[Short] The City Ends Here/Closed District - A Diary Called Bible
Passing through the back alley of the hotel, ruins spread out before me.
This is the western edge of the city; the city ends here, and there is nothing beyond this point. The streetcar line ends here, too. Electricity and gas end here, and the reach of currency ends here as well.
It was once the center of the city, but the city expanded eastward, like the path of a typhoon, and now it has become a "Closed District" surrounded by barbed wire. In a sense, it is a laid-off town.
Deep into the ruins, sealed off by a heavy iron gate, the tracks of a streetcar that will never go anywhere again stretch out lonesomely.
Yet, I do not dislike this scenery.
It lacks the raw, fleshy vividness of a living city, and there is no deception. It is clean, calm, and I feel a sense of relief knowing that nothing will go anywhere else and nothing will change.
I am not the only one who feels this way.
Lina, who lives in the same hotel, sometimes stands by the fence, gazing blankly. Her back looks like that of a lost little girl. But the same is true for me. It might be the same for you, too. Everyone is like a ship run aground, with nowhere left to go.
"Whatever you're looking for, it's not over there," Al once said to me. "Things happen that cannot be explained in words."
I waited for him to continue.
"That's why they can't be explained in words," he laughed, pressed his lips together, shook his head, and flicked his cigarette butt over the fence.
I hesitated, but as I watched the cigarette butt smoking on the other side of the fence, I swallowed my words.
I came from an old port deep within this Closed District. That is likely where the threshold of this world lies.
I walked from those port ruins, relying on the lights of this city visible in the distance.
However, the "things that cannot be explained in words" that Al spoke of did not happen. Perhaps I was too despairing at the sheer scale of this city to notice. Or perhaps, the "thing that cannot be explained in words" is me.
©2026 Text/Yoshine Arishiro Paper Cutting/Mio Arishiro