Strandline

Every kid starts out the same way.

Bright and starry-eyed, their little hearts sing with unsullied curiosity. They roll around in the grass, they dive into puddles of mud. They pick up strange critters and let them crawl around on their skin. Each morning they wake up full of awe and wonder and this thrilling, addictive sort of fear, this feeling like every day is both their first and their last.

And they stay that way for a while. For how long, it depends, but it always ends. Sooner or later, they’re all touched by the specter of resignation. Of jaded normality. For most, years pass before they even realize what they’ve lost.

Not Kaname Raana. She knew. She could tell, right away, that something had changed.

One afternoon, just a few days after her ninth birthday, she wakes up from a nap, and she’s suddenly drowning.

The air she breathes, once so light and refreshing, now flows heavy and molasses-like into her lungs, reeking of stagnation, filling her with a terrible sense of premonition. Everything is wrong. The faces surrounding her in class now look morose, joyless. The words they speak no longer reach her. Everything is wrong, and it will never be right again.

But it’s not her fault.

It’s everyone else’s.

The signs were all there, in hindsight. She’d just been having too much fun to notice.

The kids she liked playing with the most had begun drifting slowly, slowly away, spending less time out in the parks, the jungle gyms, the sandpits. The way they spoke had changed bit by bit; they’d began copying each other’s words and mannerisms for reasons she couldn’t begin even to fathom, all regressing to an ugly, repetitive mean. Now they were sorting everyone they knew into arbitrary groups, labels, cruel little boxes that seemed to her to exist purely for the sake of existing. They called each other names, they raised their voices, they started fights just to start them. It was just as if their hearts had been torn out of their chests, stolen by some ancient, encroaching darkness that had crept into her world, intent on taking away everything she held dear.

Not that she herself had so many words for it. It had all just become so incredibly, suffocatingly boring.

Desperate to breathe, she starts skipping classes. She wanders the neighborhood like a hungry little ghost, looking for something, anything that might make her feel that thrill again, that zest for life she was once so full of. She cuts through forgotten alleyways and run-down shopping districts and old, overgrown parks until finally she comes across a quiet nook walled off by zelkova trees on the river bank. It feels right. It’s not home, but it’s comfortable. It’s somewhere to hide.

One day, as she’s laying there half-asleep on the grass, a cat wanders through the brushes and into the clearing. Its grey fur is terribly matted and stained with dried mud, and its front-left leg has a limp. It has no collar, no tag, no name. It circles her, regarding her with caution, with curiosity. She feeds it a piece of her strawberry-cream sandwich.

After that her nook becomes a gathering-place for stray cats, lured in by rumors in the air of food and belly rubs. She finds that she doesn’t mind this at all. She spends most of her afternoons feeding them, getting to know them, memorizing their eyes, their scars, all the patterns on their coats. She starts talking to them. She’s certain they understand her, because she understands them. She knows they have so, so much more to teach her than the people she’s been hiding from.

But her behavior doesn’t go unnoticed. One morning as she’s sneaking out of school she finally gets caught. And so it begins. Hours and hours spent sitting with her mother in front of desks inside these awful, dusty, claustrophobic offices, both at school and at unfamiliar buildings a long miserable drive away from home. And always on the other side of each desk: a tall, imposing figure of Authority, of Correctness. Teacher. Principal. Truant officer. Child psychologist. Her mother tells them she’s so sorry and that she doesn’t know what the problem is and they talk and talk and talk, and Raana sits there and pretends to listen and pretends to care because otherwise it’ll just drag on even longer but of course she doesn’t. She knows what this really is; she’s already figured it out. It’s violence. It’s a punishment. A sad, desperate attempt to drag her back down into the prison they all live in.

This routine finally breaks her. She gives up hoping for change and simply shuts down. For three days straight she sits in silence on the rotted rain-soaked planks of the front deck of her house, taking breaks only to eat and to sleep; she wastes away, with her legs tucked into her arms, and her eyes lingering, deadened, on the past.

On that third day, though, her grandmother comes around to visit. She brings something out of their storeroom. A battered old guitar; one Raana’s seen her play before, long ago, when her mind hardly even knew of memories. Its worn maroon paint is all flaked off at the edges; it’s covered in scratches and gashes, in scars. Out on the deck, the red setting sun glints off one of the strings just right as it crawls behind the horizon. The shine brings the light back into Raana’s eyes, and Grandma notices. She asks Raana if she wants to try playing it. And Raana says yes.

