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Some days are gray. Today is one of them.
Thunder rumbles across the slate gray sky as Homura slowly makes her way home from the bus stop, eyes downcast. The air is heavy and damp, smelling of mud and wet grass. Most there is to see on the lonely trek home are the long, winding asphalt roads; the surrounding rice fields half-submerged in dark, murky water; and the village houses, ancient wooden ones and subdued concrete ones, spread along the main road. Even the oranges and reds of the autumn trees dotting the landscape look dull and lifeless, their leaves starting to fall off their skeletal branches.
Homura gives no thought to any of these things. She gives no thought to anything at all, and simply walks mechanically down the usual route to her family’s old house.
She eventually reaches the house, just as it starts to rain. Nobody else is home yet; Mama must still be at work, and Grandmother must still be at her friend’s place. The cats are nowhere to be seen either, likely hiding from the booming thunder. With no one else around, and with all the lights off, the house feels vast and barren and cold.
Homura slowly removes her boots at the entryway, and trudges across the creaky floorboards and up the creaky stairs to her room, locking the door behind her once she enters.
Inside, there is no color either. The gray of the stormy skies outside seeps into her room as with the rest of the house, leaving every inch the same dreary, miserable monochrome. Heavy rain pelts her window and rattles the old roof overhead as more thunder crackles in the distance.
Homura drags her feet towards her bed, haphazardly dropping her sling purse to the floor as she approaches it, and collapses onto the futon mattress, burying her face in her arms.
Shortly, she begins to cry.
There’s no particular reason for her tears. Today is just one of those many, many days where existing is tiring and excruciatingly painful. It’s been like this for the past several days, and she’s been barely keeping herself together; but it seems she’s finally reached a breaking point today. Every waking moment has been an assault of awful memories, sickening body sensations, constant fear and anxiety, and the deepest pits of utter shame, regret and self-loathing. And it never goes away, no matter what she does or how many years pass.
She cries her eyes out for hours, curling and shrinking into herself, as the storm outside picks up and rages on. Wind begins to howl outside her window, competing with her shaky, broken sobs. A flash of lightning illuminates her room for a split second before leaving it in darkness once more. Through her tears, the world blurs into a messy, all-consuming gray blob; it has her backed into a corner, and along with the incessant rain outside it threatens to flood in and drown her.
And right now, Homura almost wishes it would.
Finally her eyes run out of tears to shed; now they just feel dry and irritated. She sniffs and wipes her wet face with her sleeve. Weakly turning on her side, her weary gaze falls on the old digital clock on her old desk beside her bed. It’s about time to go downstairs and start making dinner; though she doesn’t know what time Mama and Grandmother will be home in this weather, she knows they’ll expect at least the rice to be washed and cooked by then.
It takes a lot of effort just to push herself to sit up. Her body aches all over and weighs her down like lead. The door is just a few steps across from her bed, but she can’t even muster putting her feet to the floor. The thought of leaving her room at all makes her want to throw herself out the window and break her neck upon impact.
Come on, you cow, berates the voice in Homura’s head that sounds a lot like her own. Get off your lazy, sorry ass right now and go downstairs. If you don’t, you’ll be having instant noodles for dinner again, and Grandmother will scold you and Mama won’t talk to you for the rest of the night. Do you want that? Why don’t you make yourself useful for a change? Go on, get up!
But she doesn’t. She can’t, no matter how hard she screams at herself to. The door gets farther and more daunting the longer she stares at it without doing anything. It’s almost like it’s taunting her, daring her to get up and walk towards it while knowing full well that she can’t. And probably never will…
Another brief flash of lightning, another clap of ear-splitting thunder. And all Homura can do is slump over and bury her tearful face in her hands in shame.
God, she’s pathetic. Really pathetic. How weak and useless is she that she can’t even walk towards a damn door? This is low even for her.
It’s bad enough that she has to force herself to do even the simplest tasks, like getting up, eating, bathing, and taking the bus to work every day. It’s bad enough that just having to face and talk to other people is agonizing and painful. It’s bad enough that she has to put on a front all the time, trying to act as if nothing’s wrong and that nothing happened, knowing that she could never share her terrible secret with anyone. It’s bad enough that she’s too much of a cowardly chickenshit to just be honest with her family and friends and co-workers about how dirty she really is, and face the consequences of her fuckups.
