Spinning a web of words

  pale walls between myself and all I see

  in the dreamer and his dream

  ×××

  Wake up, Enza...

  A cold touch caressed his face. Hasegawa Satou stirred awake.

  He tried to go back to sleep, but found himself too parched to do so.

  Hands blindly flailed over the nightstand, and caught nothing. Something fell.

  Frustrated now, with a creek of his bed he sat up. He looked around him, and saw nothing. He didn’t know where he was, or who he was even. But slowly, as lucidity returned, he began to remember that he had dreamt. What was it, he asked himself, but all he could remember was what he had felt, ages ago, it seemed to him—a dream, very dear and precious—intimations of which, he could see, were fleeting away, right before his very eyes.

  Then, gone. Truly gone for good.

  He remembered who he was again: Hasegawa Satou. That was his name. That was who he was. And to remember who he was again brought him no pleasure. Legs folded under white-linen sheets, he sat up, and ran his cold hands over his thin and bony arms. A forlorn sense of comfort grew inside of him to do so, and he wryly smiled.

  How pathetic, he thought; that a touch of his own warmth could evoke in him such a intense sense of closure. Deeply, he yearned for the touch, the intimacy, and the warmth of another human being. But dying alone… He seemed fated for it.

  His alarm, disembodied, glowing in the dark, told him the time: 3 am. Far too early to be getting up; but what time, day, or year it was meant nothing to him; hadn’t for years, except today. Today, for a change, he had plans.

  Get up, he told himself; and for once in his life his body did listen to him.

  Bare feet landed on cold unwelcoming marble floor, and he tip-toed faster than he would’ve liked.

  The lights when he turned them on singed his eyes, and head-splitting headaches followed a cold splash of water. Light-headed, he held himself over the sink, trying to find back his breath, and ugly, was what he thought, when he saw his knobby knees, above feet, that seemed too large, duck-like, under his scrawny legs.

  He looked up in the mirror, and saw his stoic dead eyes greet him back under long and tousled black hair. His semblance with his once fairer face was still there, but muted. He looked no older than he did in the past, but to him he looked old, too old. He remembered why he hadn’t look at himself in the mirror in so many years. Now, to do it again, he regretted it.

  Was he beautiful, average, ugly? For the life of him he could not tell. Sometimes he found himself to be arousing, fair-skinned, beautiful; but mostly he thought he was vapid, pale, and anorexic. Even tonight, for the life of him he could not tell; and what he felt to see himself again after all these years, was anguish.

  Freshened, cold, with his phone he left his room. The narrow hallway was cold, dark enough to make him doubt his footing, but at the other end where came light, nothing stood indiscernible. The curtain walls of his living room laid bare the entire berth of the cityscape of Tokyo for him to see, and from there came all the light he needed to know where he had to go.

  From the 18th floor of a residential high-rise, a tangle of highways arose, drowned under its own dirty yellow lights; and beyond: a city of jewel outshone the gibbous moon above in a starless night sky. As if the moon wasn’t already faint enough, the metropolis seem to only make it all the more duller than it already was, ugly, and somehow smaller.

  Sirens came from somewhere afar, below, distant, echoing, and soon fading away. It was cold and quiet where he stood, and in his loose oversized shirt that did little to warm him he shuddered. The high ceiling of the living room, the cold and the darkness that surrounded him here, and only a droning hum of the fridge to break the monotony of such oppressive silence—he found it unbearably suffocating to stand here. He wanted it to stop.

  And it was then that all of his past came back to mind then: no physical exercise, no friends, no intimacy—nothing. How long has it been, he asked himself. How old was he tonight? How long had he lived this same day over and over again?

  Having made a conscious effort to not keep watch of what time, day, or year it was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know how old he was tonight. And in his mind, he still saw himself as that same fifteen year old boy who had given up on life, locked himself in his room, and said goodbye to the wider world at large. Not a day older. He lived with his mother; and the fact that she was not here at home right now was not lost on him.

  He lit up his phone, and there he found a new message: from his mother, who told him that she would not be home for the next few days. Why, she didn’t tell him; but it wasn’t hard for him to guess.

