Episode One: “Sensei, I Like You” — October 2032 —

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to show her my best side. Before I knew it, my eyes would follow her. In fleeting moments, I’d remember.

If such feelings and actions are called “love,” then my first love began in the spring of my sixteenth year.

　Whether that was early or late for a first love, I couldn’t say, having no friends to discuss such things with, nor did I particularly care.

Still, I did agonise over what to do.

　Had I had even one person to confide in, I doubt I’d have become such a complicated woman. But that’s merely shifting the blame; it remains a hypothetical scenario.

In classical Japanese, such impossible ‘if only…’ wishes are translated as counterfactuals. Yet for me, living in present-day Japan, neither past nor future matters.

　Today, I remain myself, forever concealing this love I could never express within my heart, destined to live my life bearing this secret.

With that resolve, determined to sacrifice myself to these feelings I could never act upon, I have lived these eight years since that spring day at sixteen.

　And yet—

“Sensei, I like you.”

The female student before me laughs off my resolve, declaring her affection for me once more today.

Her name is Uehara Meisa.

Thoughts, personality, age, position, everything about her differed from mine. Our only commonality was gender.

Unable to comprehend a single thing about her words, actions, or feelings, I am perpetually at her mercy.

“How many times must I tell you I cannot reciprocate your feelings, Miss Uehara?”

“Until you accept me.”

I let out a small sigh and turned my face away from the cheerful Miss Uehara.

My second year as a teacher, filled with nothing but the unimaginable.

In the classroom after school, today too, I am being pursued by her.