[Delusion Series] Delusional Seating

The shop was quiet. It was a night where the air felt strangely humid, even though it wasn't raining. I was sitting alone at a spacious four-person table, a book open before me. To be precise, I was pretending to have it open. Even though my eyes were on the words, not a single line was sinking into my mind.

That was because she had stood in front of my table.

Is this seat taken?

That is what she said. I nodded. At that moment, the depths of my chest pulsed unnaturally hard.

It was a large four-person table. Even if one were to accept sharing a table, normally, to maintain distance, one would choose the seat directly opposite or sit at the furthest diagonal seat. That should have been the unspoken rule for sharing a space as peacefully as possible while avoiding each other's gaze. Yet, the chair she pulled out was right next to me, the seat to my immediate right.

It wasn't as if all the other tables in the shop were full. There were other spaces. Even on this wide table, there was nothing blocking the front. And yet, why the side instead of the front? Why did she deliberately choose this position where our elbows might touch? Perhaps she just sat down without thinking deeply about it. It should have been just that, but inside me, an irreversible runaway process had already begun. The tendency to assign fatal meaning to meaningless coincidences was rearing its head.

She pulls out the chair. The scent wavers. I turn a page. I am not reading the words. Instead, I am thinking. Why next to me? How many centimeters is this distance? It is too close for our shoulders to touch. It is too close for them not to touch. In other words, it was the most awkward distance.

I am not looking at her because I am lonely. I became lonely because she chose the seat right next to me at a four-person table.

She drank her iced coffee. The ice clinked. With just that sound, my delusions advanced a little further. If we used the same glass, if we were in the same room, if it were the same night. Nothing had happened, yet dozens of futures were already being born in my head. A quieter poison that drives me crazy on its own, just from the fact that she is sitting next to me, without even knowing who she is.

The wood grain of the counter shines dully, having absorbed years of oil and someone's body heat. When I rest my palm on it, a damp humidity crawls up into the grooves of my skin. It is not raining. Yet, the air clinging to the back of my throat is terribly heavy, and every time I inhale, the weight of the night filling this shop settles deep inside.

The breath I exhaled flowed toward the right side where she sat, mingling with the rising cigarette smoke in the space a few centimeters from my chest. The thin linen fibers wrapping her shoulders seemed to quiver ever so slightly in response to my breath. That alone made my heart jump irregularly. By now, everything in the world was occupied by the presence of her very existence. I just stared as the white paper of the open book gradually became stained with droplets of condensation, and the outlines of the letters lost their meaning. I cannot read a single character. I cannot even follow them with my eyes.

She brought her lips to the straw. Her dry lips touched the transparent plastic. She swallowed, a small sound.

At that moment, the simple transparent tube looked like the cruelest boundary line in the world. What had been touching her lips just seconds ago was now sinking into the glass as if nothing had happened. There was only a distance of a dozen centimeters or so between the place she had kissed and my own lips. I want to snatch that transparent tube away. I want to trace the remnants of the heat she left behind with my own lips. Such a wretched, yet unstoppable impulse took control of me.

We are not touching. There is still a space of more than ten centimeters between our shoulders. However, the air filling that gap was already saturated with our body heat and breath, beginning to hold a heat on the verge of boiling. If I were to reach out my hand into this space, I would touch her boundary.

Inside me, dozens of unseen nights were being born on their own, as if overflowing from the tip of that straw, and they were cornering me on their own. She hasn't made a single move. She is just sitting there, breathing quietly. And yet, just by staring at her profile, I am drowning on my own, breaking down on my own.

Is this book interesting?

Suddenly, she glanced toward me and dropped her voice unexpectedly.

At that moment, her shoulder unexpectedly pierced through the thin fabric of our clothes and touched mine.

Her brand was seared into my shoulder.

A searing, hot illusion spread through my body from the point of contact with a sound. It was an indelible scar. As she tilted her head, her exposed cold wrist brushed against the back of my hand just a little. Even that coldness turned into the heat of a severe burn within my world.

All thought comes to a complete standstill. My heart pounded so violently it felt as if my chest would burst.

Deep within the eyes she turned toward me, I saw a night so deep there was no turning back. The corners of her lips moved ever so slightly. With just the vivid heat of the brand remaining on my shoulder and that momentary closeness, the humidity in the air spiked even further, and only the heat lingering on my shoulder refused to fade.

My throat felt parched, and I made a faint sound. A lump of hot air, not yet formed into words, slid down toward the space between her face and mine—a space that had already completely collapsed.

It was not her words that had driven me this mad. It was not that agonizing distance before our skin touched. In the midst of this maddening heat, I realized that it was my own irreversible imagination, which had unilaterally assigned a fatal, permanent meaning to that hot brand etched into my shoulder.

Try doing this as a tip🤗