Flowers Bloom Over the Rubble

It was the winter of my first year of high school, and it snowed.
Those born and raised in Tokyo were all captivated by what was outside the window.
Only the teacher and I, with sorrowful eyes and cheeks resting on our hands, were looking far away.

Unable to watch any longer, Yurina shoved a winter-exclusive white chocolate Pocky into my mouth.

As the sweet white chocolate melted, the bitter cocoa pretzel crumbled.
The despair spreading in my mouth and the cause of my sorrow tightly clasped hands, and I slumped over my desk.

“Hey, hey. What? What’s wrong?”

My emotions were a mess.
My eyes were hot, and my nose was probably bright red.
I couldn't lift my face anymore.

Perhaps due to the snow and the sense of liberation after the tests, my classmates, whose excitement pierced the cold sky, began to sing.

—Snow, come, come. Hail, come, come.
Falling and falling, piling up steadily.
Mountains and fields, covered in cotton hats.

“Flowers bloom over the rubble.”

It was over.
My emotions were over.
My oldest memory is from the winter of my middle year in nursery school.
At four years old, I was crying while singing this song at nursery school.

“Hey, are you okay?”
Shaken by the shoulder, I gathered my resolve and lifted my face.

“Huh? No way... What? What happened!”
I was shedding tears with the Pocky sticking halfway out of my mouth.

I pinched the remaining Pocky with the thumb and index finger of my left hand and began to speak slowly.

“Hey, Yurina. Do you know the lyrics to ‘Snow, Come, Come’?”
“Know them? Everyone is singing them right now. Oh... well, except for Yamanaka-kun, me, and you.”
“Huh?”

When I turned around, Yamanaka-kun, whose lack of emotion and whether or not blood even flowed through him was always a mystery, was staring straight ahead in an odd direction with a paperback book open.
Maybe he was practicing causing a convergent fire with his gaze again.
Then again, that was just my delusion.

“Do you know that book?”
“I don’t know it, and I don’t want to know it.”
“Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human.”
“Huh.”
“Huh.”
“How do you know that?”
“The other day, when I was about to pee my pants, he suddenly said it. He said, ‘This is No Longer Human.’”
“Huh.”
“Huh.”
“Oh, does that mean I’m ‘No Longer Human’?”
“No, I don’t know.”

I shuddered at the possibility that my habit of torturing my bladder before going to the bathroom had incurred the wrath of the android-like classmate, the mysterious Yamanaka.
My tears had dried.

“So, the lyrics to ‘Snow, Come, Come’?”
“Yeah.”

—Snow, come, come...
Yurina’s clear voice made the back of my nose sting.

—Hail, come, come...
Something hot welled up in the back of my throat.

—Falling and falling, piling up steadily...
Water began to mix into my vision.

Mountains and fields, covered in cotton hats...
—Come...!

“No! No! Stop! Shut up!”
“Huh? I mean, you told me to sing, so what’s with the ‘shut up’!”
“I didn’t tell you to sing!”
“So, what? What was wrong with it?”
“The lyrics are too painful.”
“What is?”
“It’s so painful, yet the melody is so bright. The boy who forces himself to look forward is just too pitiful! The absurdity of the world!”
“Huh?”

The homeroom teacher in charge of classical literature was looking on with curious eyes right next to Yurina, his face now free of sorrow.

"Mountains and fields covered in cotton hats, please!"

"Flowers bloom on all the rubble"

"Huh?"
"Huh?"

Pfft!
Pffft!

The homeroom teacher and Yurina burst out laughing at the same time.

"No, wait! Isn't that just... isn't that just too L'Arc? Doesn't the worldview feel too much like L'Arc?"
"Eeeek! You guys aren't even from that generation, L'Arc! And yet, it's so L'Arc!"

Hey, don't laugh!
And don't both of you laugh!

"It's not 'rubble,' it's 'withered trees,' de-ad-wood!"
"Huh?"

You've got to be kidding me, tell me it's a lie...
Give me back my eleven years... the eleven years I spent feeling gloomy and depressed every winter...
What was I even doing, singing that song with such deep emotion and tears in my eyes every time?
I was just a suspicious person!