The instant she plucks out a note, she falls in love for the first time in her life.

She spends the rest of the evening getting to know every part of it, every curve and crevice and every dented inch of wood. She hears its voice ring out under her fingers and she’s utterly enthralled. It’s so much prettier, so much clearer, so much more raw and so much more honest than any voice she’s ever heard before.

With its heavy wooden heft in her hands, she’s in control. With her fingers on its strings, she’s free. She can put her feelings into “words”.

This is it. This is what she’s been so desperately looking for.

She begs Grandma to let her keep it. She tugs at her sleeve, whines, and pleads. But Grandma tells her no; not until she’s older. Not until she graduates.

So she goes back to school. No one in class really talks to her anymore, though they certainly talk about her. They’re not cruel. Not intentionally. They gossip among each other, about all the lurid rumors, the stories about the weird girl who sneaks out of school and plays with stray cats all day, regarding her from a distance with idle curiosity, like an odd museum piece.

But nothing they say or do is worth listening to. They are not worth her time.

Not anymore, now that she has something to live for.

After class she walks straight to the live house Grandma owns. It’s an old building, worn by age and by use. It sprawls downwards from the top-floor lobby into a cavernous network of dim hallways, storerooms and stages, all well-traveled and littered with audio equipment, its ceilings covered in strange metal rafters and twisting cables. A never-ending maze that draws her inside with its comforting darkness and keeps her within with its novel sights and sounds. Strange people walk past her carrying instruments on their backs, some with their hair dyed, their ears pierced, looking completely unlike every other grown-up in her life. She sits cross-legged on the carpet and watches them, starry-eyed, watches how they dress, how they carry themselves. She sneaks into the crowds and listens to them play, listens to guitars, both electric with their deafening wails and acoustic with their solemn elegies; to drum rhythms sometimes intense and driving, sometimes reserved and complex. And she’s mesmerized.

These people, these impossibly distant figures, standing on the stage; they know how to live. They know who they are. They’re what she wants to be.

She finds a dark, comfortable corner near the PA system where she can hide and starts catching every single concert and rehearsal she can, sometimes even ditching class, if she thinks she can get away with it. Her ears become machines built for tuning into pitches; she borrows whatever guitar she can get her hands on and mimics everything she hears, and quickly the twelve tones on the fretboard in all their variations become part of her language, a language she can understand, one unburdened with the artifice of the one she was taught at home and at school. Three months in she can recognize every note and play it back without so much as thinking about it; though if those notes have names, she does not know them. She doesn’t need to.

On the days the live house closes she heads for Grandma’s house instead. She crawls up into the attic, a wooden tomb filled with dead air holding disused guitars and stacks of old vinyls from another time and another land. She puts on the first record she can find and she plays along with it for hours and hours until her body shuts down on its own, collapsing where she sits. She beats on the strings until the tips of her fingers grow blisters, until the blisters split open and coat the windings in clear serum, until the metal digs past her epidermis and cuts the blood free of her capillaries, rusting the nickel beneath it.

She does this every single day. In time the skin on those once-soft fingertips grows distorted, unrecognizable, an inhuman kaleidoscope of scar tissue and calluses. She skips proper meals whenever she can get away with it, feeding off pastries swiped from catering backstage, cups of instant soba noodles and packs of sweet snacks bought from corner stores with whatever small change she can scrounge up. Wrappers tear open and candy cracks apart beneath her teeth, filling her veins with sugar, hitting her with jolt after fleeting jolt of energy, keeping her awake, keeping her playing, keeping her away from reality and its stale, thin air.

Months turn into years. She becomes like a mascot for the live house, this strange, prodigious little girl beloved by staff and performers alike, who seems to practically live in the dark rooms behind the stage, haunting them like a zashiki-warashi. She leaves her first school behind, and finally she gets her very own guitar, that same battered old thing she fell for all those years ago. Her last missing piece. She plugs it into an amplifier and makes it scream out three years’ worth of built-up energy and resentment and wanting and for the first time she can remember she feels truly like herself. Like she’s shed the heavy, languid shell she’s been carrying all along.

She’s found it. A place to belong.

