Short Story | The Night of Unread Messages

A reply from Misaki arrived on LINE.
My heart skipped a beat.

I want to open it right away.

But I feel like marking it as read immediately would give away my “feelings” too easily.

I want to be the one in control.
Staring at the screen, my fingertips hover in mid-air.

Misaki's replies are inconsistent.
Sometimes it takes ten seconds. Sometimes two hours.

This time, it was three minutes.

To match that “interval,” I waited five minutes before marking it as read. But the message that came back was anticlimactic.

“Sorry, I was eating.”

Just that.
Even though it was just that, my heart sank a little.

I type a reply, delete it, then type and delete it again.

“I see.”
“What were you eating?”
“That sounds nice.”
“Enjoy your meal.”

They all feel too heavy,
they all feel too light,
and they all feel wrong.

In the end, I just sent
“I see, take your time.”
.

I suppressed the urge to keep the conversation going,
and matched Misaki's level of enthusiasm.

Was I too cold?
The moment I thought that, my heart grew restless again.

— — — — —

The LINE message I sent to Misaki remained unread even after two hours.

Only the hands of the clock in my room keep moving.
The sound of the second hand is strangely loud.

I only sent one line.
Words that should have been light now feel incredibly heavy.

Even as I list the reasons,
they all start to feel like lies.

“Just busy”
“Doing homework”
“Maybe the battery died”

I reach for the smartphone on my desk, feeling as if it had vibrated slightly.
It hadn't.

It was wrong.

It is completely dark outside the window.
The light from the streetlamp flickers faintly against the wall of the room.

Just before the date changed, it was finally marked as read.

But no reply came.
Only the 'read' status remained there, all alone.

Seventeen minutes later, the screen lit up.

“Yeah”

That was it.
Even though I had waited so long.

Short.
Light.
But the sound it made as it fell deep into my chest was heavy.

I couldn't reply any more than that today.

ーーーーー

The next morning, I arrived at school, but I didn't know how to talk to Misaki.

As I turned the corner of the hallway, our eyes met.
For a moment, my heart froze.

Then, Misaki said in a normal voice,

“Good morning, Kakeru-kun”

Her smile was just as it always was, and
my heart tightened deep inside.

“...Good morning”

That was all I could say.

Misaki was already walking toward her friends.
Without ever knowing the turmoil in my heart.

The time that felt so long last night,
it seems, belonged only to my world.

It appears I was the only one who cared.