The screech of a car’s tires startled me awake from my midday dreaming, and I rushed to provide the owner with their share of gasoline and service. As I held the pump in my hand, the stench of gasoline drifted in the air around me, and finally settled on my shoulders. I breathed it in, reminding myself to keep up the mask of customer service, and to keep myself from leaking out the edges. It was usually successful. In the past two years, I had learned roughly how to keep myself at bay, at least when I was covered by the stench of gasoline. I had forced myself to remember the association, because I knew that as soon as I let myself out in the gasoline station, it was over for me. I would truly have nowhere left to go.

Watching the car drive by and out of the station, I glanced across the road to scan for potential incomers. The streets were empty, and I checked my watch. 6:00 am. I supposed it was still early, and that the car which had just left would be the last for a while. I returned to my seat near the building, and let myself get caught up in my thoughts once more. 

If the second year of high school could be considered the peak of my happiness, the third year was the trough. Following the admission of Yukimura into the hospital, nothing was ever quite the same. While I was still struggling with the broken mess that was my conscience, Ono and Maeda swiftly began to distance themselves from me, almost as if they were never close to me. I hadn’t understood why they no longer opened up to me, spoke to me, laughed with me. It was painful, but each time I felt like crying, the tears would not come out. Instead, the only thing that continued to flow was my anger, and I found myself lashing out at anyone, and at anything. I had dropped to a point lower than I had started, and I couldn’t withstand it, because my weak, fragile heart had gotten too used to the acceptance of those I called my friends.

There was only one time I attempted to face my problems with words instead of my fists, and that was the last time Ono ever spoke to me again. I had been desperate, asking over and over again why we couldn’t change, why we couldn’t go back to the way things were before. The only thing I had wanted was to preserve those times, so where did I go wrong? That time, Ono didn’t spare me an ounce of relief, nor did he show me the smile that I had hopelessly wished to see. His face was as cold and distant as the day I first met him, and his bitter words pierced through my soul. 

“But we can’t go back, Hanzou. Because you were the one who started it, and you were the one who ended it. Anything that we have to regret, it was all because of you.”

I think that a part of me may have been aware that Ono had planned to use me from the start, or at least I had had my suspicions about it, but it wasn’t enough to keep me safe from being played in the palm of his hand. I had never been one to choose logic over my emotions, and thus I found myself turning to chaos just to get by. When I was consumed by rage, and when I was fighting until my knuckles turned dark, my mind would black out and I could forget. When I was smashing down doors and shattering the panes of windows until my fists were numb with pain, the thoughts of our times together would not resurface to my brain. If that was the case, then I thought, maybe it’d be alright to return to those violent days of the past.

The rest of the year blurred by in that manner, and shortly after being thrown into adulthood I felt the distinct urge to escape somewhere far, far away from that place. My memories from the school haunted me, and yet as usual, I could find no comfort from my home either. When I saw the look in my younger sister’s face each time she encountered me, I could only perceive the terror in her pitch-black eyes. From years of avoiding her in fear of harming the newborn that was the light of my parents’ lives, I had become a stranger to her. And not only to her, I felt a stranger to all of them. I was a madman who they were forced to accept, and they only fed and clothed me in an attempt to keep me satiated. It would be better if I was gone. That was the thought that ran through my head as I left the place where I grew up, in search of somewhere that would better suit someone like me. At that time, I had hardly been hoping to start anew. I was only acutely aware that the longer I spent in that house, the more crazed I became, and that my heart was aching to be left alone.