“The Atlantic puffin spends most of its life, every year from fall until late spring, living out in the open ocean, alone. In late May, however, it finds its way back to the colony where it was born, reunites with its mate, and returns to their nesting site. There they build a burrow together. Though they share responsibilities, the male spends most of his time guarding the nest, while the female spends it incubating her eggs and feeding her hatchlings. They remain there until August, when they part ways, returning to their solitary life at sea.”

“…Tomorin?”
“…Hey. Tomorin?”
Anon’s voice echoed through my mind and slowly crept into focus. I suddenly found myself standing in a quiet, dark room in the aquarium near RiNG.
No one was there except for me, and for her, and for our reflection on the reinforced glass, and for the puffins in the exhibit, waddling about beyond it.
I whimpered as her hand touched my shoulder.

“The presentation’s been over for a while now, y’know? C’mon, let’s go get those crepes!”
“A-ah.” I turned to look at her, still shaking off the haze of restless thoughts blanketing me. She was wearing her thick-rimmed glasses… I think she’d said at some point that she forgot to pick up her new contacts. The frame made her eyes appear unusually shiny and pretty.
“S-sorry.” I tried to draw my attention away from her eyes and began to explain myself. “I started… thinking… and all this time just, passed…”
“Hmmm?” She leaned forwards, and I flinched. Her sharp canine showed through her smile, and on it shone the dull, azure lighting in the room. “Something on your mind? Tell me, tell me!”
Her probing made me shrink into myself.
I tried to put my thoughts into words, but as I did I became more and more certain that anything I said would just sound strange and offputting. I thought better of it.
“…I-it’s nothing. Don’t… don’t worry about it.”
“Hmmmmm… Well, if you say so!” She smiled, and relief washed over me like a high tide.
Ano-chan can be a little… forceful, sometimes. But she’s kind, too.
“C’mon, then!” She took my arm and pulled me along. I quickly gave in and followed her. “This place gets busy quick, okay?”

A different day.
It was evening, an hour or so after school.
Winter had started to set in, and so the sky was already dark, and dotted with stars, despite the time.
I sat on the penumbra of a sterile white streetlight, at the edge of an empty coin-op parking lot. The vines on the walls behind it reflected a dull, alien mint green as they twisted around the faded sign of an abandoned live house.
My fingers were running slowly through soft mottled fur. The calico cat I was petting purred, shifted around on my lap, and opened one eye in my direction; and its shine cut through the moonless night, and sent a shiver down my spine.
I turned my head. Raana was next to me.
She sat cross-legged, petting a black cat as it slept by her side. Her body leaned against mine. We’d been here, sitting in silence among cats and crickets, for so long that her weight had faded into the recesses of my mind, blending in like background noise.
In the quiet and the dark, my thoughts began wandering. Restlessly. They tugged at my chest, lightly at first but growing stronger and stronger, until I couldn’t help but speak them aloud.

“S-say, Raana-chan.”
“Hmm?” She opened her eyes.
“We both… go to all-girls’ schools, right?” I asked.
“Mm.” She nodded.
“Don’t you think that’s… strange? A… school you can only go to if you’re… a girl…” I continued. I felt my own words choking me up a little.
“School’s just weird,” Raana answered, without even stopping to think. “They have all these silly made-up rules. I just listen ‘cos I don’t wanna get scolded.” Her lips pouted, ever so slightly, as she said this.
“A-ah…” I pondered her words. “But, I think those are… for your own good…” I recalled Mom telling me the same thing, years ago.
Raana clicked her tongue in response. “That’s dumb. I know what’s good for me.” Her tone felt darker than normal, and hearing it made me a little scared.
“…But I like the uniform,” she resumed. She tugged playfully at her skirt.
“Y-you do…?”, I asked.
“It’s comfy.” She kicked her legs outwards. “Easy to move in.”

I looked down at myself, and tugged at the collar of my blazer.
I thought about those days, which came and went every so often, where its fabric felt unbelievably suffocating, so much so that I felt an urge to tear it off; or the ones where it felt like the skin exposed by my skirt itched like a thousand fire-ant bites when the air brushed up against it, and I wanted to run away from class and wrap my whole body in a blanket; or the ones where, somehow, I felt both ways at once.
“I… I think mine is a little… uncomfortable, sometimes…” I muttered. Or maybe I only thought it. I wasn’t sure.

