Uso dayo!

I don't know why. That's a lie. I do know why. I know why very well. I still have a lot of feelings I need to get through, but I don't feel like I've made any headway on any of them. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I want to cry. I feel lost. I'm getting tied up in other things and I'm losing sight of everything again and it's scaring me.

I want to go home.

I don't feel like I'm feeling enough, and when I don't feel like I'm feeling enough—or like the depth of my feelings are lacking in some way either internally or externally—I want to make myself sick to compensate. I know I shouldn't. I've been trying really, really hard not to cause unnecessary trouble for everyone, but...

It's not real enough. It doesn't feel real enough.

What else am I supposed to do...? I've been trying my best. There are some things I want to examine and talk about, yes, but I'm just not really sure how to start or how to get it to end. It never, never ends. It just keeps going and going and going and I can't keep up. I stutter to a halt and the moment ends and it feels like I've missed the fireworks again.

Maybe it would help if I tried to articulate things in more flash fiction. I just... don't have any ideas at the moment. Ouma's very near and dear to my heart, but there's only so many scenarios I can put him in before it starts to get tedious, I think. Or rather, it feels like there's an expectation for a conclusion? A resolution? I don't ever really have one. I'm more focused on whatever feelings are being conveyed than the actual resolution of them.

So I guess I don't have the words to make it end. Is that it?

I've come to realize that a lot of what I've been doing these past couple days has been in service of feeling better, which isn't what I want here. Feeling better first isn't a resolution to me, it's just putting the bad feelings aside to ignore. It's a bandaid solution. I just... don't know what the real solution could be, and the longer I take to figure it out, the more stale these feelings get. I'm getting distracted. I don't know what to do. I'm scared. I never learned how to do this sort of thing on my own.

Oh god, I feel small. Oh god no. I can't. I can't, I can't, I can't. It's too scary right now. Everything's so scary.

I'm not ready to examine that gaping hole my family left. I don't want to miss them. It's not them that I miss, it's what they should have been. I want... I can't. There's so much. It was so bad, so much pressure all the time, to be able to handle things. More and more and more. Gifted programs and younger siblings and extracurriculars and expectations and more and more and more—

I wonder if Ouma had that kind of pressure growing up, with his Talent.

I learned that being sick was the only way to make it stop. I was a sickly kid. Ever since I was a baby, I would get this nasty, nasty cough. Bad enough to keep me up. Bad enough to choke on and it still wouldn't stop. They told me that at three months they would have to drive me around for hours to get me to sleep when I had that cough.

So I learned very quickly that if I was sick, I got some kind of special treatment. I wouldn't even fake being sick, but I always knew what it meant when I did get sick. I started wanting to be the sick or injured child in games of pretend from third grade. Going into high school, I started neglecting myself in the hopes that I might get sick somehow, like you see in anime when the protagonist suddenly faints from working too hard and everyone rushes to help them.

That's the kind of family I lived in. I was the oldest. I was bright. But whenever I wasn't bright enough, or made a mistake in some way, it was because I wasn't trying hard enough. I started piling on more and more to my plate to please them while secretly hoping I might collapse and have my pain understood.

That isn't to say I didn't communicate, either. I remember having breakdowns around them before, as early as fourth or fifth grade, where I had a breakdown in my mother's arms and all I could tell her when she asked what was wrong was「I don't know!」It's not as if this sort of thing came on to completely blindside them later, although they liked to act like it did.

No, the only time I was ever taken seriously was when I was sick or injured. So now, whenever I feel like this, I want to be sick. I want to starve myself again. I want to waste away and disappear quietly, because I wasn't taught what to do with these feelings other than carry them like rocks in a satchel on my back for the rest of my life. If I have to carry them, then wouldn't it be easier if my life were shorter?

That's not what I really want, though. I don't want to die. I just want... something.

I want to have had a family that cared about my feelings and taught me what to do so I could finally put them down properly. I want to be a child again properly so I can learn. I want to learn to take care of myself. I want to learn to love myself. I want to learn to be loved. I want to be the baby I want to be small I want I want I want but can never have because—

Because I don't know how or where to get it.

I'm an Ouma without his DICE. There's no getting it back. It's gone. I've lost it. I can't be small. I'm an adult now. Or maybe I was always an adult, so I could be what was expected of me. When I was a child, being sick was like how being small is now. I was always doing this. Always trying to make up for something I never had and never could have. Illness, injury, something, anything that could get me some small facsimile of what was missing.

When I broke my arm in fifth grade, it was just a buckle fracture. Nothing major. It wasn't even my dominant arm. The doctor said I was lucky because it apparently was just shy of my wrist. I didn't think I was very lucky, because that just meant it would heal faster. Heal correctly. When I tore my knee in high school, I was upset again at how minor the injury was. What kind of upbringing does one have to have to wish disability and permanent injury on oneself? Does my life even count as severe enough? Am I just being dramatic? Have I been my whole life?

I grew up being told to get a grip. Getting a grip mean putting the stones that were my emotions back in my satchel where they belonged.

Out of sight, out of mind.

It ebbs and flows and ebbs and flows and I can't get it to be consistent one way or the other. I'd rather it flowed, so I could finally empty this glass in my soul that's always full to the brim. Every so often, the emotions pour into it, like one of those games where friends take turns seeing just how much they can pour into it before the surface tension breaks. Every so often, the surface tension breaks, and the tears well up and spill out calmly and quietly. Just enough to restore that tension. The glass is still full, always.

I don't know how to empty it.

Even now I'm just staring blankly at the screen as I try my best to pour my heart out into words that make sense. To solidify how I feel so I don't have to carry it anymore. Why do I still feel like I'm carrying it? Is this not how processing emotions works? Is this not how I make things okay again? This is how they always recommend you should, right? It doesn't make sense.

The smallness comes and goes in waves with the ebbing and flowing. The closer I get to a new spill, the smaller I feel, but it never stays long. It passes along with the spill and quietly goes with the tears. I wish it would stay. I wish I could hold onto it so I could actually grasp the catharsis.

I wonder if Ouma has a similar disconnect from his emotions because of his lies. He's used to carrying them like I do, but doesn't have anyone to help him put them down. Did DICE help him do that? What about the universes where he didn't have a DICE? What about Real Fiction verses, where he was alone. He was always written to be severely abused and bullied. What if he was more like me? Days dragging by in a slog of expectations met, because of course they were. Distant parents who didn't think much about what their child thought or felt about anything in particular, as long as he was doing well enough in school. A boy who wasn't necessarily bullied, but almost longed for it. Longed for something terrible to happen to him just to be validated in the way he felt about the world.

... Maybe I do have an idea for a fic after all. Maybe I should hold onto that so I can try to write it. Maybe it will be cathartic. Maybe it won't. Maybe it will help put into words all these things I feel but can't figure out how to let go properly. Maybe it won't.

I'm still unable to write myself, so maybe it's better if I keep writing Ouma instead.

Until I become him. Properly.

Kurokichi