The subway ride back to my own station, to my own home, was the most surreal experience of my entire life, surpassing even the horrors of which I was the sole witness. Every detail of the real world was an assault on my newly reconstituted senses. The hum of the fluorescent lights, the worn pattern of the subway car floor, the faded advertisement for a soda brand, the muffled music from cheap headphones playing so loud I could make out the lyrics, the murmur of a street vendor shouting "gum, lollipops, chips!"—everything was so painfully, overwhelmingly normal. I looked at the faces of the other passengers, each absorbed in their own small world of music, tiredness, or boredom, and felt an unbridgeable distance. I had returned, but I no longer belonged here. I was a traveler from a country that didn't appear on maps, and I carried its strange earth stuck to the soles of my shoes.
Upon arriving home, the familiar smell of home-cooked food and the sound of my mother's voice on the phone in the living room hit me with the force of a wave. It was the sound and smell of life, of continuity. A life that, until an eternity or a few hours ago, I had taken for granted.
My mother saw me and her face lit up. "Kenji? What are you doing here? I thought you were having dinner with Vale."
I tried to smile. The movement of my facial muscles felt clumsy, as if I were learning to use them again. "Changed my plans. Do you need help with anything?"
The question surprised her. I saw a flicker of confusion in her eyes before she hid it. "No, my love, thank you. I'm fine. But are you okay? You look pale."
"I'm just tired," I lied. It was a lie, but for the first time, it wasn't to evade or manipulate. It was to protect. How could I begin to explain to this woman, my mother, that I had just returned from a journey through the bowels of my own soul?
I went to my room and closed the door. It was a time capsule. The posters of bands I no longer listened to, the pile of video games by the console, the clothes thrown on a chair. It was the room of the lazy boy who had chosen misery because it was easy. I felt like a stranger, an impostor in the skin of my younger self.
I sat on the bed and looked at my phone. The message I had sent to Valeria was there. And her reply, which arrived a few minutes later: "Ok, weirdo. Everything okay? Call me when you can. I'll save your plate."
My heart pounded. The normalcy of her message was torture. She was there, living her life, completely oblivious that I had just returned from war.
I didn't have the courage.
That was the simple truth. In the void, with the flame of resolve burning, everything seemed possible. In the harsh, cold reality of my old room, fear paralyzed me. What did I tell her? How could I act normal? Every word that came out of my mouth would feel like a lie. The person she knew and loved, that cynical, apathetic boy, no longer existed. And the man who had replaced him was too broken, too full of unspeakable horrors, to sit down for dinner and talk about the weather.
I spent an hour typing and deleting text messages. "Sorry, had a terrible day." No, that made it about me. Again. "Feeling a little weird, talk tomorrow." No, that was cowardly.
Finally, I realized I couldn't do it over the phone. I owed her, at the very least, a face-to-face conversation. I owed her the courage to look her in the eye while pretending to be the man she thought I was.
The walk to her apartment was a stroll down death row. Every step brought me closer to the possibility of ruining everything again. What if my trauma leaked out? What if my gaze scared her? What if the weight of what I knew was so great that it crushed her too?
I reached her door. I could hear soft music inside. For a full minute, I stood there, hand raised, unable to knock. The image of Koro, fading, appeared in my mind. You must continue.
I knocked on the door.
It opened almost instantly. And there she was. Valeria. Real. Alive. Vibrant. Her brown hair was tied in a messy bun, and she wore an old, oversized band T-shirt. She wasn't a vision from purgatory. She wasn't a memory. It was her. And she smiled at me, a genuine, warm smile, though tinged with slight confusion.
"Hey, stranger," she said. "About time. I was about to eat your portion."
I wanted to cry. I wanted to fall to my knees and beg forgiveness for everything. I wanted to tell her about the hell I had just returned from.
Instead, I forced another smile. "Sorry. The subway was super slow. And then... I got sidetracked."
"Sidetracked?" she asked, raising an eyebrow as she let me in. "That's not new. But you're here now. Come in, sit down, I'll warm it up."
I entered her apartment. It was exactly as I remembered it from the memory, but instead of being heavy with sadness, it was filled with her warmth, her life. Architecture books piled on the floor, sketches taped to the wall, the scent of her perfume and food. It was a home.
"Want a beer?" she asked from the kitchen.
