Floating Like a Lilo ── Itadori Yuuji (✓)

06 TRIVIALISM

A FACE SO FAIR
YOU COULD NOT SEE
ALL THE LIES I TOLD TO YOU

kill yer darlin,
emme woods

A nightmare elicits more than the reality of bloodied lands. When you can't fully be here, you go to the places where you did feel alive - even if those places are filled with horror and misery. Feeling alive is a soliloquy of all the thoughts in the world amassing to the bluest one; you are not you in those nightmares, not the person you make yourself out to be, not a god or a human or a curse at all.

Instead, what plagues on your first night in the dorm alongside the raging moon, cold as the smile Father last gave you, is the litany of distant memories crowding your head like a pile of autumn leaves. You know those leaves are dying, that everywhere things are falling to sleep just like Mother, but the disappointment of 'yesterday' in the murky timeless echo was just the reminder of how you watched Mother's grave be dug.

It is not necessarily a nightmare, but death held her hand and you had watched those curses swallow her whole at the mercy of a thousand gods in agony; they will writhe in human emotion when you ascend to find her again.

She is lost; where is she? At the family grave on the hill overlooking the town, or deep in the waters of an unforgiving echo, pulled out from the framed photographs on walls for Father to hoard alongside a pint of gin?

O' death, she sings, where is thy sting?

Without an answer, you awake.

▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃

Tokyo sings with the click of boots against pristine pavements, marble touching marble; words ebb from people's lips around you but they become webbed into the air tightly, too disillusioned to understand. It was a city that makes you wonder if it cries itself to sleep every night, hurting from the pain of being alive; it's eyes must ache with the weight of unshed tears, for the burden of humanity brings to life anything it touches.

You sit on the metal railing, unfazed by the passing cars and loud traffic to which you become accustomed to with every passing minute. Eyes drift over to Fushiguro and Itadori, who wait patiently with you.

You cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking. Below the surface of the fragile web of thoughts, lingers the truth.

"I'm gonna get an ice lolly," Itadori says decidedly; immediately, he looks at you. "Do you want one as well?"

You blink, the mist around your eyes clearing, "Sure. I'll have whatever you're having."

Fushiguro rolls his eyes, unamused, "Be quick. It would be rude if we turned up late."

"Gojo-sensei is always late," You hum, "We learn from the best."

Two minutes later, Itadori is sprinting towards the two of you with two blue lollies in his hands. He hands one to you and you hate how a blush creeps onto your cheek at the brushing of your skin with him.

"Hm," Itadori ponders, looking over to Fushiguro, "How are there only four first-years? Isn't that too few?"

As he asks so, you take a bite out of the lolly, the taste of blueberry lingers on your tongue with a curling sweetness. It was a beautiful flavour, and you understand why he had it. Blue holds the deepest connotations, after all.

"Well, have you ever met anyone who can see curses before?" Fushiguro replies.

You don't bother opening your mouth to say something; what would you say after all? For a long time, curses were a silent outreach of the devil's smile, healing in the ruptures in your broken heart with a frothy venom. It was some black and rotting cavity of wrongness that hurt somewhere inside you; you had felt it but could never quite name it.