It was not uncommon for me to find myself on a ledge.
Standing on the outside of a closed window, my only foothold was a shallow sill—so narrow it couldn’t even hold the full width of my exposed feet. I struggled to balance, my toes hanging over the skyline of some unknown metropolis, waiting for the rest of me to lose focus and follow them over the edge.
This was familiar territory.
It felt like standing on display before the entire world, my unsteady footing a reflection of my place in it. But the window I stood on was never really a window, of course. That would be crazy.
From the beginning, it was always an eye.
A giant, unblinking eye that refused to let me in.
“Perform!” it demanded with its piercing gaze. “Perform for the people so they won’t look at me.”
To keep from slipping into madness entirely, let me clarify—the eye was my own. A doorway into my mind. That much, at least, I understood, even in the chaos of the moment.
Only when my lids fell like a curtain at the close of a play would the eye retreat, lifting like a backdrop, granting me passage behind the stage. There, in the dim glow of deep red lights, I would meet the producer of the show—a man I knew as Akano Ran.
The other me.
Always waiting in the wings, preaching truths so personal, so simple, so undeniable.
We would speak of the coming night and the roles we were meant to play. Our conversations felt effortless, almost serene. But they always ended the same:
“You see the good, the hope, the best in people. I know this.”
He would tell me this then point his gaze away from me and onto the audience sitting on the other side of the curtain.
“And yet, in you, I see only naivety, while in them, I see the truth. So isn’t it natural that you should go first? You belong in the light, and I… I will come when the best in you is spent. When your hopes collapse under the weight of why I exist.
My time will come. I am sorry for that. I truly wish it weren’t so. But I am here because it must so. So don’t worry about me, though I know you do. We all have our time. And if mine never came, I would be happy to see your vision of the world realized. But it won’t… and I will.
I am no prophet. I see only the uncomfortable truths already before your eyes.“
I knew it from the start, the world he was showing me. That’s why he was always just as real as I was.
Not a premonition, but a reflection.
That was my life—some of my days, but most of my nights.
Not anymore.
I remain here now, in this dark theater, far more than I ever walk the stage.
His time has come.