Why can’t she do any of that? Why can’t she do anything right?
If only she could just drop dead then and there. If only the raging lightning outside would strike her down and burn her to a crisp, or if the roof above her room would collapse beneath the weight of the rain and crush her. Or if she could muster the energy to end it all herself. Then it would stop hurting. She would no longer have to deal with the endless dread, guilt and hurt. She would no longer be a waste of space burdening the people around her. She would spare her family the trouble of having a stupid, filthy, lying whore tainting their bloodline. Everyone would be better off without her.
She removes her hands from her face after a while. The rain continues to pour incessantly, with no signs of slowing down or stopping; everything in sight is as dreary and colorless as ever. Homura contemplates sinking back into her bed and never getting up ever again.
Then she sees yellow.
Only a little bit, and a little faint in the all-consuming grayness, but it’s there, managing to stand out enough to catch her weary attention. The specks of yellow are coming from a certain picture frame, standing among the other picture frames arranged on her desk beside the digital clock. The picture frame itself is nothing special. But the pictures inside of it are.
Homura is compelled to sit up once again, fighting the agony and despair weighing her body down. She reaches a weary hand out and takes the picture frame to get a better look.
Now she can see the contents of the frame more clearly: a pair of photo booth strips, taken at an arcade in Tokyo. Surrounded by cutesy stickers and sparkly, multicolored doodles are pictures of a smiling her and a dark-haired man in a yellow jumpsuit, grinning from ear to ear in every shot.
His smile, lively and radiant even in mere photographs, makes her heart catch in her throat.
Jyushimatsu-kun…
She hasn’t thought of Jyushimatsu in a while. After all, it’s been years since she left Akatsuka Ward for good—years since she saw him for the very last time. And since then, she’s been very busy with readjusting to life back home, finding a job, reintegrating herself with her family and the village, and overall just trying to survive each day without falling apart too much or outing her shameful secret. Sometimes, there just isn’t the time or the opportunity to think about him again.
But when she does, all her memories of him always come rushing in.
Her memories of him are always in color.
He came to her during a time when everything in her world was dark and gray—even darker and grayer than the storm outside. Life in the city destroyed her, ripping away her innocence and violating her with its harsh realities and demands over and over again. Trapped in a degrading and miserable line of work with no end in sight, it seemed that death was the only way out of her shitty, wretched existence…
…until that day she saved Jyushimatsu from drowning at the lonely beach. Or perhaps, that day he saved her by making her laugh for the first time in years.
She spent an entire month by Jyushimatsu’s side after that. And throughout that month, as he made her lose her breath with his hilarious gags and played all sorts of fun games with her, as he told her all sorts of wild stories and listened attentively to hers, the world came to life with laughter and color.
The sky he reached out to as he stood and whirled around on the playground swings was a crystal-clear blue, as was the serene lakewater that he raced through during boat rides. The leaves of the treetops he hid in during hide-and-seek and tag were a verdant green. The pinks and purples of the park flowers popped as he helped her form flower chains and crowns with them. Even the dirt and grime that got onto their clothes after hours of playground games had a lively brown earthiness to it.
Whenever he cheerfully promised he’d see her tomorrow again at the end of the day, his bright and earnest smile glowed with the orange warmth of the setting sun. His laughter rang across the sky as his cheeks flushed a rosy red that left her flushed, too.
Even his clothes, from his baseball uniform to his hoodie to his jumpsuit, always seemed to come in such a vibrant, jolly shade of yellow that could rival the very sun itself. Though perhaps it was less about the clothes and more about the silly, optimistic and kind man who wore them.
Homura’s lips curl into a sentimental smile as she reminisces. She absentmindedly thumbs one of Jyushimatsu’s goofy grins, taking in every detail of his sunny face. The gray dullness of the rain and her room seemingly have no effect on the photo strips: every hue and shade, every cutesy decoration and sparkly doodle, his smiles and even her own smiles pop out in bold colors against the darkness.
If only the real world could be as beautiful and as colorful as Jyushimatsu made it.
