Chapter 9:
died living.
He skipped school the next day.
Not because he wanted to rebel.
But because he couldn’t remember why he was going in the first place.
He sat in his room long after the sun had risen, eyes dull, the same clothes from yesterday clinging to his skin like dried regret.
There was no knock on the door.
No parent checking in.
Just silence.
He got up finally, not to leave — but to dig.
He opened the drawer where he kept the little things. The things that mattered. Aki’s notes. Her handwriting. The tissue she once handed him when his nose bled during gym. A candy wrapper she gave him because she said “it tasted like summer.”
Gone.
He tore through his room. Every drawer. Every notebook. Every pocket of his school bag.
Nothing.
No handwriting.
No scribbled notes.
Not even a trace of her scent on his scarf.
As if the world had swallowed her whole and coughed up air in her place.
He didn’t cry.
He just stared at the mess on his floor, breathing slowly, trying to think.
Then — something.
A flash.
A memory.
The bench near the train station.
She dropped her keychain there. That stupid rabbit she always hung from her pencil case. She’d bent to tie her shoe and it fell off, and he had picked it up for her.
He remembered it.
He was sure of it.
He clung to the image like a dying man to a floating piece of driftwood.
He ran out the door, barefoot. Didn’t care. Didn’t notice.
He reached the station, panting, soaked from the misting rain.
The bench was still there.
Empty.
But he got on his knees and searched beneath it.
Hands scraping against the concrete.
He didn’t care who stared. He didn’t hear them.
He found a bottle cap.
A cigarette butt.
A torn flyer for a tutoring service.
But no keychain.
He pressed his palms to the concrete, trembling.
“Please,” he whispered. “Let something be real.”
But there was nothing.
He stood up slowly, the world around him spinning.
Reality felt soft. Malleable. Like it could be bent.
His breath shortened. His heart pounded.
Then—behind him—he heard it.
A girl’s voice.
“…_?”
His name.
He turned.
Fast. Too fast.
There was no one.
Just the streetlight flickering.
Just the wind.
He looked at the passing faces. Strangers. Blurs. Echoes of people he thought he once knew.
He walked home. Slowly.
He wanted to hear her voice again. Even if it wasn’t real.
Even if it wasn’t hers.
Even if it was only in his head.
He returned to his room.
Collapsed onto his futon.
And laughed.
A quiet, broken sound.
Because he finally understood:
She was never coming back.
Maybe she never existed.
And if she did—
She had abandoned him.
Just like everyone else.
The only thing left now was silence.
And the faint, gnawing sound of something inside him… crumbling.
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