It’s right here, with this guitar in her hands. It’s in the soothing overdriven noise of the amplifiers in the live house, in the pounding rhythm of the drums and the growling of the bass. Away from the stifling stench of humanity. It’s not just a place to hide. It’s home. Right here, and nowhere else.

And then one day, she’s drowning again.

It hits her like a splash of cold water to the face, seizing up her nerves.

We’re closing up shop her grandmother says. She speaks the words so matter-of-factly it’s like she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know the life she’s snuffing out. How badly it hurts. She thought even if no one else understood how she felt at least Grandma did but clearly she doesn’t. It hurts. It’s not fair. It’s not fair, Raana thinks.

But her body is so paralyzed with despair that she can’t open her mouth to speak in protest. She can’t even move.

She locks herself in her bedroom that night, and she cries for the first time in her life. She hates it. The way it flows out of her unbidden, the way she can’t control it, can’t make it stop no matter how badly she wants to. After two long hours her well finally runs dry. She feels sick to her stomach.

She decides it’ll be the last time, too. The last time she lets anything have this awful sort of hold over her.

Closing day comes. She goes with Grandma to see it off, sits through one last concert. She watches as the key to the front door turns to lock it one last time. She feels nothing now, save for a dull emptiness. Grandma pats her on the back and sternly tells her to keep her chin up, says that someday, someone will make a place for her, somewhere she truly belongs.

It rings painfully hollow.

Someone? Who? Who could possibly understand how she feels? She knows now that no one could ever reach her heart. That she was a fool to ever think otherwise.

She slides back into delinquency, into aimless loitering, growing her menagerie of stray cat friends. A ghost once again, purposeless and unmoored, trapped in the land of the living. She picks up her guitar and tries to play it but every note and every chord out of it sounds like a stake being driven straight through her heart, like that intractable grip finding its way around her again. She sets the thing aside, somewhere dark where she can’t see it. She sleeps through half her days, sometimes in her bed, sometimes on the grass and dirt somewhere quiet where the sun shines. Every so often she finds herself coming back to the abandoned live house, standing in the sad little coin-op parking lot some investment company’s converted it to. The cats seem to like it there; they crowd on the concrete like a funeral procession, like vultures circling a rotting carcass. She sits with them and watches as vines crawl day after day up the crumbling walls.

Two years pass.

Two unbearably long, yet frighteningly short years.

They flow past her like tepid river-water, barely dragging her body along for the ride, lifeless and bereft. Her guitar sits in a closet, buried in dust and old clothes and in regret. It’s all a blur, a terrible, ugly blur. By the time her third spring in middle school comes around all she has to show for those twenty-four months is a gaping black void where her memories ought to be, dotted here and there with faded reminisince, vague images of sitting in class, watching the seasons turn into one another, growing and dying, quietly, diligently.

She lays down on a patch of grass one morning, closes her eyes, and wishes that she would never have to open them again. That she could stay trapped forevermore inside her own mind, in this comfortable oblivion.

But when she wakes up, she’s still there. Still trapped.

So, call it an act of desperation, a cry for help. Whatever it was, that day she wanders somewhere new—a freshly-opened live house, one she’d heard her grandmother talk about off-hand. And behind the counter she finds a familiar face: a young woman, her grandma’s old stagehand. She’s known Raana since she started playing the guitar, and her eyes light up the moment she sees her walk in.

She practically begs Raana to start playing again. Raana hesitates; she backs away, turns her nose up; but once she sees her guitar, somehow whisked away from her closet and brought here without her knowledge, something comes over her. She can’t help but acquiesence.

She plugs in and starts playing.

And… it hurts. It still hurts, after all this time. The wound hasn’t closed. Time has only helped it grow more tender.

She doesn’t stop, though. She bites the bullet and lets the pain flow through her, like an icy winter chill on bare skin, then out of her, into song. She draws out a somber, slow piece from her guitar, a sort of music she’d never let herself play before. And she learns to like it. She feels in control again, as if she’s tamed the grief inside her like one would break in a wild beast.

By the time she finishes the woman in front of her is in tears. She tells Raana she has to keep playing, that she should come to the open mic. That if she does, her music is bound to reach someone, someone who truly understands.

