Eden, good morning
Chiyoko woke up terribly hungover, seeing his slender body from somebody else’s perspective, maybe that of a forensic scientist, or of a coroner, called to the 1 pm Tuesday scene because Chiyoko’s neighbour was rightfully worried, as Chiyoko was not responding to her texts or Facebook messages, that Chiyoko had died in the night, or something. Looking at his seemingly dead body in this way, Chiyoko was reminded of a character from a Murakami short story.
Chiyoko got out of bed, peed in his sink while brushing his teeth, washed his face and took a shower. He got dressed, his clothes smelt of cigarettes, which reminded him of when he kissed a girl once in 2011, while being wet, because it was raining, when he had been smoking. Chiyoko went on Facebook to talk to Nile.
‘What happened last night, I feel really unwell,’ said Chiyoko.
‘You were rly bad, ppl were looking at you,’ said Nile, maybe two minutes later. ‘Aw,’ said Chiyoko, thinking ‘damn,’ but, by the speed of Nile’s response, Chiyoko was, at the same time, slightly consoled.
‘Last thing to happen was you got with some girl, she was ok I guess,’ said Nile.
‘Ok,’ said Chiyoko.
‘Then one of her friends said ‘You can’t do that’ because she had a boyfriend or something, maybe one minute after someone started walking over to us with an angry expression, I pulled you away very quickly and we left,’ said Nile.
Chiyoko did not know what to say, or what to even think – his head hurt so much that he did not think it would be healthy, even, to think about anything at all, like he should go and check with a doctor that he was not about to die, or that he was not at that very moment currently dying. Life is made 100% of moments, Chiyoko thought, 99% of which are forgotten within minutes or lost within days; will he remember this dying moment or would he forget it too? Chiyoko asked himself.
Chiyoko lent back on his chair, he slid down it, a bit, with his body occupying the space that was, seconds before, assumed by his thighs, the tops of his legs, and he stared, with a wounded eye shape, hating the light, at the solid white ceiling above his head, upwards, reminded of a broken radio or a television set without any aerial, or his MacBook Pro sometimes when the speakers stopped working.
Chiyoko remembered a quote he saved in a Word document once, don’t let the bastards get you down, that he planned to print and tack to his wall, but he did not have any tack or tape or any sort of adhesive to do so. Thinking about this quote made Chiyoko realise his ‘potential mobility’ as a human being, a human boy with legs, hands, liver, heart, stomach, and various other things of many proportions, weights and sizes, such as finger nails and some facial muscles. Chiyoko felt that he could do anything that he wanted on this mysterious Planet Earth: be in love with anyone, love anything, dream about any things, many things, entities like rainbow animals born out of nuclear radiators; he could piss in sinks. But practically he was truly immobile. Out of energy, it was the morning after a night when it had rained, and Chiyoko was like a dead owl in the snowy forest in the Javier Bardem movie he watched and cried about.
Ignoring Nile, Chiyoko checked his mobile, and read some text messages that he would never reply to. Chiyoko loaded up YouTube and streamed a few Arctic Monkeys songs. He opened his curtains; the ground was wet and slippy like a wet snake. The sky was wet like a slippery animal, and gray like a badger’s mane after it had swum a ‘fair’ distance across a lake to find some food in the heat of bad or terrible, even, weather. Everything was wet in the world, thought Chiyoko; so wet that he wanted to write ‘fuck’ across his fingertips, take a photo of his handshape and send himself to Paraguay, Nicaragua, somewhere. All seemed explicitly ‘sad’ and ‘disappointed’ for Chiyoko, and maybe, though impossible for Chiyoko to say so, for everybody else. It was as if every single emaciated animal, forced from its habitat out of deconstruction or coincidental construction - the taos of modernity -had come out of its hiding or slumber to cry on the ground its few precious animal tears, contributing to an animal-y internet of eternal sadness and unrequited love for ‘home’ that really made Chiyoko even sadder.
Chiyoko thought about a Murakami novel, or every Murakami novel, because every Murakami novel anticipates the end of the world to a point where it seems like the world has already ended in the same way. Chiyoko imagined sons and daughters of men and women reading Kokoro or Norwegian Wood in a rocket ship watching Planet Earth being hit by a comet maybe 15,000 years from now and maybe 20,000 miles above us. What would they think when they read Kokoro; what would they think about what they have missed?
Chiyoko youtubed some R.E.M. songs.
A few days later the sun would come out, Chiyoko hoped. Chiyoko tweeted ‘good morning, Eden’ and ate a cheese and tomato sandwich.
Chiyoko hoped really hard, feeling ill and bad, and conscious that by doing everything he was doing he was doing nothing that he wanted to be doing, like the Christian girls and Christian boys assembling sextoys in Philippine factories, dreading as to what will they tell their grandchildren in 2089, that the sun would come out soon; that anything would come from this mysterious something some day.