  The fact that his mother went on trysts with a secret lover of her’s was no secret to him. He had known about it for some time now. The thought alone did not repulse him. He was indifferent to it; holding, that whatsoever his mother did away from home was none of his business. But the knowledge that a stranger might enter his life did frighten him.

  Satou hated her, his mother. He hated her, not because he blamed her for all his woes, but because never once in her life had she understood him. A failure of a son; and to him a failure of a mother. The relationship between the mother and son was an estranged one, and one that would also never find it’s closure.

  Even tonight he thought about it, as he had thought about it countless times in the past: that he would write ‘your fault’ on a piece of paper for her to find before he took his own life. But tonight, the thought brought him no pleasure. It seemed such a petty thing to do; and that it was better if he disappeared quietly instead; bothering no one, no one at all.

  Next to the living room partitioned by a marble half-wall was the kitchen. There, the fridge. Cool air hit him with a brightness that made him squint when he opened it, and inside he saw food, drinks, half-eaten pastries, and cartons of who knew what, his mother used, being a part-time architect, to renovate the condo. He reached for a box in the far back, checked the label to see if it was the right one, and with a bottle of alcohol brought it all to the half-wall counter.

  Blue-pills like caps of screws inside strips fell out in cascades and in a glass he dumped them all in. He made sure to put in more than that was necessary, because too little was not a death sentence; excess on the other hand was what he wanted. The barbiturates would take him, and with a few shots of alcohol, he could be certain that he wouldn’t botch his final rites.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  A few more rechecks later, he left it all there, and with a mug of coffee headed back to his room. He closed the door with his backfoot and sunk down on his chair. Legs folded, mouse clawed, he waited for his pc to boot up, because there was one last thing he had wanted to do first before he took his own life.

  “My final session,” he said, as he took a sip of coffee. He winced.

  “Hot,” he muttered, when his lips singed a little.

  His pc booted up back where he had last left off: an ancient relic of a game forum barely still active greeted him with threads, posts, and announcements of any content related to Project Elyse, none of which even vaguely interested him.

  He closed it, and opened Project Elyse.

  His screen disappeared, and with it so did his room. For a brief moment, there he sat, in the dark. Then a blinding light came, and three whole years of having not seen it since, ‘Project Elyse’ transitioned in.

  He tried to remember when he had found out about it, but could remember nothing. His life at that point in time had been a massive blur, where a day seemed never to end and stretch on till eternity. He was in still school then: that much he could still remember; probably middle school, where he had terrible grades and was bullied often for being too frail and quick to tears.

  The fantasy DD-MMORPG: it used to be his second home. He was once utterly obsessed with it. But after developments ceased and players left en masse, it was to barely move him. Hours spent opening and closing his inventory now of no value, interacting with npcs who said nothing new nor did anything but stood in place, until he too left. Tonight, Project Elyse moved him deeply, but did so with nostalgia, as well as vanity, but also pride at his once exalted virtual fame.

  A veteran among veterans, with more than 6,000 hours of playtime in the span of four years, it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the fantasy DD-MMORPG had once served him as his second life. Yet, as much as he enjoyed his virtual prestige, he was never able to be truly proud of it. He was skilled, respected, relied upon, looked up to—but so what? It was all digital, at the end of the day. It was guilt, he felt, whenever someone looked up to him; not pride. Others lived better lives.

  A bright flash brought him back to his screen. Project Elyse had finished loading in. All he had to do now was enter in his credentials. “But first,” he said, and reached for ‘Hall of Fame’, clicked on it, and browsed through a catalogue of in-game news articles, devlogs, and public announcements, until he found what he was looking for, four years old.

  “The remnants of my heydays,” he murmured.

  Global Tournament: Guild Wars Category: Regal Volition in 1st Place wins $250,000

  The splash art created by Project Elyse’s Visual Arts Team themselves, commissioned for whosoever won, even now filled him with guilty pleasure to admire. Having been in-game leader during the festive, his player-character, Me–Enza…, stood posed center. Statuesque, with a tomboyish mien and tousled jet-black hair cut-bob, she was photogenic to look at: both as his cynosure and his creation, and to him the most beautiful woman there ever was, and no wonder:

  Someone whom you would find more apt to call handsome, dashing, instead of pretty, or beautiful, Kiryai Enza was his perfect ideal, because he had created her to be so. But to see her again, after all these years, and feel—envy?