“Hmmmmm.”
Raana leaned over and rested her chin on my shoulder.
I tilted my head, wondering what she was thinking, and when I did, she poked my cheek with her index finger.
I jumped. A noise came out of my mouth. She giggled.
“Hehe.”
The weight of her gaze, lingering and pushing up against me, began to feel like too much for me to bear. I searched around for somewhere else to rest my eyes–and found them drawn downwards.
Toward her legs.

They looked… so smooth, and so soft, bathing in the dim moonlight. The pleats lining her plaid skirt folded and creased between her thighs, forming pretty fractal patterns in the cloth; her beige top hugged the slight curves of her body, rising and falling alongside it; its little red ribbon floated gently over her chest, hanging below her collar fold; and framed by it I saw the lines of her collarbone, shaded by her pale skin, meeting in the middle, and then fading away.
It all seemed to fit her perfectly. She seemed at home, just as comfortable as she said she was, like she was meant to wear it, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
Why she seemed that way.
Why I felt so off when I wore my own uniform and saw myself in the mirror.
Was I… doing something wrong?

Raana ducked forward and locked eyes with me once again. Hers were half-closed into an unreadable squint; she was still smiling.
I recoiled and averted my eyes.
“Tomori. You’re different today,” she whispered.
I gasped under my breath; I didn’t think I was letting it show. “I… am?”
“Mm. You’re always calm when you’re here. But today you’re restless. I can feel it.”
I tensed up as she continued. “It’s kinda funny.”
“F-funny… how?” As usual, I couldn’t figure out what she meant.
“Hmmm… like you’re all on edge and it makes me wanna mess with you.” She smirked.
The hairs on my back stood on end. I mouthed a weak “…please don’t” while staring at the ground below us.
“What’s up?,” she asked, with her face still close to mine, still held in the same smile.
“I… um…” I tried to explain myself, but couldn’t untangle the knot in my stomach. “N-no, it’s nothing…”
“Liar. Tell me,” she cut in, tugging on that knot. It hurt.
“Ah, I… there’s just… something I’ve been thinking about…”
“Hmmm?”
“W-well…”

Anon and I sat inside the crepe shop by the aquarium.
I was watching my reflection dance along the surface of a glass of orange juice; I twirled a straw around it and watched my face skew and muddle amid the ripples before slowly settling back into shape. Its sight was making my head feel strange; even more than it normally did; but I couldn’t get myself to turn away.
At some point, Anon had started talking about… something. I don’t know what. I felt bad, but I couldn’t focus well enough to process a single word of it.
I just kept staring, and staring, at myself staring back at me, until one thought wriggled through a murky sea of doubt and hesitation and found its way out of my mouth in an aimless whisper.
“…Am I… a… female?”

I heard a strange, sudden, gulping sound. Anon seemed to be having trouble swallowing her iced tea.
Some of it flew out of her mouth, and she coughed once or twice; then she wiped herself off with a white cloth napkin and stared at me for a while.
“Um…” She put a finger up to her chin and let her eyes wander, humming along. Her pensive expression felt right at home under her glasses. “…I guess you are? I… think so?” Her voice carried an unsteady lilt. “But that’s, like… up to you, though, isn’t it?”
Her words shook me out of my stupor like a cold breeze.
“U-Up… to me?”
“Yeah! Like, it’s your choice, y’know? We’re in the Reiwa era, after all! Be what you wanna be, and all that!”
“…What I… want to be…”
I looked into the orange juice again, and found that I seemed even more distorted than before,
so I stirred the liquid with the straw until the image twisted away, into nothingness.

