10

Even ten years ago, I knew about the concept of people that would steal from someone while pretending to fuss over them, but it wasn’t like I would naturally assume I was the victim of such a case. Given that I never even considered the possibility, I suppose I just used to be less suspicious back then.

Nowadays, I’m so terrified of thieves that I can’t sleep anywhere in public. Not trains, or airplanes, or anything in between. If I were on the road and passed out from exhaustion, no matter for how long, the first thing I would do when I woke up is check all my pockets for my wallet.

Of course, back then I had a very clear-cut goal of getting to school to attend my lecture, so it’s possible that not considering such things was less a product of a generous mindset and more a matter of priority.

If I had ever come across the opportunity to use my student ID during classes that day, I would have noticed its absence, but unfortunately no such opportunity arose. I’ll now reveal that my student ID had the apartment where I lived at the time printed on it, which is pertinent information.

Regardless, I parked my bicycle in one of the provided parking spaces (which wasn’t easy given the state of the warped rear wheel. I got annoyed at the idea of having to drag it home, but that should have been the least of my worries), made it to my first lecture by the skin of my teeth, and went through an otherwise very normal day on campus. I could not appreciate the fact that it would be my last experience of that normalcy for quite some time.

But, in order to protect what little honor I may have left, it’s worth mentioning that I wasn’t so dense as to feel zero bad premonitions at all. Most of that came from the recorder I had was still holding on to from the scene of my fall, which I had initially intended to throw away.

The damage was such that the recorder was functionally useless, so throwing it away would have been the smartest thing to do. But I hadn’t forgotten or lost the opportunity or anything like that. All that stopped me was the thought that some poor elementary schooler had lost it.

I think it’s fair to say that most would feel guilty upon throwing away something that someone else lost, especially if it had belonged to a child. In fact, given that the item in question had personally led to my terrifying fall, I dare say I’m a rather good person for still feeling that guilt. Under other circumstances, maybe. If I had fully known the truth at the time, that guilt would’ve gone out the window.

I had the recorder sitting on my desk during lecture, and had spent a good majority of my time staring at it, unsure what to do. There was even a part of me that thought I should just leave it there and callously ignore what became of it, or pretend I accidentally left it there when exiting the room.

Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting this, but having the spare time to argue with myself about such a topic during a lecture is one of the greatest things about university. Since I personally didn’t have anyone to talk to, I had plenty of spare time to indulge in all my negative fantasies.

As I sorted through options in my head, I noticed a sticker label on the recorder. There was some text written on it in black pen.

[4-1, U]

A class number and name. Now, it should be obvious that the sticker didn’t really have an English letter written on it, but I can’t reveal the actual name written down (even if it was only hiragana). In fact, I had even considered obscuring the class, but ultimately decided that wasn’t specific enough to be personal information. There are so many fourth-year elementary school classes that knowing a few numbers doesn’t help anything, and besides, I can hedge it up with a precautionary, “The class number is fictitious”.

On top of all this, after the pain from my fall had subsided alongside the shock of my road racer’s mechanical troubles (to put it lightly), the soprano recorder slowly began eliciting certain feelings from me.

At first, it was hard to toss out something someone else had lost, which morphed into guilt over breaking something that a child had dropped, which then gave way to a completely different set of thoughts… about another recorder.

It brought to mind a memory of the prior week, where I could have sworn I saw a recorder in a blue pouch sticking out of that girl’s school backpack. While I can’t remember faces, I wasn’t kidding when I said my memory in general is quite good. I am very good at remembering features, like clothes, hairstyles, and accessories. Or recorders, as was the case at that moment. I was able to connect the girl whose actions were burned into my mind to the recorder I was holding.

Now, of course, that would also mean that the girl walking alongside her would have had a recorder in her backpack, too (logically, that means it was a music day for [the fictitious] class 4-1), so I couldn’t immediately assume the girl had chucked her recorder into my bike wheel from that memory alone. That would have been less of a deduction and more of an assumption.

But it was enough to make me wonder if the fleeting memory of a girl looking down at me had actually been real, which suddenly gave way to a pervasive sense of indescribable unease that seeped deeper into my mind as the lecture went on.