A melancholy longing gnaws within Homura’s chest. She lifts her head to find herself back in reality—her room and the view outside the window all drenched in dismal, lifeless, foreboding gray. Shoulders drooping, she looks back down at the photo strips. As full of life and dazzling color as those precious snapshots of her and Jyushimatsu are, they are just that. Mere snapshots. Faraway memories of a very short time she had spent with him. A time she’ll likely never get back.
Her very last memory of Jyushimatsu replays in her thoughts: seeing him one last time at the train station, just as the bullet train leaving Akatsuka Ward was about to depart. The train platform in her memory is cold, clinical, and colorless, just like the city as a whole—but Jyushimatsu himself is in full technicolor: blue suit and dark hair and red cheeks and eyes shining as he tearfully, yet smiling broadly, promises that they’ll see each other again.
Then the bullet train’s doors close, and as the world blurs through the train’s increasing speed and through her tears, Jyushimatsu runs alongside the window, still trying until the very end to make her laugh and smile.
And she did smile then, just before the train pulled away from Akatsuka Ward for good and her time with him ended forever. The world was plunged into grayness without him once more.
It’s not as bad now, to be honest. Years passed since she returned to her hometown, after all; she’s managed to make some progress in putting the past behind her. But even then, the color in her life has never fully returned. Awful days where everything around her is endless, numbing gray void are still frequent and unavoidable, even years on. Even on days when not a single dark or painful thought crosses her mind or body, there’s always some large patch of dour gray somewhere in view. The greens and blues and reds and other colors are never as vivid or as beautiful. Not like during that brief, wonderful time she spent with Jyushimatsu.
She wonders if she’ll ever live out anything like that short time again. She wonders if she even deserves to.
She wonders if she’ll really ever see him again. It’s been so long, after all…
Homura sighs and returns the photo frame onto her desk. It’s then that her gaze falls on another familiar object on her desk. Her eyes widen when she recognizes it.
Laying on her desk, next to the box she keeps her cosmetics in, is the old yellow wristband with the number ‘14’ embroidered on it.
Once again Homura compels herself to take it. She isn’t allowed to wear the wristband at work, so she often just leaves it on her desk to wear later. But it seems she's been forgetting recently. Things have been so busy at work in the past several days, and she’s been losing sleep and making so many mistakes; she’d come home stressed and exhausted, lost in her own morbid thoughts and unwanted memories. The wristband would be the last thing on her mind during all of that.
She slips the wristband around her left wrist, mentally apologizing to Jyushimatsu for forgetting. She gives it a little rub. The fabric is rather worn out by now, after years of use, but it’s still very comfortable and comforting to wear. And in the dark and lonely dreariness of the room and weather, its yellow color and ‘14’ written proudly across it makes it the brightest and most colorful object in the whole world.
Homura smiles again, warm and wistful. She presses her wristband—a small part of him, she likes to think, to keep with her forever—to her heart, gently stroking the fabric. Her eyes once again fill with tears; but this time, not out of despair.
We’ll meet again, Jyushimatsu-kun! Muscle muscle, hustle hustle!
After a while, Homura sniffles and dries her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. She lets out a soft, tired sigh and glances at the digital clock. It’s now well past the time to cook rice for dinner. But she also doesn’t hear Mama or Grandmother downstairs.
Lifting her eyes once more, she looks around at her surroundings. The rain outside still pours incessantly, but it’s now at a slower, lighter pace. Thunder rumbles at a very far distance. Every inch of her room, her world, is still very much bathed in gray—but this time, she’s sure she can see the faded colors of every object in the room start to peek through.
Her body still very much aches and feels like lead when she slowly inches up from her bed and plants her feet onto the floor. It very much takes all her strength to stand up and drag her feet across the floor towards the door. For a moment, she hesitates when she reaches for the doorknob; but she wills herself to turn it and step out of the threshold into the hallway.
It’s stupid and rather silly, but it feels like an accomplishment when she finally closes the door behind her.
It seems that one of the cats has been waiting for her. The little thing stares up at her and meows expectantly once she’s out of the room. With a small smile, Homura carefully crouches and opens her arms to the waiting kitty, who eagerly jumps into her embrace. She strokes her black and orange fur as she stands up just as carefully. The quiet purrs ringing in her ear are soothing.
With that, she and her cat make their way down to the kitchen without hurry.