I took the calico on my lap and lifted it up slightly, towards Raana. It mewled in response.
“This cat is… i-it’s a female, right?,” I asked.
“Hm?” She eyed it for a second, then looked back up at me and answered—“It’s a cat.”
“A… a female cat, right…?” I tried gently to turn it over, just to make sure.
“A cat,” she repeated, confidently.
I turned her answer over in my head, trying to make sense of it.
“It’s… it’s just a cat?”
“Yeah.” She nodded.
“B-but…” I looked down at it, and realized that it was staring back at me. It mewled one more time.
My stomach burned with anxiety as Raana simply waited on my next word, and I began to ramble. “It… it has… to… breed and raise its kittens, and, and feed them, and—”
“Tomori.”
Raana cut me off.
I tried to speak and realized that her finger was touching my lips, holding them shut. I barely stopped myself from yelping in response.
She was staring right at me, and er eyes seemed all of a sudden to be burning with an intensity I’d only ever seen her show on stage. Her usual, unconcerned smile had faded away.
“A cat does what it wants,” she said, in a low voice; stern, but… somehow, reassuring.

What it wants.
What… I want.
Those words had been seared into my mind since yesterday. I felt their shape rear its head as Raana spoke them.
I’d spent my whole life so far just living how I was told. Trying my best not to get in anyone’s way. I watched as everyone around me talked about their hopes, their dreams, their desires; but I could never feel the pull they all felt.
…Not until two years ago, that is.

Being in a band finally showed me the sheer weight of that pull. Of that overwhelming, inescapable want other people felt so readily.
But I’d never considered why.
Maybe, I thought, it was because it let me escape.
Because it was a refuge.
A refuge from the crushing, asphyxiating, sickening burden of having to… be myself. Of having to stand on my own, to draw a line in the sand around my feet.
It was incredibly comforting, I realized, to simply be… part of something greater.
But it made being pulled away and singled out hurt all the more.

Eventually, once my heartbeat settled, I leaned towards her and stammered out a question.
“What… um, what do you want? Raana-chan.”
“Me?” Her head tilted aside.
“Y-yeah. …I wanna know.”
She replied right away. “I wanna play guitar. And I wanna… eat sweets.”
“A-ah…” Something in my guts turned as I listened to her.
Her answer didn’t… feel like what I wanted. I thought she might have misunderstood me. “I-I mean, besides that…”
“Hmmmmmm…” She let her eyes drift off and up towards the night sky, and she scratched her chin, before turning back to me. “Nope, nothing.”
“Y-you don’t… think about all the stuff people always talk about? Like… getting… married, or… starting a family…”
“Boring. No.” Her voice turned sharp and drove straight through me, but I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I kept talking.
“B-but you’re… a female, right? Uh, I mean, um. A girl.”
“I am?” She sounded so much softer, all of a sudden.
“A-aren’t you…?”
“Hmmmmmmmmm.” Her face began to contort, and her gaze wandered elsewhere. “Hmmm.”
She paused.
“Dunno.”
“Y-you don’t know…?” I asked.
“Dunno. Don’t care,” she continued.
“Y-you don’t… B-but what would you be, if not…” I said, though I felt my own thoughts choking up in my throat.
She turned her hand over and extended her index finger, pointing it at herself.
“Raana.”

I sat and looked at her. Her expression was even harder to parse than usual. I hid my face behind my knees.
“…I-I don’t… know… what I want,” I finally whispered, and felt my mouth quiver with every word.
When I did, the knot in my stomach untangled itself; but as it did it unleashed something, an indescribable feeling, cold like sleet and tacky like freshly dampened mud, and it washed all at once over my body, making me tremble.
“That’s fine,” Raana answered. Her tone remained both forceful and gentle. “Just don’t let anyone else tell you.”
The shivers slowed down just a little.
I sat in silence, catching my breath, gasp by gasp.

…Then, something took shape in my mind.
I realized what it was that made Raana feel so distant, yet so hard to look away from. What it was that made my skin feel itchy and warm every time I saw her play her guitar, every time she turned towards me and wordlessly smiled.

She’s lost. We all are. But she’s free. She does what she wants; she knows what she wants.

I pictured the shackles that have bound my limbs for my whole life, holding me back, gouging into the skin on my wrists and ankles every time I struggled hopelessly against them.
And I wondered how it might feel to be like her.

On that night, I decided.
That I’d follow her, until I could learn how to want for myself.