Chapter Text
April 4, 2015
The night had folded in on itself. Heavy, airless, and unkind. Keiji sat slumped over his desk, his pen poised uselessly above a half-finished paragraph. The dim cone of light from his desk lamp flattened everything into sepia tones, as if even color had grown weary. His laptop hummed softly beside him, screen black, fan sighing. A faint breeze from the cracked window carried the smell of rain that never came.
He stared at the paper, the last assignment of the semester, and felt a kind of hollow exhaustion press against his ribs. The words refused to move. His thoughts felt waterlogged, sinking under their own weight.
He sighed, rubbing at his temples, the skin there tender from too much tension. “What am I even doing…” he murmured to the empty room.
For a moment he let his eyes wander to the open notebook beside the pile of printed articles. The one where he jotted stray ideas, fragments of sentences, things that felt too personal to type. His pen moved before he could think better of it, tracing a single sentence that came from somewhere deep and irrational:
“If tomorrow never comes, I hope my last thought was something kind.”
He read it twice, then underlined kind with a shaky line. It felt too sentimental, too exposed, but it was the only truth he could articulate tonight. He closed the notebook softly, as if sealing away something fragile.
His lamp buzzed faintly; the bulb flickered once. Maybe it was time to stop. His whole body ached from stillness. He stacked the pages neatly — his ritual against chaos — and shut his laptop. The click of it closing was louder than it should have been. For a moment, he simply sat there in the sudden quiet, hands resting against the wood of the desk, eyes unfocused.
The silence pressed in like water. His body was still young but felt ancient with fatigue. He turned off the lamp, and the world vanished into soft, grainy darkness. The air was cool on his face as he crossed the short distance to his bed. Sheets, pillow, weight. The familiar rhythm of breathing carried him downward, and the last thing he saw before his mind dissolved into sleep was the faint afterimage of that single written line glowing behind his eyelids.