FLCL Fan Fiction ❯ A Deathly Kind of Joy ❯ Being Numb ( Chapter 1 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Being Numb

By: Ave Cantharis

I don't know how long it's been. As far as I can remember, well, the thing is, I can't remember. Some of it I can get before it slips through my mind, nut it's like trying to hold water with your hands. I only remember Haruko.

Her glittering eyes reminded me of drops of gold. Now they remind me of something sick and twisted, some kind of demented little grin that used to play across her face. That was when her eyes would glitter the way they did.

Everything about her, her face, her clothes, her smell, her shape, everything dominates my mind. Ever since the nightmares, life no longer was my priority. School, friends (if that's what I could call them) everything melted into the dreary mist of this town. The smoke hangs in the air and blurs it out.

Just blurry gray. After the point where I forget anything that happened, people got back to their lives. They ignored what I didn't know, feeling it to be nothing more than a sick, crazed fantasy. But the nightmares tell me.

Every night of my God-forsaken life, they're there. The twisted shapes, bending, swooping structures that threaten to swallow me with their shadows. Those eyes. Those horrible, sick, fucking beautiful eyes. And it's always the same. And the voice. Sometimes a whisper, sometimes a scream that threatens to make my ears bleed. “You have to be flattened out. You will be flattened out.” I wake up in various stages of hysteria, shrieking, wild laughter, paranoia from the shadows. It's all the same, and I know I shouldn't care, but I do. The shadows loom vast and horrid before me.

Smoking was something Mamimi gave to me. I like watching the tip glow shades of russet in the dark, smoke curling through the air in little rings, breathing it in to revive the lost time. It makes me feel strange. I forget those feelings when the lovely amber bottle tilts in front of me. It's bitter and too strong. I hate it. In the same way I felt about Haruko, I hated it all and still wanted more of it. Like being a selfish child. But the bottle keeps tilting and the concrete is still cold. An emptied bottle helps me forget this nightmare.

Yes, the pain. Every time something came out of my head, I felt a searing pain. The first time it happened, I thought I was going to die. I think I really did die, and now I'm in hell. If that is true, I'm well adjusted to the place.

It's midnight. The lights from the street are faint and look like little fireflies from the window. Then my door opens and the weak puddle of hall light falls over the carpet. A solid, lonely shadow falls across it. I loom up slowly and it's her. That insane grin she always wears. Her eyes with that fucking glitter in them. I want so desperately to kill her. To watch her blood pool at my feet. She grabs me and kisses me violently. My lips begin bleeding. “They will come. They will iron you out.” Her voice dropped to a sad lilt. “Because you're the one I saw first.” Then I see something I know. Thousands of Medical Mechanica's gliding smoothly across thousands of galaxies, removing the wrinkles, the ones Amarao said make me think. I'm flattened. I die. My galaxy is smooth and flat with the sheen of glass.

My screams wake me up. I look around frantically. My bedroom is still the same, as it always was. I think for a moment. I'm still 12 years old. Haruko is sleeping right above me. No she isn't, she was never there. Like the monster that lurks under the bed, waiting for your pitiful shriek. It was never a dream. Her guitar still rests in the corner. Somehow, it makes me happy.

Sometimes, being numb is a soothing, revolting, lovely, horrid medicine.

Notes: Traumatizing events like the ones Naota went through will sometimes result in memory loss. At the end of the series, he seemed well adjusted, but I think it was just going to take a while for the shock to set in.