'This can't be what it was all for'
A pen scrawled in the periphery hesitantly, almost shakingly. I dragged my hands across my face, pressure building in my temples to an ungodly degree.
'How did I get here?'
I felt a hand clasp my shoulder as the scrawling came to a close with a final swoop. "Well done Satoshi-San" a voice rang out, perhaps belonging to the owner of the hand. Uninterested in finding out the answer, my gaze remained trained on the sole inhabitant at the opposite end of the table.
Quivering and destitute was the only way I could characterize what filled my vision. A visage that so contrasted with what you would expect from someone so young. In recognizing one of the key contributors to this look being myself, my heart drops into my stomach and I am utterly petrified for the first time in I don't know how long.
'When did I become numb to such a scene?'
Attempting to swallow down my existential crisis, I simulated sliding my Adam's apple along twin strips of sandpaper as I stood up, shaking hands with a young man down on his luck. Collecting the recently signed consent judgment into my hands, I sighed staring down at it. Working with debtors was never what I wanted out of life as an attorney, yet I have nonetheless found myself here. Passing the document along to the head paralegal, I attempt to shove down the gnawing feeling of guilt as I continue with my day. 'So we proceed. Half-assed as ever I see.'
Stepping out of the building around 6:30, I am greeted by the bright lights of the city. There's something about Tokyo at night. Where to many it is a hub of activity symbolic of community, to others (namely the careerists) it is a reminder of all the fun you could be having had you been wiser in your youth. Loosening my tie, I trekked toward my sole source of salvation, the convenience store.
En route, I lit a cigarette as my mind wandered. Calling back to that twinge of guilt I had in my office, I became nostalgic. Back to when it was us against the world, fighting for causes we believed in and standing up for those without voices. Sure the only homes our wallets could produce involved tenets with eight legs, but the fulfillment that accompanied such work was everything.
Faintly smiling as I looked at the array of billboards littering the skyline, my internal diatribe continued.
Those nights of work felt endless, yet I'm more tired now than I had ever been then.I wonder why that is. An image came to mind, a face began taking shape from the jaw up as I walked aimlessly. 'When did that switch flip? Where did things go wrong?'
The sound of broken glass filled my ears and my mental image shattered. 'Ah, maybe it was when you -'
I feel a lifting sensation in my navel as it feels like I've crossed some unspoken threshold. I take a pull from my cigarette and blink only to see the world completely change before me. As if a harsh cut were made between two frames of an old film, my reality had been torn asunder.
Architecture medieval, almost Arthurian in nature. Literal creatures walking around me that one could only dream of. I would have pegged this for a fugue state had the hit from my cigarette not so perfectly hit my throat simultaneously.
Stumbling off to the side of the road to regain my bearings, my mind was going a mile a minute. Unable to formulate any coherent ideas in the face of being so brutally displaced I could really only look up at the sky and say, "What the fuck?"