#to. you know. ‘soft sell’ hanzawa to tashiro. i would be wearing a tinfoil hat and everything

[dirtbra1n]

it’s about running away and being chased and knowing when to surrender but maybe not how to surrender. it’s about chasing and chasing and chasing until you blink and realize that you went from being the hunter to being the huntee, like a looney tunes bit. except there is no laughing happening, and no punchline, and the anvil and grand piano and cruise ship landing on your head one after the other are simply metaphors. still painful, though. more than enough to send you spinning, or knock you flat, or weigh you down.

—

that is to say, on the topic of weird love:

love that is unconventional, bizarre, lacking rhyme or reason. perhaps off putting, though it isn’t really, or beyond any one name or title.

hanzawa masato hadn’t been expecting any love whatsoever. that it is unconventional (or bizarre, or off putting, or so on) is salt in the wound.

(not that it doesn’t suit him, he knows himself to be someone who is, in more than one manner of speaking, fairly weird. acknowledging this is further salt in an exacerbated wound.)

tangentially: hanzawa masato doesn’t ordinarily have any particular desire to die, but recent circumstances have pushed him to reconsider.

who made you feel like you have to handle things alone? did we teach you shame? do you think we don’t want to look after you anymore?

well, fine, “to die” is something of an extreme. he doesn’t think he actually wishes to die, doesn’t want his heart to stop beating or his neurons to stop firing. it just has to be a violent enough reset, send him back to a youth where he’d wake up every morning and choose to be busy as a fun pastime rather than a survival tactic.

not a snapped neck, but, well. whatever.

—

he’s back at the river. he never has his pant legs rolled up. it’s getting on his nerves.

the current is mild today. he can almost make out his face in the water, not that he wants to spend any time admiring his reflection. the sun’s beating down on him, too-warm on his skin. he inhales heat and regrets it.

his eyes reflected are wide open as they stare up at him. the reflection looks like it’s getting clearer.

masato doesn’t like that.

submerging his head, he figures that it couldn’t be any harder to breathe with water in his lungs than it is without.

—

sometimes, very rarely, when he has time alone with his thoughts, masato forgets how to breathe. becomes over-conscious of it and does it wrong, inhaling without feeling like enough oxygen is getting to his brain. his entire chest will move up and down but it feels like he’s dying.

to be frank, masato feels like he’s dying a lot. running on autopilot, it seems, is better for him in the long run.

but, well. that’s boring.

inhale for elastic muscle activation, exhale for large muscle contraction. draw your arm back, hit the ball.

breathe, won’t you?

leaving tashiro after club is easy. walking to the station to wait for the train is easy. clouds are gathering overhead. he rests his eyes awhile. rookie mistake.

his rib cage is rickety and the joints in his fingers have gone stiff. his neck has hardly any mobility to speak of. images like shadow puppetry are playing on the backs of his eyelids. weird love. mapping intimacy, tashiro drums his fingers on masato’s chest, where the bones of his rib cage jut out. presses down on the joints of each of his fingers until they pop.

stands behind him with his head in his hands and guides it just so until his neck cracks—

masato feels the train’s arrival in his bones. he opens his eyes. he feels geriatric. something about the barometric pressure.

tashiro-kun, do you know any chiropractors?

he squints at his phone, bleary.

with a license, he clarifies, unnecessarily.

—

masato is a little worried that he might have strange tastes.

—

it’s like this: being with tashiro gonzaburou is terribly easy for hanzawa masato when he’s not in love with him and wonderfully difficult when he is. this is an on-off situation. this makes everything worse. riddled with impossibilities—frankly masato’s convinced it’s a sickness. or a curse.

standing against the violent current with his feet planted firmly in the silt, masato ponders the symbolism at play. rivers representing cleansing, rebirth, the beginning of things. he, symbolically, watches a coffin bob apathetically downstream to his right. he, symbolically, wades with great difficulty to catch up with and lie in it. cleansing, rebirth, the beginning of things. destruction, also.

masato’s good with literature—the basis is that you cannot build upon what’s already been built. what existed must be razed to be remade. something must die to facilitate a rebirth. religious undertones abound, though flood myths are universal.

definitely a sickness; he wonders if there was ever any basis for this, before. he doesn’t really want to believe that tashiro was the first. selfishness. sickness. the sort of thing the river’s supposed to cleanse him of. what he should do is get out of the coffin, maybe swim around a little.

he doesn’t.

masato stares up at the sky above him, listens to the wood creaking around him. imagines he’s in a boat instead. a flood so great it threatens even the heavens—the rocking of his “boat” is making him a little, well, sick.

he jolts awake. riddled with impossibilities. weird dreams shouldn’t count.

they do, though.

he has reason to believe that the creaking of the “boat” was actually the creaking of his bones. he feels brittle enough to have earned the spot in that coffin. it might’ve been his all along.

he really doesn’t like that.

—

ah.

masato wants to live.