Someone? Again, she scoffs at the idea. But it sticks in her head. And she does come back, this time when it’s busy. Her virtuosic playing quickly draws a crowd, first a couple people, then a dozen, then two. She finds that she doesn’t mind it, the way all the eyes on her feel.

Every week from then on she drags her grandma’s old vacuum-tube amplifier on a dolly to the live house and up onto the little stage at the corner of the cafe, shredding away until she’s satisfied. She becomes a fixture: the stray cat of RiNG, as people take to calling her. A girl just a little older than her starts working the bar; Raana takes a strange liking to her. She finds it fun to test her patience, at least. The crowds around her grow larger; she even picks up some dedicated fans. Soon enough someone walks up to her after one of her sessions and asks her to join their band. She figures she might as well try.

But she quickly regrets it. They sound so off, so lifeless that it physically hurts. Their music is as dreadfully boring as they are, as they all are. Listening to it makes her like she’s walked into a pit of thick, sludgey quicksand, an awfulness with a life all of its own, trying to drag her down into the pits of monotony.

After one song she walks out of the studio without so much as a word, leaving them stunned and confused.

She keeps on playing the open mics. Another band or three try to recruit her, but they’re all the same, all tired clichés and paper-thin people. One day after ditching the fourth group to try and bring her in, she walks out of the building and slumps down onto the floor in the shadow of a dark alleyway, sighing to herself in defeat. A stray black cat climbs onto her lap.

The grip around her neck tightens; her vision grows dark.

She’s running out of oxygen.

But the following week, as she’s packing up her amps and getting ready to leave the live house, someone catches her eye. A girl. She’s sitting at one of the tables, across from the barista girl and two others, talking about something or other. It doesn’t matter what. She jumps out at her immediately through a sort of sixth sense. There’s just something special about her. Something incredibly… interesting.

The girl’s shape sits askew in the world around it, as if it doesn’t quite fit. A sense of unresolved tension follows her every movement, like an imbalanced electrical field. She’s like a bright little splash of color—of motion—in a sea of gray stillness. Raana sits and stares at the girl for an hour, observing her from a distance until she leaves the live house, and then she follows her out and watches her disappear over the horizon.

Who is she? Where did she come from? What makes her so different, so much brighter than everyone else? What lies beneath her skin, in the deepest recesses of her soul? And why can’t she stop thinking about her?

It’s the first time she’s felt this way about another person. Curious. So curious that it digs at the pit of her stomach like the dull claws of an intractable hunger. That night she tosses and turns for an hour, her thoughts consumed, before finally falling asleep.

When the girl comes back with her friends a few days later, Raana listens. She learns her name. Tomori. She’s in a band with the other three, apparently. A band. Raana casually invites herself into their practice session. She hears Tomori sing for the first time, and the instant that voice touches Raana’s ears, she’s entranced.

She’s it. This girl’s off-key, desperate cries, so shrill and sharp, so unrestrained and unstable that they seem to set the very air around her alight. And the song she sings is so pretty, so forlorn and yet so full of light. Quickly she finds her way around it with her guitar. It’s a perfect fit. It gets stuck in her head. Her mind races. After all these years, she’s finally found something different, something new. She wants more, and she wants it fast.

They book a concert. Raana’s played gigs by now, subbing in for a band here and there, but it’s never felt right. Not the way the bands back in SPACE did. The pieces were all there, but it was always like a chemical reaction waiting to take place, missing its catalyst.

One song into this show, though, she knows. This is it. This is oxygen. Pure, flammable oxygen.

She didn’t even know she could breathe this freely. She’s like a raw flame, a live wire. The amplifier screams out her truth as she draws it out with her fingers. It’s the most alive Raana has ever felt.

…

But it can’t last.

It won’t last.

It was too good to be true. She had realized that fairly quickly, spending time around these four. It had crept up her spine until she could no longer ignore it.

Something’s not right with this band.

An ill omen hangs over them, a sense of impending doom. It’s this other girl, this Soyo. It seeps out of her, that darkness. Her words taste acrid and off, like they’re laced with something foul. They shouldn’t play that song she insists. It doesn’t belong to them she says.

Raana can tell. Soyo’s not here for this. She wants something else. Something petty, something human.

They say cats can tell when you’re dying. Raana smelled the scent of death on this band.

