Episode 1 — From the Place Without Barlines
I quit writing fiction. I quit when I started high school.
I’d post to novel sites every day, but my view counts stayed on the floor, and the prose I’d poured my soul into sank into the digital sea without catching anyone’s eye.
On Twitter, people I’d never met would hold forth from on high — just finishing a piece is an achievement and don’t worry if the numbers don’t come — and every time I saw that kind of thing I thought: shut up. I don’t want consolation, I want a proper assessment.
I’d write something I genuinely believed in, put it out there full of confidence, and no one would read it. I’d polish the plotting, make the prose catchier, and still: nothing. After enough of that, the anxiety sets in. Your writing starts to come apart. You lose faith in your own sense of what’s interesting, and then you start to suffocate, and then you can’t breathe at all.
I shake off those memories and look out the window. The world outside is awash in gentle spring light, a perfect contrast to my mood.
Last seat by the window. The spot every story’s protagonist ends up in — set apart from the classroom commotion as if by some invisible boundary. Even this seat, handed to me practically the moment I enrolled, feels like a taunt aimed at someone who’s given up on telling stories.
It can’t be helped. As a route to becoming somebody, fiction has terrible returns. So this is the smart choice. I’m only fifteen; there’s a world of possibility ahead of me. I don’t need to rush. I have nothing to regret, and I haven’t made a mistake.
There is one thing I can’t quite let go of, though.
The fact that I did have one devoted reader.
Great update as always!
Or:
This novel is the only thing keeping me going.
Every time I posted, that person would leave something warm like that. Their presence was the one thing that stuck with me.
But it’ll be fine.
Just as fiction turned out to be something I could abandon without too much trouble, my fiction was probably never that significant to them either. It’s been a month since I stopped posting. By now they’ve almost certainly moved on without a second thought.
I want them to miss it when I stop. I push away that selfish, prayer-like worry, remind myself of what I know to be true — and then a voice cuts through my inner monologue. The homeroom teacher’s high-pitched voice, calling on me.
“Class rep, if you would — attendance call.”
Class rep. That’s me. Below the word 日直 on the blackboard:
Ogawa Uta (小川 詩).
My name. Uta — poetry. A name given to me by a mother besotted with literature. Even that feels like a taunt now. Like a curse. I shake the thought loose and use muscles I don’t normally bother with to project my voice.
“Stand. Bow.”
As if to trample on the whole point of the exercise, my classmates move in scattered, staggered pieces, dipping their heads in ones and twos, and their thank you very much swallows me whole. Then the shapeless noise of freedom fills the room.
I watch it all absently, and think: free at last. A little internal fist-pump. Unlike the days when I was posting something new every day, there’s nothing tying me down anymore. I’ve got nothing in particular I want to do — I’ll just go home and nap — but still.
Being colourless means you can be any colour. I keep that thought in front of me to avoid looking too closely at the truth of my situation: that I’m drowning in a sea of potential, in the process of becoming just transparent. And I slip out of the classroom.
Though, of course — freedom does mean writing fiction is still on the table as an option. I mumble this to myself, hunched over, shuffling along inside my own head. My fringe swings in and out of my line of sight, catching on my eyelashes.
But I’ve decided, firmly and cleanly, that I’m done with fiction. I’m going to spend my youth on something more constructive. My mind is made up.
I walk fast, not looking where I’m going, down the corridor. The old wooden floorboards creak underfoot. Even that small sound grates, and I tamp down my irritation and repeat it to myself one more time.
Unless I happen to encounter something of the beauty I’ve been reaching for. Unless I stumble into the kind of meeting that kicks off the first episode of a story. I will never write fiction again. Not in this life.
Repeating this vow to myself, I pass through the corridor and cross the covered walkway toward the old school building. The shoebox lockers for the general-track students — my track, not the advanced one I might have reached if I hadn’t been so absorbed in fiction instead of studying — are far from the main building. I’m indulging in some light self-pity about this when, riding on the spring breeze, passing through the walkway like something weightless —
sound finds my ears.
At first it comes in scattered drops, like rain just starting to fall. Then it becomes something larger, a current.
It was piano music. Flowing and polished beyond all reason. The sound carried from the old building out onto the covered walkway — and fell, it seemed, on me alone.
Why does it have to be piano.
I mutter that under my breath, and yet my feet have already turned toward it of their own accord. Well, I have to go this way to reach my locker anyway, I tell myself. Just down those stairs right there and I’m at the lockers.
I note this fact, step into the dimmer air of the old building, and the piano grows louder and fiercer, drowning out my footsteps. I realise the source is the old music room at the end of the corridor — and realising that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
A first episode doesn’t have to begin.
And yet.
I walk past the stairs. I pretend not to notice myself doing it. And I reach out and quietly open the door to the music room.
In an instant, I was swallowed by wave after wave of sound — and a single, absolute beauty seized my eyes.
The music up close was raw and violent, as if fury were being hurled against the keys. Grief at something lost, helpless anguish, pounded into the white keys. And through the cracks in that, something fragile and mournful traced the black ones. In concert with the sound, the girl at the piano moved with the same ferocity — her long hair plastered against her cheek — and she was beautiful in spite of all of it, beautiful because of all of it. Slender, delicate fingers drove the keys, the music’s many faces throwing into relief the girl’s every grace: porcelain-pale skin, lustrous silver-white hair shining translucent in the light.
I was helplessly drawn in. My heart was beating in time with the piano. My pulse was shouting at me.
I want to capture this beauty inside something that will last forever. For that — I want to write.
What felt like an eternity was an instant. By the time I came to myself, the notes had thinned and were falling one by one. The girl slowly pressed both hands down into the keys — as if placing a final period.
And then, freed from the music, that naked beauty turned slowly toward me.
Silver hair still wind-tossed, still beautiful. Skin pale as paper. Slender arms. Features perfectly composed. Her expressionlessness was what threw the unadorned beauty into sharpest relief — the word serene might have been illustrated with her face.
“…Who are you?”
She asked this without expression, in a voice without warmth. The only thing readable in that small, bell-clear sound was wariness. Even wrapped in something like hostility, she was luminously, purely beautiful.
“I’m Ogawa Uta.”
“…I see.”
She didn’t offer her own name. She simply nodded, with something like resignation.
Awkward.
Normally, I leave awkwardness exactly where it is. Just turn around, walk away, done. One more layer of ignominy on a life already well acquainted with it — that’s all.
But even knowing that, my mouth moved. My words reached toward the beauty in front of me, clinging to some presentiment.
“Your piano was incredible.”
A laughably thin piece of praise, hardly what you’d expect from someone who used to write fiction.
She must have heard things like that before. She didn’t move a muscle, offered no trace of softening, and replied:
“Thank you. But it’s over now.”
“Over?”
I looked up in surprise at the abrupt words.
“Exactly what it sounds like. I’m quitting piano. Today.”
She said it in a transparent voice. Her pale, slight figure stood there, emptied out. That beauty looked as if it might vanish any moment. The presentiment seemed about to end as just a presentiment.
Before I knew it, the words had left me.
“I don’t want that.”
“…What?”
I threw everything aside and crossed the room in a straight line.
I took hold of the girl’s hand — a hand that looked as if it might break.
“Play for me. Keep playing piano — for me.”
Through her cold, soft skin, something small and warm lit up.
A draft of wind slipped through the gap in the curtains and moved through the silver hair.
Before me, a pair of violet-indigo eyes trembled.