"Sure, thanks," I replied, my voice sounding strained and strange to my own ears.
I sat at her small dining table. It was an act of superhuman will. Every instinct told me to flee, to shield myself from the intimacy of this scene, a scene I knew I had desecrated in the past.
She returned with two beers and then brought the katsudon. She placed it in front of me. The ceramic bowl, the sheen of the egg, the aroma. It was an exact replica of the meal from the Feast of Mirrors. My stomach churned.
"You look really serious," she said, sitting across from me. "Did something happen with your exam?"
There it was. The opening. The perfect opportunity to launch into my self-pitying monologue, just as I had in the original timeline. The easy way.
The flame inside me burned brightly. No.
"No, the exam is the least of it," I said, surprising myself. "How are you? How was work?"
Her expression shifted from concern to genuine surprise. She blinked. "Work? Uh... fine. Same old. The coffee maker broke down and the manager almost had a fit. Nothing exciting."
"I'm sorry about the coffee maker," I said. And I meant it. I was sorry for every small inconvenience in her day that I had never bothered to listen to.
She smiled, a small, genuine smile. "Thanks. Well, eat, before it gets completely cold."
I picked up the chopsticks. My hands trembled slightly. I had to do it. I had to eat. It was the only way to maintain the charade. The only way to prove I could be normal.
I took a piece of pork with egg and rice. I brought it to my mouth.
And the world broke.
The real taste, the delicious taste of food made with love, exploded on my tongue. But at the same time, my mind, conditioned by purgatory, provided the other taste. The phantom taste. The taste of ash, of exhaustion, of sadness. Reality and traumatic memory collided in my mouth in a sensory dissonance impossible to bear.
A sob escaped me, a guttural, animalistic sound. I dropped the chopsticks, which clattered against the plate.
"Kenji?" Valeria's voice was filled with alarm. "What's wrong? Is it bad?"
I couldn't speak. The dam had broken. All the horror, all the pain, all the grief I had held at bay with iron discipline since returning, flooded out. Tears streamed down my face—tears for a loyal dog, for a lost future, for a burning city, for a forest of wounds.
"Kenji, you're scaring me," she said, her voice trembling.
I rose from the chair, the movement clumsy, spasmodic. The world swayed. I rounded the table, towards her. She cringed in her chair, eyes wide with fear.
And I collapsed.
I fell to my knees in front of her and hugged her waist, burying my face in her lap, clinging to her like a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood. My body shook with sobs that seemed to tear me inside out.
"I'm sorry," I managed to gasp between retches. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
"You're sorry? For what?" she asked, her fear beginning to give way to overwhelming confusion. I felt her hand touch my hair, hesitantly.
"For everything," I sobbed into the fabric of her jeans. "For the feast... for the garden... I didn't know... the thorns... the mirror... I was so blind."
My words were a madman's delirium. They made no sense to her. But to me, they were everything. It was the confession I could never make.
I struggled to catch my breath, lifting my head to look at her. My face was disfigured by weeping, my eyes those of a man who had seen the end of the universe in a carnival mirror.
"Valeria, forgive me," I said, and my voice was now a broken whisper, but clear. "Forgive me for everything. For every time I didn't listen to you. For every time I took you for granted. Forgive me for the man I've been and for the man I was becoming. Forgive me, please."
She looked at me, and I saw terror and confusion wrestling on her face. She didn't understand my words. She didn't understand the source of this torrential pain. But she saw the agony in my eyes. She saw the truth of my repentance, even if she didn't know the sin.
Her expression softened. The fear receded, replaced by a surge of the same compassion and care that I had so selfishly consumed in the past. Her hands, now firm, cupped my head, her fingers brushing through my hair.
"Shhh, it's okay," she whispered, as her own tears began to well up, tears of empathy for a pain she couldn't comprehend. "I'm here, Kenji. I'm here. I don't know what's happening, but I'm here."
And as she held me, kneeling and broken on her kitchen floor, I knew the charade was over. Normalcy was a fortress I could no longer defend. I was exposed, my soul laid bare. And in her response, in her embrace, I found no judgment. I found a grace I did not deserve. The next chapter of my life, that of truth and rebuilding, had begun. And it was far more terrifying, and far more hopeful, than any hell I could have imagined.