Let's do our best for the new semester, okay? I also want to go to school and have fun playing in the classroom with everyone (internet dropout, middle school grad, angel)
I don’t want to go to school. I can’t talk to anyone—neither my classmates nor my teachers. Everyone looks stupid to me. And yet I know that feeling is wrong; I’m aware enough to realize that if I were actually smart, I’d be able to fit in.
So… I guess I just don’t belong.
Maybe looking down on everyone is a kind of self-defense instinct. Because if I don’t make it that, I’ll fall apart. My pride is weirdly high—no… maybe even “having pride” is just part of the act. Maybe I’m simply trying to convince myself that being stupid is the same thing as being “me, someone with refined tastes who’s different from ordinary people”…
I call it “shallow” when people in the classroom bond over whatever music or manga is trending. I’ve only dug up a few obscure internet works to kill time, and that alone makes me feel like I’ve acquired individuality or intelligence… But it’s also true that I genuinely prefer darker films. I can empathize more with unhappy people, and with fools who drown in pleasure. Last night I watched Requiem for a Dream. Ruining your life over drugs is trash-level stupidity, but… you can understand it, can’t you? That feeling that life is boring unless you’re intoxicated by something. I get that a billion times more than some story where a hot guy and a cute girl fall in love and live happily ever after.
There’s nothing. My life has nothing in it—plainly, simply nothing. I want to pin a reason onto that “nothing,” so I’ve started forcing myself to see my upbringing and environment as excessively miserable, or slowly mistaking convenient fantasies that play in my head for truth… and that scares me. The classroom, my parents, my classmates, my intelligence, my income, social media, the opposite sex that drifts toward me, the same-sex peers obsessed with appearances… I’m terrified, vaguely, that the way I keep myself intact by blaming everything else will someday lead to an irreversible mistake. I know I’m supposed to think it’s my fault, but… depending on how you look at it, the root cause is just me—an isolated, phone-addicted student who hasn’t taken a single real action. I should throw away my delusional pride, admit that trendy music and manga can be genuinely interesting, stop sneering that conversation is “flattery,” and just look people in the eye and talk like a normal person.
But you end up thinking it anyway, don’t you? Am I really that bad? Weren’t the adults the ones who looked away? Weren’t the ones who betrayed me those people in the classroom? I… I… I start wanting to die, but if I actually say “I want to die” out loud, that would make me so unbearably thin. If my feelings get “processed” as just some everywhere-you-look Troubled Adolescent Girl A, I couldn’t stand it. It would end with the school nurse patting my shoulder like, “It’s okay. Life has good things too, so just do your best at your own pace!”
Right. Sure. There are good things. Let’s think happy thoughts. I mean, the teacher probably has a whole lineup of “fun events” waiting for them in life, right? Maybe after work they go home and their beloved partner hugs them tight. Maybe they enjoy a slightly extravagant dinner with friends. Or maybe the teacher, too, relies on psychiatric meds in a pitch-dark room just to make it to morning. But the one who said “there are good things” was the teacher, so—there must be lots of delightful things, right? Things you can stay drunk on forever.
There are lots of fun things, right. Mom makes omurice for me. A friend invites me to an amusement park. The manga I’ve been reading gets an anime adaptation. The people I hate get hit by a car. Mom becomes kinder. The people I hate drown in the ocean. I awaken psychic powers and can blow the people I hate to pieces. I get every single book in the bookstore. The people I hate get cocky and fall off a cliff. The people in the classroom—the adults…
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