As she walks down the blinding neon streets of Osaka City under the overcast evening sky, Mizu finds herself disorienting and reorienting to the shifting figures of human beings. Strewn across her torso is a blue coloured dress with white highlights which falls across her figure like a waterfall over a cliff. She can’t walk in a straight line anymore as the neon signs in either side of her seem to be reeling and repelling her unto them like a magnet. Carrying the necessary groceries which would last her the next week, she finds her path home as she treads on it like a rock hitting bumps along a cliffside as it rolls. Her hair was fixed up in a neat bun and she occasionally swept the bangs across her forehead to allow her emerald- coloured eyes to see the road ahead, as a small waiver in the path would lead to her demise.
Periodically she would lower her eyes back down to reality to see who would best her in a competition of morbidity. Her feelings flow around like black ink mixed in water, indiscernible to herself as to what was anger and what was sad in her. The clouds fit perfectly in her palm and turned into mist in her veins as they poured and thundered feelings from head to toe.
She was at ease. Hundred meters from her house she was greeted by an old school friend of hers who she was in oscillating contact with, nothing too personal and nothing too professional, a perfect concoction of sufferance and jealousy. As she sparked a conversation upon seeing her friend, the blizzard in her started to let up and thaw the bodysuit she was donning. She carried along the conversation along the lines of playful and jest, occasionally bringing up the past school lives they shared, as she tried to light the nostalgic flame within her to warm her hands once again.
It was a farce, her friend knew, but to pull down the mental curtains and stare into her home seemed more a crime than invasion. After the flame had flickered away, they bid their goodbye’s and see you’s and started back on their ways.
Mizu’s house was on the third floor of a rental housing building, with each flat having a single bedroom and attached bathroom and kitchen, it was enough for a single person to survive on a day to day basis. She put down the groceries and started making some egg fried rice to have with the new soy sauce bottle she had purchased. As the fried rice was being prepared she couldn’t help but drift into her thoughts and how mundane her daily routine was, from morning to evening she worked in a supermarket as an assistant manager and had to deal with the constant groans and complains of the customers at every little inconvenience like babies who wanted to be fed and wouldn’t stop crying until their bellies were full.
She was burnt out and her charred husk carried the rest of her vessel throughtout the days as they ebbed and receeded. She could only watch as the marriage of the Sun and Moon with the Sky everyday washed away her youth with every floating day like the grains of sand in a wave rushing back into the ocean, leaving the beach, Lonely.
As she finished plating the dish and sat down to eat, she was slowly hugged from the back, like a gentle yet painful hug of a wet towel that had wrapped around her heart. Each fibre of it was digging into her muscles and constraining them as they shrunk further and further. The tap was now open, and it didn’t stop till the tank was empty.
She had lost all her senses as she ate in a puddle of solitude and tears, the fried rice and soy sauce didn’t have taste and were like water on plain rice for her, not that it mattered, it wasn’t about the taste anymore, it was just about having the feel of eating her food and the longing of wanting to taste more exquisite flavours and textures, her longing pulled at her until she was streched as thin as a strand of hair, unable to coil herself back into shape.
After cleaning up her sink and tiding the house, she set out to brush and sleep, a ritual if you could say so. She slowly lowered herself into her cushioned coffin as it gratefully accepted her with open arms, never to let go, but they had to let go. The act of having something was of letting it go. She let go of the tides, no longer holding onto them as to stop them for leaving her stranded on this cold, deserted beach.
She wanted to feel the Sun as it reconciled with the sky tomorrow, to feel its warmth as it hit the deepest crevices in her heart, giving sunlight to the lowest lying creepers and nursing them back to health. Maybe some had already died out, maybe some could never grow there again. So she set out to find newer soil, newer pastures and newer anchors. She had to let it all go, to be able to hold onto something else again, something new. As she fell back into a state of limbo for the night, her heavy eyelids shed a tear of that wasn’t as black as the night, but as shiny as the rays of the suns, glinting and shining towards the new dawn.