So she does what she does best: the opposite of what she’s told. In the lingering silence following their first song, she brings down her pick and she plays ‘Haruhikage’. You could call it a trial, a test of their mettle. She wouldn’t. It just felt like the right thing to do.

The others follow her lead and join in. It’s beautiful. It’s intoxicating, addicting. She gets so caught up in it she starts to think it might just work out after all. But backstage once it’s all over, just as Raana thought, the darkness spills from the hole she’d punched open, an all-consuming black flame lit by the faintest spark. And in its wake it all crumbles.

Good, she thinks. She’s ended it on her own terms. Better to burn it down than to let it fade away.

A day later she spots them at the counter and tries to give Tomori one last chance. She, at least, deserves that much. But it’s just as she feared. She was too fragile to survive the blaze; she was dragged down into the murky pits with the others. Boring. Predictable. Not worth her time.

The air around her grows thick and heavy again. She’s certain now that that gap, that howling abyss between herself and the rest of the world will never close. That it was never even worth closing in the first place.

But in the back of her mind a nagging seed of doubt clings stubbornly. She can’t help but wonder what could have been. Can’t help thinking about her, about Tomori. She spent only a scant few days around her and yet her absence lingers in Raana’s chest like a fresh wound. There really was so much she wanted to know, so much she wanted to understand. But she’s not worth it, she tells herself, over and over again, like a mantra. She’s not worth the risk. She wasn’t willing to follow through.

She’s eating a parfait at the cafe counter, papering over that low, dull ache with sugar and cream, when she spots a sign. A sign on the wall with Tomori’s name on it, advertising a live performance. A solo, spoken word affair. Raana doesn’t think twice. She picks up her guitar and rushes over.

And there Tomori stands, all alone on the stage, ensconced within a single lonely spotlight amid a sea of black shadow. She reads from the notebook in her hands, her voice trembling. Raana watches as she spills her guts, cries out for mercy, begs for a second chance. All things Raana would never do, could never do. This girl, this fascinating little creature, this ray of burning sunlight, she gets something that Raana doesn’t. She sees something Raana can’t. In that moment her sight sears itself, like a white-hot brand, into the back of Raana’s eyes. The clutches of her presence dig themselves into her mind.

Without a moment’s hesitation she climbs up on stage with her guitar in hand, and she lends Tomori her harmony and rhythm, a hand outstretched, a signal looking to resonate, raw emotion in the only way to show it Raana has ever known. Her own way of saying that she will follow her for the rest of her life.

The crowd grows. They play another show, and then another, whenever the schedule will allow it. Backstage after each one Raana comes to know Tomori, through precious few words, through glances and long dense silences, through her scent and her body language. She wants to become human, Tomori tells her one evening. But why? She’s perfect as she is, Raana thinks. So beautifully inhuman. She doesn’t need to be like them. Still, it fascinates her, the way this girl keeps surprising her, the way her mind races with endless possibilities whenever she’s with her. And the clutches dig deeper.

In time the whole band gets back together. Raana drags the barista girl into one of their shows, and soon after that the other two follow, the funny pink one - Anon - and Soyo. She even grows to like them, too. She comes to find something to like among all their flaws and imperfections. There’s something to this Rikki, in particular. It’s the way she looks at Tomori; it’s like she gets it, too. Like they’re both searching for the same thing. She grows comfortable around them, among this band. Without knowing it, she lets herself believe that it’s hers, too.

And that festering wound in her heart begins to heal.

Or so she thought.

But she had simply let her guard down.

She’d been having too much fun to notice the water creeping up her neck.

Just an hour ago she was sitting in front of that stage as Tomori and Rikki and Soyo played a song or two with those two other girls from a band they used to be in. It felt like nothing, at first. Like nothing at all. They were sloppy; they couldn’t even keep time. They all started crying at one point; they were barely even playing by then. It was hard to watch, really. Anon had to bribe her with candy just to get her to sit still and observe.

It really did feel like nothing. Like a gentle, cold numbness, perhaps. Nothing more.

But now she’s standing in a dark hallway by the stage entrance and her nails are digging into the skin on her palms. Her hands are shaking, she’s sweating. Her breath is ragged and labored.