Perhaps the situation is so specific that I shouldn’t call that feeling a “premonition”, and some of the details were arguably too vague for that moniker. But there were still a few hints that I later thought back to and wondered, “I should have known”, so maybe I’m just trying to show off. Maybe I’m a little too shameless in retroactively claiming a bad premonition to the terrible things I’m about to describe happening to my past self. I’ve just proved my occasional lack of understanding regarding even my own personality.

Regardless, as my lecture went on, my anxiety only increased, and I began to feel truly rattled. Like I had made a big mistake. To give a comparison, it was like I had locked myself into an unwinnable route in an RPG, like what I’d done was beyond fixing, like I’d wandered into the jungle without the slightest form of protection. The feeling shot through my entire body, all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes.

But that was only an emotion, something my rational mind could very easily deny. Clearly, I was overthinking and worrying too much. It was just a mental tic, like checking that the door was locked over and over, or washing my hands time and time again… yeah, I know. I’m a little better nowadays, but even back then my own timidity repulsed me.

My general anxiety levels have only risen by the year, and even now as a 30-year-old I rip open my sealed envelopes two or three times to make sure my manuscript isn’t somehow damaged. I try to keep at least a hundred envelopes stocked in my house. Although I wasn’t that far gone a decade ago, I would already check sealed envelopes at least once before sending them as a young man (I’d get seized with unfounded worry that I’d put the wrong letter in, or that a personal note got slipped between documents, and such delusions have only gotten worse with time). Still, I wouldn’t say I was very prone to worrying, so I felt rather astonished at how much I was overthinking a simple “premonition”. In fact, behind that astonishment was a sort of sadness at how small and feeble I was.

That led to concerns that such mental issues would prevent me from becoming an author. Those concerns have been handily proven wrong since I’m now an author, so I shouldn’t have been wasting all that headspace on them.

I should move things along. After I finished all my scheduled lectures, it was time to go home. Now, I wasn’t in elementary, middle, or high school, so part of me wonders if it’s correct to refer to going back to my university boarding house as “going home”, but I will anyway. When the time comes, you go home. Despite the lingering feeling of unease, I didn’t change my usual route.

I’m forced to acknowledge that I’m not good at changing my routines, looking back. It’s just as true now as it was then. If I’m going to the same place, I will always take the same route, and now that I’m thinking about it, I eat from a pretty small list of the same foods over and over. As I was writing the last sentence, I realized that I always reserve plane and train tickets for the same departure times. I tend away from any possibility of unexpected incidents or accidents.

That even applies to my work, if I’m brutally honest with myself. I wake up at 5 AM to start writing, and the converse is that if I don’t wake up at 5 AM, I can’t work. I genuinely can’t get anything done. If I could find some kind of supplier that designed planners with ten-minute intervals, then you’d better believe I’d buy a hundred of those. That’s how deep my desire goes to live in extremely conventional and predictable ways.

Despite how much I love to be seen as eccentric, I hate any form of change in my daily life. I don’t get it much myself, honestly. I don’t know if there’s anyone else like me, and I’m not sure if I think there should be. There was a time where I didn’t even like the word “troublemaker”. It had a playful, positive connotation that always annoyed me. Strange how life works, given that I write story after story with troublemakers in them now.

Back then, after having that accident… my own sort of traffic accident, there was of course a part of me that wanted to quit going to school and stay home. I should’ve just given in to the feeling, but instead I went to university like always and went home like always. That devotion to routine really is amazing in its own way.

Maybe if I had learned anything through my subsequent experiences, I wouldn’t still be the same today. But here I am, living an excessively routine life despite everything that happened. Guess I never learned that sticking too hard to a routine can cause trouble… or at least to look out for any sprouting seeds of trouble along the road I always walk. I may be uncontrollable in many ways, but you’ll still find me walking the same roads every day, even if I knew for a fact that landmines had been planted along them. I’d walk beside them like nothing had even changed.

