帰る場所 | A Place to Return

I, Masayuki Junichiro, wrote this last will as my first attempt at communicating with the outside world. In their world, a “last will” is a writing that expresses one’s wishes for any means to their closest ones. Even though that I am a youkai that will not physically leave this world, and will reincarnate as another being after banishment. This writing serves as a sign of my inner thoughts.

Thoughts and feelings are like water. It is not distinguished into separate, countable objects; once mixed with others, it can never truly return to what it was. As you try to grasp it, it slips through the gaps between your fingers, and you see only a part of it. Thus allowing one’s perspective to be misinterpreted and not comprehended as one truly want.

My heart and amygdala are the channels to direct the flow of the water, and my hands are the engines that will distribute these flows to anyone willing to grasp it.

It is without a doubt that his youth has been spent with an excess waste. He waver to and fro. Thinking that with hard work and a little bit of luck on his side, he will truly find resolve. That’s what he thought when he tried to live his life dutifully and with caution. Alas! He found himself at a loss, just like forty-two thousand years ago when he was still living as a human. Well, he liked to pretend that he counted those years as forty-two thousand, though it may seem that it was only a couple of years. In terms of youkai world, maybe it feels like forty-two thousand years, is it?

He contemplated upon his tiny, three point two jou room. The best thing he can convey about something that kept him awake at night and intervening his sleeping schedule are two uncertainties: how far should he continue with his current work which gathered new interest and how should he face the coming months to come. In approximately one month was his date of birth. But, for what’s it worth, that’s not what he wanted to convey as a private person — the month of his birthday also happened to be the month of his matriarch. Which mean, for him, the time had passed for almost two years reminiscing a parental figure. At times like that, it’s easy to look back and think how miserable one can be; losing a member of a family. Friends and acquaintances around him would spend around couple minutes through their silicon & cobalt-made compartment of communication saying their condolences and moved on with their own life because there’s only so much sympathy one can have facing with someone’s else dire.

We, as youkais, are used to communicate through the help of shikigami. It takes around a week or two to get our message sent to others before the receiver send another message depending on the distance between the sender and the receiver. But humans seem to be comfortable with these… devices which display some kind of boxes with words in it. It seems very convenient and fast, though I doubt it will serve any good to their offspring getting used to communicate without hesitation of misinterpreting and the absence of real emotions on what they want to convey. If I were to use it - considering it will not waste me piece of paper and ink to write, I could pretend to send a message containing empathetic or even commending words for that mischievous and rather elusive miko in the grand village shrine, when in truth — really abhorring her existence.

I continue to observe him so, to him, what has kept him from asleep, aside from the things he worked on since the start of the new year. Two years ago, was that he did not know how to face the coming months when eventually his ‘thoughts’ would pop out again. He’s not sure that turning dramatic and wreck havoc upon his surroundings an adequate solution. His last days with her settled out in peace and laughs at the hospice. But, seeing his days as a human, he was never been that familiar with her. He never understood certain things about her and lived his whole life understanding that. Looking at his dull expression and silence as to what he used to show to others as quite a conversing and agreeable person, his reaction to this contemplation would end up with only a couple days of exaggerated inner emotions turned inward like any sane, mourning person would.

He looked back at that year and there are much more than just her passing that kept him awake at night. When he tried to convey this feeling in which he doesn’t understand yet to his friends, he jokingly assume that he has some kind of hero complex combined with naivety on dealing with worldly hardship and resolving conflict. For the past 10 years since he knew the importance of time and has been very strict about how much time he had left to complete work on deadline, he muster himself a tentative finger around the depths of uncertainty and conveyed that ‘time is on his side’, and ‘with some persistence and some opportunity’ — at the end, things will get better.

At the time, in his friend’s place, supposedly, no wider than his cramped room, the conversation was filled with gleeful laughter. Not just because it was comical to his friends hearing him said something in the lines of leaving an impression of an idealist clown, but also the fact that — in their muffled expression — they all knew that there was a shred of truth to his opinion. Though they all suffer from worldly ordeal, they spent themselves that night the best of their ability to express joy and share their distress by covering them in an ironic manner so that each other can laugh at another one’s suffering without having to think about how hurt it is compared to their own.

