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 creak of his bed he sat up.

He looked around him and saw nothing.

For a brief moment, he looked lost. He could not tell where he was, or who he was even; but slowly, as lucidity returned back to him, 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 lifetime’s worth of a dream; something very dear and precious to him—intimations of which, he could see, were fleeting away from him 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 curled, hugging himself, and felt his hands run over his thin and bony arms.  A forlorn sense of comfort grew inside of him to do so, and he wryly smiled. He was lonely, he knew that much already; and also that there was nothing he could do to fix it. 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, 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 the cold and 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 into 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. Once again he remembered why he hadn’t looked at himself in such a long time. Now, to do it, he regretted it.

Was he beautiful, average, ugly? For the life of him he could not tell. Sometimes he found himself arousing, fair-skinned, and beautiful; but most of the time he saw that he was vapid, pale, and anorexic. Even tonight, he could not tell himself apart; and what he felt to see himself again in the mirror after all these years, was anguish.

Freshened, cold—with his phone in hand he left his bedroom.

The narrow hallway outside was dark, 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 wanted to go.

From the 18^th floor of his residential high-rise, a tangle of highways arose drowned under its own dirty yellow lights, and beyond it: a city of jewels outshone the gibbous moon above in a starless night sky. As if the moon wasn’t already faint enough, the metropolitan faraway only made it seem 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 and the spaciousness of his living room, the cold and the darkness that surrounded him here, and only the droning hum of the fridge to break the monotony of such absolute silence—it was unbearably suffocating to stand here. He wanted it to stop.

And it was then that all of his past came back to mind: no physical exercise, no friends, no intimacy, nothing; only those unsympathetic jeering eyes that stalked him wherever he went: judging, sneering, teasing, insulting, and always uncomprehending as to how he might’ve felt inside. Then there was him, letting himself get pushed around.

How long had it been? He asked himself. How old was he now? How long had he lived this same day over and over and over again? Having consciously kept no watch of what time, day, or year it was, he didn’t know. Satou didn’t know how old he was tonight; and in his mind, he still saw himself as that same fifteen year old who had given up on his life, locked himself in his room, and said goodbye to the wider world at large, and not a day older.

Moreover, he lived with his mother; and the fact that she wasn’t 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 was going to be away from home for the next few days. Why, she didn’t say; but it wasn’t hard for him to guess.

The fact that his mother went on trysts with a secret lover of her 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 thought 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 did she understand him. Their relationship was an estranged one, and the antipathy between the mother and son seemed one that was never to find its closure.

Even tonight he thought about it, as he had thought about it countless times before 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 little pleasure. It seemed such a petty thing to do. It was better if he disappeared quietly instead—alone, bothering no one, no one at all.

Next to his living room partitioned by a black 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 he saw inside: food, drinks, half-eaten pastries, and cartons of who knew what, his mother used, being a part-time architect, to renovate the condo around.

He reached his hand in for a box in the far back, checked the label to see if it was the right one, and with a bottle of alcohol in tow, took them all out and laid them all down on the half-wall counter.

Blue pills like caps of screws inside strips fell out in cascades, and in a cup 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.

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 behind him 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 planned on doing first before he took his own life:

And that was to pay his homage.

“My final session,” he said, as he took a sip of his 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 for any content related to Project Elyse, none of which even vaguely interested him.

He closed it, and started up Project Elyse.

His screen disappeared; with it, so did his room. For a brief moment there he sat, in the dark, waiting; 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 first discovered it—but nothing came.

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 still in 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 virtual world: it had been his only source of respite back then. He was utterly infatuated with it once. For many years, it was to barely move him. Tonight, Project Elyse moved him deeply, but did so with nostalgia, as well as vanity, but also pride at his once exalted virtual fame.

He had been quite well-known back when he still played it.

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. But as much as he enjoyed his prestige, he never really had been able to be truly proud of it. He was skilled, trusted, respected, relied upon, looked up to, but so what? It was all digital, at the end of the day.

Once Project Elyse had finished loading in all its assets, all there was left for him to do was to enter in his credentials.

Instead, in the main-menu he clicked on ‘Hall of Fame’, and browsed through a catalogue of in-game news articles, devlogs, and announcements, until finally 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 1^st Place wins $250,000

The splash art created by Project Elyse’s Art Team themselves, commissioned for whosoever won, even now filled him with a 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, 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 women there ever was—and no wonder.

Someone whom you’d find more apt to call handsome, or dashing, instead of pretty, or beautiful—Kiryai Enza was his perfect ideal; 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 so, fictive…

—But he could not help it.

With all his heart, Satou envied her, his own player-character; he envied her, his own player-character, and wished that he was her, and not him, and lived there, in the world of Elyse, and not here in his world, which was so dull, monotone, mundane, and so 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, and to his no surprise of his own he 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 for a long time now he had already known that he had always been a little queer. All his life he had yearned to be someone else.

Specifically, someone like her.

His memories of what he had done when he was fourteen was still stark in his mind. He remembered acting on an impulse he had never really been able to find words for. One day after school, he had snuck into his mother’s bedroom and put on her lipstick. And the risqué thrill he had felt when he had seen himself in front of the dressing mirror, was incomparable to anything he had ever felt till then. And he was never slapped harder across the face for it.

His mother had caught him; and he still remembered thinking, seeing her appalled face, wide-eyes, grimaced, contorted to see him, that she would disown him. But what surprised him more, even then, had been how utterly calm he had felt 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 still 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 tonight, feeling pity for her. Any resentment tonight seemed entirely beyond him; and with his resolve for self-harm set in stone, nothing seemed as though they could any longer matter. If he was not right in the head, then so be it. I am what I am.

Satou 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; and on its corner, in sharp fonts, read: ‘DIVE GEAR | DDC VXL7’.

He felt conflicted, perturbed, and wistful to see it.

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

If only years ago had he known what would consume his life thereon—with vivid imageries, fantasies, and yearnful longing for a dream unattainable, only to never reach it but in his dreams, would he have rather never dreamt it at all.

Those precious moments where we forget who we are, and lose themselves to become a part of something larger than ourselves: enchantment, endazzlement—whatever name one calls them—all of us who consume stories do so to find ourselves there: in that evanescent place, brimming with meaning and bountiful delight, where we can never stay for long—we long for it to happen to us. Satou was the same.

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, just as we do not get to choose what disgusts or revolts us; and what pulled Hasegawa Satou out of his unbearably small and insignificant world of familiar conflict and self-angst was that niche and long-forgotten fantasy DD-MMORPG known as Project Elyse.

Though his obsession for its fictive world had not lasted, waned through the passage of time as he got older and changed—it had once been strong, incredibly 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 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, Satou had found his expression.

Having nothing of value or stake in the real world he was ordained to live out, isekai to him had shone as an answer—implausible as it was, he knew—it nevertheless had touched something deep within him: and for that, he could not let go.

In a mere prospect, he had found what he had always chased after, 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 stupid hope, foolish and futile as it was, that the impossible was possible—that just maybe, just maybe, at the other end of life what awaited him was another world.

Which is why he is so dear to me, and why I have been 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 that I myself could not live. I wish to grant him his wish, so that he may live for me, and at the end of his journey, changed, look back, and tell me whether he resents me, or whether 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…