7

Now, even if you’ve never seen a little girl get torn to shreds, I don’t think I have to tell you that it was quite a gruesome scene. But in that moment (after a brief prayer for the departed to rest in peace, of course), my focus was not the victim, but the other girl who had been walking with her.

Now, having conveyed this to you the way I did, you may think, “Ah, c’mon, Sensei, you’re making all this fuss over her saving her game. Sounds like you’re just making a mountain out of a molehill.” I’m going to reiterate just so I’m not misunderstood: She was not simply saving the game as a force of habit, or in some reactive way. She compared the game she was playing to her friend who had just been hit, and after a moment of careful prioritization, she continued playing the game up to a designated save point, saved the game, gently placed the console in her backpack so that it wouldn’t fall out while she ran, then ran over to her beloved friend, followed by the aforementioned crying and screaming.

It was ordered.

Much like putting your socks on before your shoes, she made sure to save her game before rushing towards her friend.

I really need to stress how abnormal it was. Hypothetically, and I really mean hypothetically, I would have thought it less strange for her to completely ignore her friend’s death and just walk to school alone playing her game. In fact, I might have resonated with something like that. I don’t know if I would react that way myself, but that’s how I feel, at least.

My sensibilities are so off that I just lack basic empathy for other people.

I personally can’t understand the desire to rubberneck a traffic accident that has nothing to do with me, outside of specific life-saving efforts. If the girl was that way as well, then I might have thought of her as a comrade. Someone with a conscience and basic ethics, but disconnected from emotion. I know some other people like that, and while my personality makes it impossible to actually build a meaningful relationship with them, I have no problem thinking of them as friends as long as they make me feel less alone.

But the girl was different. She was entirely lucid, yet she approached things in the wrong order. Anyone else in that situation would have tossed aside the game to run to their friend’s side. Urgh, just having to write it all down makes me so uncomfortable… I thought I could just flip through the pages of time and put down the words with perhaps some slight differences here and there, but this memory is nothing short of traumatic, and even thinking about it makes me nauseous. I get goosebumps as I think through that girl’s actions.

So, what did I do after that? I ran away, of course. I couldn’t stand to be there a moment longer. My mind was still fixated on the girl, and my feet were practically rooted to the ground, but I just left my mind and feet there and turned my bike around.

Besides, there was really nothing for me to do in regards to the traffic accident. As someone who had witnessed his fair share of accidents, I knew that if I were the only witness, then I would naturally have a duty to wait and report what happened, along with providing care where necessary (just out of common sense, not empathy), but this accident had several other witnesses, and there was nobody who needed care. The driver who got out of his truck didn’t even have a scratch on him. And of course he didn’t. For a truck that large, an elementary school girl wasn’t any more harmful than a bug. They probably didn’t even need to fix the bumper.

Yet despite the many witnesses, I seemed to be the only one that noticed the strange behavior of the victim’s friend. For that case, I was the only witness.

But everyone else was so focused on the big, flashy aspects of the traffic accident that the other girl escaped their notice. In fact, they might not even have really seen her as she sat there cradling her friend’s head.

At the time, mobile phones with cameras were still in the prototype stage, and the only thing lower than the number of people that used them was probably the resolution of their pictures, so I doubt that any photographic evidence of the girl in that accident exists. I get quite tired of the sudden paparazzi events that start whenever rubberneckers gather at a traffic accident nowadays (and to be honest, the first thing I do when I get a new phone is destroy the camera, so I’ll never be lumped in with that group), but whenever I think back to that moment, I wish someone had taken a picture of that girl.

That could at least confirm if her crying was actually real.

That’s what I think looking back, but at the moment, all I could think about was how to casually slip out of there.

I didn’t want anyone to notice. I didn’t want her to notice. Ever so slowly, ever so quietly, I slipped away from the scene. I never did cross the street, and I abandoned the prospect of attending my first lecture.

I figured I’d just go home. Go home, lie in bed, and read my favorite book. Surely that would help me forget the horrendous events I’d just witnessed. Desperately trying to convince myself, I quickly pedaled back towards the one-room apartment I had just left.

As it turned out, that was the worst choice I could have made.

Because, in my haste to run home and deceive myself that I would be safe there, I failed to notice the childish gaze that bored into my back as I left.