Now, that the time has come again. This time of the month. Two years ago. At least in his arbitrarily questionable imaginary timeline, he turned his head down in silence, and whispered softly:

“Are things really has become better than they were before? Or was it just all an illusion? Surely I’ve done the least I can do to get back up when things are falling apart, there’s brief respite in between, but it still feels like as if I’ve stepped on a stone among the mountains.”

He thought to himself that he’s not as smart as he could be. He had a dying family. And his own physical conditions he never shared with anyone. Frankly, he looked like a mess. Including his ancestry, and his biology, and the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce victimized [him], with his all pathological problems. The books that he had bought never read, his promises were not kept, the time he had given wasted in excess and decadence. Then he thought to himself, that right now he can only drown in cower whilst swallowing the bitter pill of ignorance.

I, as an observant youkai, thought to myself, that it is technically impossible to fix all the hardship the human had forced to endure. For logic’s sake, I am going to fractionate it: First, they can’t even list all the sufferings they had. Second, how are they going to weight them? Third, who’s going to decide that their hardship is over? No one can solve it. What is he going to do about that?

I’ve seen the terrible things that humans have done to each other. You just cannot even imagine it. It’s so awful. He, of all people, should not want to be someone like that. Now, does he have every reason to be? He had a lot of reasons to be. To begrudge about his existence. There’s going to be pain along the way, and a lot of it is going to be unfair.

The humans that I have observed thus far, have an amazing capacity to derive pleasure out of the most unlikely domains. You look at some of the major diseases, somebody with cancer. Somebody crippled by heart disease, and you see the most unlikely things out there! Had I not been turned into a youkai, and be able to communicate with humans without the permission from the Gods, I would have told him that his dying family had said something like this:

“Obviously, I’m not glad that I’m dying of this kind of disease. But, without this, I never would’ve realized the importance of friends. I never would have reconciled with my family members. I never would have found the ways of God.”

He woke up earlier than usual, preparing himself for a trip to his native soil. In spite of being born and lived most of his life in the main city, he had a rather bitter view about living there. He disregard the pretentious living and stressful pressure of having to be ‘up to standard’ with the lifestyle. He hated going to crowded places, yet find serene among his friends — often gathering unnecessary attention because of his boisterous laughter, something that he had think about for a long time and made an effort to refrain. His place of return is not much different than the place he currently resides. It’s overshadowed by the growing forest of steel beams and sea of asphalt. The young are finding themselves lost upon these forests, and the elderly are preparing themselves to return into the depths of the earth upon the trees they’ve planted their whole lives.

To him, coming back was not only caused with a sense of longing the warmth of familiar presence, but also a duty to be fulfilled since he’s going to be what’s left of his family in the city. He had doubts about his presence. It has been years since he comes back to see his relatives. For any reason, he had little, but growing thoughts about being a burden for coming back only at certain times. Despite having an outlandish manner among his peers, he switched his persona once he stepped in. In the face of his relatives, he turned himself to be more preserved and introverted than he usually does.

For what I can tell you, he is a person of many faces. He has many persona depending on the social environment he’s currently in. Most of the human I have observed have the same kind of trait when it comes to dealing with various environment they’re in. But he’s quite convincing when it comes to setting a persona to the people around him so that they perceive him as the person he wanted them to. To someone, he’s a gentle, soft-spoken and caring young man. To another; he’s a brutish, loud, and someone doomed to spend holidays with. And for some; he is that amalgamation of the devil and a hell spawn ready to unleash an apocalypse. It is unknown what has been his motive to let different people have drastically different views. In a sense, he might not even care.

I finished my week of sojourn. Sitting in a near-empty minibus that will take me back to where I reside. There’s not much time left where I can reject reality and let my thoughts adrift. For that reason, I let it go.

It is technically impossible to fix all the hardship human had forced to endure. Even if it means the need to return with nostalgic familiarity, a warmth presence of loved ones, or other form of pleasure seeking activities — it is without a doubt that all of the above are transient. When things settle down, it all comes back to the beginning, and I come back to where I’m from.

Well, if that’s really how I want to let myself be.

There are many places to return, but the sense of belonging is only there when the thing inside my chest feel at ease. I wish that youkai would tell me the things I didn’t know.