I am now suffering the humiliation of eleven years all at once.
At the same time, I realized that I'm not a natural speed demon, but a natural L'Arc thinker,
and I had absolutely no idea what kind of face I should be making.

After such an outrageous mishearing, I had been giving this song a completely misguided interpretation.

"Gwahahahaha!!!!"
"What's with that demonic laughter!"

Here, the Westminster Quarters (the common school chime) rings out.

Ding-dong-ding-dong...

Is it because of the snow?
Even amidst the mingling voices of the students, it reaches my ears clearly.

My eleven years have turned into rubble, and the snow is falling over it.
All that's left for me is to go crazy.
No, I'm usually crazy anyway.

"I lose control! I dead then my instinct was born!"
"Stop, that's scary. Stop mixing song lyrics with the pitch of our conversation. And besides, you're only just now realizing you're losing control? I realized that the day after the entrance ceremony, you know?"
"That song was popular when I was young!"

I hear their words, of course.
I understand the meaning, too.
But my consciousness has already taken a giant step into a world where flowers bloom on all the rubble.

I asked them both before dragging my right foot, which remained in reality, into the world of fantasy.

"Are you ready?"

"Huh?"
"Huh?"

"...Are you ready?"

"Oh, are you ready, teacher?"

“Use honorifics with me, too. Even among friends, there must be courtesy.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Are you ready?”
“Yes!”
“From now on, you all will be...”
“An invitation to freedom!”
“No, that’s wrong! It’s not that kind of upbeat song!”

Without the courage to say, “Just for now, forgive my sharp tongue,” the Y'Omogi-en-Ciel concert began in a rather awkward state.

—The conflict is over.
A city destroyed, people wandering.
The city, the people, the sky—everything was scarred.

Dog tracks snake across the snow, heading west.

Father said nothing.
He just smiled, and smiled.
I wave at his figure as it is swallowed by the crumbling world.

I drag my right leg as I follow the dog’s tracks.
The sky I look up at is endlessly white and dim.
As if to say that feeling pain is a sin.

I press on through the dancing gray snow, which seems to have entangled resignation and despair.

A world transformed, a torn map.
Surely, a compass is useless now.
It is in the right pocket of my dirt-stained green jacket.
But I won’t look at it!

My brown leather boot is heavy and damp, especially on the right side.
The ground where I drag my right leg reveals the painful state of the city.

The fallen snow is like an angel shielding a wound.

I cannot help but think of myself as a demon gouging at a wound.
What should I do...
Rubble is piled up behind me and ahead of me.
It is covered in a thin white veil, emitting a soft light.

Is this a dream?

The dog’s tracks stop here.
There is no sign of it.

The city is deathly silent.
The groans I heard just moments ago have vanished.

No, my ears are being pressed by a heartbeat so intense it feels as if my heart has moved into my head.
My head hurts.
My hands and head are hot.
Only my chest feels strangely cold.

I collapse to my knees right there.
Soft, green, sprout-like grass sways in the world I exposed by dragging my right leg.
I doubted my eyes.
I rubbed them hard, so hard, before focusing again.

Pale blue flowers are blooming in the burnt-out school.
On the houses reduced to timber, on the shattered bricks—everywhere, without exception, pale blue flowers are blooming.

On the guns whose owners I don’t know, on the knives, and even on the unexploded ordnance—everything.

However, there is no one here.
Other than me, there is no one.

When I leaned forward to pick a flower at my feet, the compass fell from my chest pocket.

The rusted needle spins round and round over the pale blue.

I lift my face.
I intently send that fleeting blue from my retinas to my brain.
I want to repaint all my memories with this color.
No, I want to soak it into my brain.

I press my back against the surface of the city, its wounds now healed.
I can see the sky.
The sky, white as far as the eye can see, is gentle and bright.
I am being swallowed by the light.

I strained my eyes to see deep, deep into that whiteness, and then I closed them.

After a while, I feel a soft coldness on my forehead.
It turns into water, warms up, and then vanishes.
On my cheeks, on my nose, on my chin.
On my neck, on my arms, on my chest.

The soft, cold things fall and pile up silently.

When the world and my body finally become one, what color will it be there?