  It seemed pathetic, even for him—

  Feeling this way, towards something fictive…

  —but he could not help it.

  With all his heart, Satou envied her, his own player-character. He envied her, and wished that he was her, and not him, and lived there, in the world of Elyse, and not here, in this world, which was dull, mundane, and utterly confining. In contrast to the life fate had ordained him to live out, her’s in his eyes dazzled. He wondered what it would be like to be her, not for the first time; and found himself delighting in it. He would be a women then, sure; but he felt no pangs of shame for it. Better if so, was his verdict, because it was no secret to him that he had always been a little queer.

  All his life he had yearned to be someone else. Specifically, someone like her.

  He remembered still at the age of fourteen how he had snuck into his mother’s bedroom and put on her lipstick. The risqué thrill he felt when he saw himself in the mirror was incomparable to anything he’d ever felt till then. And he was never slapped harder across the face for it. His mother had caught him; and he remembered thinking, seeing her appalled face, grimaced, contorted to see him, that she would disown him. But what surprised him more, even then, was how utterly calm he had been inside, even though outwardly he was crying, hiding his face away. When she said to him, how pathetic of a son he was—accentuating that one word—he remembered thinking: ‘Why did you even have me then, you hypocrite?’

  Satou hated her, his mother. He hated her so much. Yet here he was now, feeling pity for her. Any resentment seemed entirely beyond him tonight; and with his resolve for self-harm set in stone, nothing seemed as though it could any longer matter. If he was not right in the head, then so be it. I am what I am.

  He took out his Dive Gear from under his desk and held it up so that its visor faced him. Superficial scratches on it stood out to him which they never had in the past. An on its corner, in sharp fonts, read: ‘DIVE GEAR | DDC VXL7’.

  “Better have no regrets now, Satou.” But plenty of regrets he did still have.

  Those precious moments where we forget who we are and lose ourselves to become a part of something larger: enchantment, endazzlement—whatever name one chooses to call it—all of us who consume stories do so to find ourselves there: in that evanescent place brimming with meaning where we can never stay for long—we long to find ourselves there.

  In such fleeting moments, we say, ‘I was transported!’ to another world, no less, and are wise enough to know that these precious moments are not something we get to choose. We do not get to choose what enraptures us; and what brought Satou out of his unbearably suffocating world of hopelessness was that long gone fantasy dd-mmorpg called Project Elyse.

  Though his obsession for its fictive world had not lasted, waned through the passage of time, it had nevertheless once been strong; especially so, because it had introduced him to what that one word: ‘isekai’ meant, by having as its premise the transmigration of a modern man, like him, to another world.

  A second life. And to live that second life in another world unlike one’s dreary former—the premise of an isekai had struck a powerful cord within him, had moved him terribly like nothing had ever in his entire life; precisely so, because someone like him: who was dissatisfied with his own state of affairs and yearned for a better lease of life, had his wish fulfilled.

  In such a prospect, he found his expression.

  Having nothing of value or stake in the world he was ordained to live out, isekai to him had shone as an answer—implausible as it was, he knew—it had nevertheless touched something deep within him: and for that, he could not let go. In a mere prospect, he found what he had always longed for, but never found. And here it was now, in his hand, that mystical artifact which had purportedly transmigrated countless contemporaries of his, like him, to their elysian dream.

  Wake up…

  Not him, though.

  Void or death, rebirth or a second chance. He should’ve been non-committal, but he wasn’t. Even now, you could’ve still seen him, holding onto that foolish hope, futile as it was, he knew, that the impossible was possible. Which is why he is so dear to me. Why I am so fond of him. I see a part of my life being played out in the life he has lived, and for that I wish for him to live a life I myself could not live. I wish to grant him his wish, so he may live for me, and at the end of his journey, changed, look back, and tell me whether he resents me, or if he loves me.

  I do not know what he will choose. But I wish to see him smile.

  If there is such a thing as a God in this world,

  He held it up over his head. Eyes closed, blood spilled from it like veins, profusely soaking him wet in its warmth.

  A wreath of thorns settled on his head like a crown for a martyr.

  It began to melt—

  Then please… Give me a second chance…

  —with it, so did he.

  Please…