And so, I walked back to my apartment, like nothing had even changed. Okay, technically I had to drag my busted road racer alongside me instead of riding it home, so strictly speaking, my routine had already been obliterated. I parked it in my personal bike space, wondering whether I should repair it or just chuck the thing (Okay, I can see that I’ve made many suggestive, novel-esque statements, so I’ll just be blunt: I ended up tossing the road racer. This is due to another lingering issue that still haunts me, which is my chronic incapability to take things in for repairs. I never end up getting anything fixed, even if fixing it would be cheaper. I just buy a new item, no matter the cost. I’m self-aware enough about this to never ask for extended warranties, because I wouldn’t use them. Best I can tell, my psychology behind it is I don’t like other people touching my stuff. So, I got rid of the road racer and later bought one of the exact same model). Then I stepped inside my apartment building.

I may have lived there, but that was a decade ago, so I don’t really remember what it looked like. I may not have been as itinerant as the classic painter Katsushika Hokusai, but ever since I started living on my own, I don’t think I’ve been in any one place for more than a year. There’ve been so many apartments that I can’t remember this specific one more than another. I’m trying to recall if the door had an automatic locking system… no, probably not. Given what happened later, that wouldn’t make any sense.

As I was writing this, I was able to locate that old apartment, but of course I won’t be revealing that location here. It may be a decade old address, but it still exists, and that would still be a leak of personal information. For the new person that lives there, anyway.

I made my way into the apartment building, heading up the stairs. It was a six-floor complex with no elevator, and I lived on the sixth floor. I didn’t think much of it back then, as a young lad bursting with energy, but now that trip sounds like pure torture. That apartment’s definitely been updated with an elevator by now. I hope.

As I arrived at my room door and went to unlock it, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have my key.

Huh?

Naturally, my first thought was that my big fall had thrown it out of my pocket. I searched all my pockets and carefully emptied my bag. I’m a cautious person by nature, or at least a timid person, so I don’t lose things often, but I’ve known myself to lose a wallet or a watch occasionally on my travels (in which case my caution would be noted in the fact that the most valuable thing I ever bring with me is the money in said wallet). This might be difficult for anyone who doesn’t think like me to understand, but it’s because I’m so cautious that when I find I’ve lost something, I feel more confident than upset. I feel that having lost it was an inevitability, take pride in the fact that I was right to be cautious, and distort the whole thing around into something that I become happy about.

Even though I’m writing about my past self, it still hurts to put it objectively on paper. It might hurt less if I was talking about something separate from my present self, but even now, at 30 years old, that part of me hasn’t changed.

I may not have had any trauma back then, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe I was just a little strange in the head from the get-go. In that case, maybe I don’t have as much of a case against the girl as I thought. No, wait, of course I do. I have to. When I think about the tragedy that followed, it only makes sense that anything I say against that girl, no matter how it comes out, is acceptable.

At that point, I had realized my keys were gone, but still had not noticed my lost student ID. Basically, I still didn’t fully grasp the situation I was in. I wish I could just go back in time and warn myself.

But that me remained relatively calm, and concluded that I should call the apartment agency and ask them to open my room with a spare key. Upon further reflection, I realized that since I had lost my key, it would be more appropriate to ask for a lock replacement. My thoughts fell into place eventually.

I checked all my pockets one final time to make sure the key was gone, then contacted the apartment agency, whose number I had saved in my phone for exactly that kind of situation.

I was told a locksmith would arrive in about three hours, to have the replacement fee ready to pay him, and to wait. I didn’t do anything special with the sudden three hours of extra time dropped in my lap. I went shopping at a nearby bookstore (by nearby, I mean a couple of miles away), and spent the time reading my purchased book in the park.

I’m sure there were many more meaningful ways I could have spent that time… Then again, an aspiring author shouldn’t count time reading as time wasted, but… It just feels like I’m missing something.

Surely there was more I could have done, right?

I could have called the police, or… something. I could have done literally anything else.

But I didn’t feel the need to do anything, and spent three hours reading a book. I considered how interesting the book had been as I made my way back to my apartment, met up with the locksmith, and waited for him to open my door.

The entire lock changing process didn’t even take 30 minutes.

I was rather excited to see the structure of a front door lock, which was new for me, and the thought crossed my mind that the information could come in handy for a novel. That said, to this day I’ve never been in a writing scenario where the process of changing a front door lock has come up.

I paid the man his fee (about a hundred bucks or so), waved him goodbye, and finally retreated into my dwelling.

A dwelling that already housed someone else.