──The conflict is over.
A city destroyed, people wandering.
The city, the people, the sky—everything was covered in wounds.
But they are sleeping quietly beneath layers of transparency.

The traces following the footprints leading to the west stop beside the distortion.

──Flowers were blooming on the rubble, every last one of them.

I placed the microphone on the stage, knelt down, and looked up at the white lighting, feeling a chill that reached the core of my head.
Yurina has lost the parts of her face.

Of course, there is no microphone, and the white lighting is just the fluorescent light of the classroom.
Even this intensely boring light, which wouldn't normally tickle my middle-schooler sensibilities, is helping to deepen the shadows of my fifteen-year-old, over-dramatized delusions today.

Our homeroom teacher, whose tear ducts—and indeed, many parts of his body—are quite loose,
while shedding tears like tropical rain that wouldn't turn into snow outside the window, for some reason let out a fart.

“Sorry, my fart just turned the worldview into rubble...”
he says, sobbing loudly.
That crying is surely mostly out of shame for the fart!

Before long, that android... no, that mysterious classmate of ours, Yamanaka-kun, who might be an android, approaches with a very human-like gait and says with a dead-serious face:

“The flowers are nemophila. The flower language is ‘I forgive you.’ The flowers that bloomed on the rubble are...”

He stated his interpretation at length and then disappeared into the hallway.

Dead trees and rubble...
Certainly, both are positioned somewhere apart from 'life,' but the images are quite different.
To me, a dead tree is an 'end' with a hint of hope.
Rubble is pure despair, and despair beyond that is still despair.
It’s that dizzying thing, like the famous quote from our grade head, Mr. A-fuji,“Beyond the beyond of the question,”which describes an endless 'demise'.

Before long, it is discovered that the person who wrote these lyrics is someone namedMukasa San.

“How do you read this?”
“Take-Kasazo.”
“Huh?”
“Take-Kasami.”
“That’s definitely wrong!”
“Bu-Ryusan.”
“What is that, some kind of Szechuan cooking master?”
Yurina and I are saying whatever we want because we can't read the lyricist's name at all.
Mostly, I am saying whatever I want.

“Oh, that’s read as Mukasa-san.”
“Eh.”
“Eh.”
“Eh?”
“Even if I concede a hundred steps, Mukasa is fine, but San?”
“sunSun?”
“sonSon?”
“No, no, threeThree!”
“No, that’s like Totoro’s Satsuki-chan becoming ‘Gogatsu-chan’...”
“If you’re going to say that, isn’t it even stranger that you guys call Sanae-chan from the next class ‘San-chan’?”

That’s true.
“San” is “San,” but is “Sanae” really “San”...

“No, teacher. Sanae is SS- AA- NN- AA- EE. SS- AA- NN, San.”
“Wow, you’re right!”

He looks like he's made the discovery of the century, but it's nothing special.
I grieve for Sanae, whose name has been torn to pieces.
I grieve for it, even though I'm the one who did it.

He, whom I had firmly believed to be a boy, was actually San Mukasa (forty years old).
And in the first place, there are no first-person lyrics in "Snow".

My power of delusion has reached such a peak of glory that it's scary.
It's a problem that while I'm poor in money and knowledge, I'm part of the wealthy class when it comes to the power of delusion.

Even while I'm doing this, the snow is piling up steadily, and the Chuo Line has given up on running.

The rails are buried, the subsequent plans of Chuo Line users and the no-overtime day (if that's even what it is) for the railway employees have collapsed and turned into rubble.

Even so, the snow continues to fall without ceasing.

Flowers bloom over all the rubble.
White, white, snow flowers.

Even now, "Snow" torments me.
Of course, one reason is the gray world born from my own misunderstanding.
The other is... shoveling snow.
It hasn't happened yet this year, but I shudder every time the temperature drops.
I have eyes that are terrified that the next thing to turn into rubble will be my lower back.

However, as long as my brain doesn't stop believing in its mistakes, I can become Hyde every time winter comes.

So please, let me stay like this a little longer.

↑
Yurina's marriage, sometimes katsu curry, and occasionally Lafcadio Hearn.

↑
The story of when the homeroom teacher who farted didn't fart.

[Other Misheard Lyrics]