I get back from campus at this time—did you stay here all day waiting for me?”

I shook my head.

“No, for some reason I find myself unable to leave this area,” I explained, “or at least unable to go back home.”

“You can't go back home? Why not?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to figure out myself.”

She sighs and sits down next to me.

“Fine, I’ll amuse you,” she said, “do you remember anything different that happened today?”

“Hmm… well I did get to see my reflection today.”

“Really? You said all you saw was just a blob.”

“Yup, but I managed to figure out how to see what I actually look like.”

“Oh, ok… that’s good to hear I guess. What else?”

“Uh… Oh yeah! I remember seeing a blob outside of my house with a piece of paper in their hands. They were saying something to me but I couldn’t hear them, and they were making me feel bad so I just ignored them. I saw them put the paper on my wall though before I left.”

She froze.

“A piece of paper?”

“Yup.”

She looked me dead in the eye.

“Come to think of it, I never really see you do anything other than come here every day. What do you do for a living?”

I tilted my head, confused what she meant by that.

“I, uh… I explore the world every day?” I replied.

“I see…” she murmured before she mumbles out quietly, “so it’s an eviction notice after all…”

Eviction notice?  I wondered, what does that mean?

She lets out a big sigh before standing up and stretching her arms out.

“Well I can’t just leave you out here, so why don’t you follow me back to my place?”

“Your place?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, “is that not acceptable?”

“No, it’s just… I never really saw a place outside of my own home.”

“Huh, is that so?” she asked before turning to look at the world around us, “tell me, Nanashi, what is it that you see when you look around us?”

I silently look around.

“An empty, blank white canvas,” I answered, “for as far as I can see. The only place that’s different is the horizon, where the white emptiness ends and the black emptiness of the night sky begins.”

“Woah,” she said, “that’s pretty scary.”

I looked at her curiously.

“Do you think so?”

“Of course.”

“Well I don’t. It’s probably because it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. If anything I don’t think it’s scary, instead I think it’s lonely.”

She looks at me, a sad expression befalling her face.

“Come with me Nanashi,” she says, extending her hand, “let’s go back to my home.”

I take her hand, and she leads me through a strange set of movement rules that I never remember following as we cross through the blank white emptiness. The trip was mostly filled with silence, but it was a strange kind of silence—one that didn’t make me feel lonely.

As we continued walking, I looked at her face, and saw that she was looking up at the black sky above us as if seeing something that I couldn’t. It was a common occurrence throughout our trip—in fact throughout our entire time together, she always seemed to be looking at something that I couldn’t see. It was only when I asked about it and she introduced me to it, that I was able to start seeing the things that she could.

Perhaps the black sky had something in there that I couldn’t see. Perhaps it was worth seeing.

I didn’t know why else she would be so entranced by it, after all, it's just an endless black thing otherwise.

“What are you looking at?” I finally decided to ask her.

Without stopping she turned to look at me and replied, “oh it’s just the stars.”

“Stars?” I ask.

“Yup, the stars. They appear every night and make the sky a lot prettier to look at. You can’t see them?”

I shook my head.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you can only see an endless pitch black up there huh?”

I nodded and asked, “what do they look like?”

“Hmm… like little beads of white sugar sprinkled on top of a black cake.”

Sugar? Cake? What are those things? I wondered, as I tried to imagine what the stars looked like.

“Are they pretty?” I asked.

“Very,” she said, stopping in her tracks, “so much so that I feel bad you can’t see them.”

My face saddens as I think for a moment.

“Well, if you can describe them for me, maybe I can see them,” I suggested, “I’ve started to notice that when you tell me about these things that I can’t see, I start to see them as long as I look for them.”

She looks up at the black sky for a moment and thinks.

“You know what light is right?” she asks.

“Mhm.”

“Now imagine the light coming in the form of little tiny dots, sprinkled across the black sky. It’s kind of like if the sky itself was a blanket and you’re poking tiny holes through it into a white background behind it—that’s kind of what they look like—little tiny white lights that twinkle and light up the night sky.”

As she describes the stars to me, I stare up at the black sky, concentrating and imagining them, using the words she described them as.

Like poking tiny holes through a blanket…, I thought, as I imagined myself with my blanket over my head, stabbing through it with my pencil, before looking through the holes at the white ceiling behind it.

Breaking free from my imagination, I looked up at the sky again, and began to notice it starting to glitter with tiny white dots.

I gasped.

Stars, I thought.

Upon hearing my gasp, Emuru lets out a big smile, her light blue hue, transforming into a yellow one.

“You see them, don’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I’m glad,” she said before continuing to walk, “c’mon now Nanashi, it’s getting pretty late. I may not have classes tomorrow, but I don’t like staying up too late regardless. Besides, my home is right around the corner.”

It was? I wondered, breaking free from my entranced state as I looked around the place.

She takes my hand and drags me until we make a sharp turn, and before me stood… another empty white plane.

“Ta-da!” she says, waving her hands over to it, “this is the apartment complex I live in. I know it’s nothing too cool, but it’s really all I got.”

For a moment, I stood there confused, but as I kept staring at the white canvas, lines began to be drawn on it, just like they had when I was first introduced to the bus. Slowly, they begin to intersect until they form a large, long, rectangular box with a set of stairs leading up to a higher level.

Unlike my home, where there was only one large black wall, this thing that Emuru called an ‘apartment complex’ seemed to have multiple small black walls, each evenly spaced out across the rectangular box.

“Come on,” she says, “let’s go get some sleep.”