[3-Minute Novel] Dreams in Blueprints and a Six-Tatami Room | Tokyo - Ketsumeishi

I messed up again.
That's the third time. The blueprints I placed on my senior's desk came back with a thud. The red pen marks spread across the paper like blood vessels.

“Hey, junior...” he started to say, but he sighed and stopped halfway. He must have lost the energy to even say it. Knowing that made it even harder.

On the way home, I stopped in my tracks after passing through the ticket gate.
For a moment, I didn't know which way to walk.

Even if I go back to my room, there's nothing there.
Truly, there is nothing.

In the refrigerator, there is tofu that expired two days ago.
Outside the window is glittering neon.
Voices in a language I don't understand leak from the next room, but it has nothing to do with me.
It has nothing to do with anyone.

This city will keep walking even if I'm dying.

I collapsed onto my futon and looked at the ceiling.
Hey, what am I doing in Tokyo?

Back in vocational school, I could talk about dreams.
Like becoming an architect or designing a house my mom would like. But in reality, I can't even draw a foundation properly.

I know better than anyone that this is a problem beyond just sense or talent.
Every morning, it takes me a few seconds to open the office door.

Thinking that today is the day I'll hand in my resignation, I end up sitting at my desk and picking up my mechanical pencil again. I don't know if it's pride or just inertia anymore.

“I want to go home.”

It was a phrase that welled up from the back of my throat. To that house in Sasebo. Where fishing gear is piled up in the entryway, it smells like fish, it's cramped, but—I want to go home.

I picked up my smartphone. My father's name appeared.
I couldn't press it.

On the platform that morning, my father came in his work clothes. His face was stiff. He wasn't crying or anything, he was just frozen. Just before the train doors closed, his voice flew at me.

“Don't come back.”

At the time, I thought I had been pushed away. I thought he was a cold-hearted father. But now, hugging my knees on the futon, I finally realize.

That voice, wasn't it trembling?
Don't come back—
Didn't that mean, 'I will protect the place you return to even if I die, so for now, give it everything you've got'?

His words were just too clumsy, and they came out in the exact opposite form.

I couldn't cry.
If I could have cried, it would have been easier.

But no tears came, and the back of my throat just burned like it was on fire.

I will crawl, and tomorrow I will go to the office again. I will draw the blueprints. They will be sent back again. Even so, I will draw. It's not a pretty story about dreams or hope. It's just because I can't go home. Because I can't afford to go home.

Outside the window, the lights of Tokyo looked blurred. I didn't think they were beautiful. But they didn't disappear.