She’d tried to drown out that sinking feeling once she got her own turn on stage. She’d turned her amp up until it made her ears hurt, ignoring Rikki’s chiding, and struck the strings on her guitar as hard as she could as if to tamp it all down, as if to bury it in the darkest depths of her heart. Even now, her left pinky finger is bleeding. She hadn’t managed to cut through her calluses since she left grade school.

All that, but it didn’t work.

It’s still there. And it’s only getting worse.

This gnawing at the bottom of her stomach. This thing called loss of control.

She should know better. It was just a one-time thing, Rikki told her as much. They’re doing this for the rest of their lives. For the rest of their lives. Tomori says so, herself, practically every day they’re together. Of course she should know. Nothing’s going to change. Everything is fine.

But it’s not. No, it won’t go away. Her muscles tense up, her heartbeat quickens. Like a cornered animal, she searches desperately for an answer from her instincts, and finds that they have none left to give her. She tries to move her legs but she can’t. The room she’s in grows dark around the edges, starts to spin vortex-like, to draw itself away from her. She has nowhere to run—

“R-Raana-chan?”

And that’s when she sees her.

Tomori.

This girl.

The air she breathes, in the flesh.

Her reason to live, and her undoing.

For better or for worse, her instincts come back to her all at once.

Blood rushing with adrenaline, Raana spots the door to a janitor’s closet. As Tomori approaches her, looking hesitant and vaguely concerned, Raana grabs her by the collar of her shirt and shoves her inside. She’s older, and noticeably taller, but still she crumbles and falls away under Raana’s hands with only the slightest resistance, as if she were made of paper, so easily ripped apart.

Steeping in the darkness of the cramped little room she can barely make out Tomori’s outline. She feels her tense up in her hands and tightens her grip in response, and pushes her up against a wall. She hears her saying what’s wrong, asking what she’s doing, and ignores her, instead moving one hand up to her mouth and using the other to pull back her clothing and reveal the skin of her right shoulder. And in one swift motion she bites down on it as hard as she can.

She feels a scream trying to escape her and turning into deadened muffled noise in her palm.

As much as she’d like to hear it, she presses down to keep its volume down. It would draw too much attention. And this—

—this is for her, and her alone.

She digs her teeth in deeper—just w do you think you’re doing—until she feels something crush with a pop beneath them, then moves on—where do you think you’re going?—drawing closer to her neck, to the next patch of unsullied skin, of unmarked territory. Over and over again.

You think you can just leave? She forces the both of them lower towards the floor and slides a hand under Tomori’s shirt and starts digging her nails in—I’m not letting this happen. Not again.—and all the while feeling her muffled squeals and protests and labored breaths on her hand. Don’t go. You can’t. After a dozen more bites something wet and warm and cold at the same time starts trickling onto her fingers, too. Tears. She pulls back and looks at her, at the blood pooling inside the marks her teeth had left, at the tears streaming down Tomori’s face, the clear liquid running from her nose, as she whimpers and pants.

For a moment, she feels satisfied. But it all rushes back up her throat the second she catches her breath. She can’t escape it. Or maybe she can’t get enough of it. Of this feeling—is it control, or is it simple catharsis? She leaps back in and starts biting again, scratching again, this time more haphazardly, almost desperately. She doesn’t even bother covering Tomori’s mouth. But, somehow, no noises escape her.

And then she feels something on her head. A hand.

Tomori’s hand.

It’s shaking, even as she slides it through Raana’s hair and gently runs it over her scalp.

With a quivering, raspy voice, she speaks—

“Raana-chan. I-it’s okay. It’s okay,” she says. And just as Raana freezes up, an arm pulls her in. Tomori’s whole body is shivering, it turns out. But still, it’s so warm.

“I’m not… going anywhere.” She sniffles. “I’m not. We’re not. I promise.”

The weak, unsteady grip around Raana’s waist grows just a little stiffer. She stops resisting. She buries her face in Tomori’s chest, and closes her eyes.

She can still taste the blood she drew from her in her mouth. Still feel the texture of her flesh on her teeth. Her hand is still wet, stained with the tears she had so violently forced out of her mere moments ago.

And yet there she sits, melting into her embrace, so quickly tamed, by nothing more than a touch and a whisper.

It’s really something else, Raana thinks.

The things this girl can do to her. She’s always so full of surprises.

"…For life?," Raana finally asks.

“Yeah. For our whole lives.”

#writing/mygo