Conversation between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 began at 9:05 AM, April 8, 2016
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: hey, fuck, i'm like... so sorry for suddenly removing you last year, i think? or maybe the year before? without any warning or indication at all, either way. i was in a really bad place. almost all of it is a haze to me and i'm getting it out of the way now because it hurts to think about it, lmao. i'm still kind of getting out of being at rock bottom, basically. i had to admit myself into a psych ward in the winter because i had this huge paranoid episode that was super notable after having a couple for a while that i kept blanking on every morning after because of shit like my circadian disorder and my drug habits. this time i was completely convinced that almost everyone i had been talking to was some kind of ploy or psyop designed by the government to extract information from me. was biting my nails every minute of the day. i barely slept well either. absolutely none of my delusions turned out to be true when i got let out. quite literally sobering, lol. i really hope that we can reconnect though! i'm glad i even managed to remember you. i've completely mellowed out now. going insane and burning bridges sucks.
tomoko8: woah oh my god holy shit um i hope youre okay now... a lot has changed since we stopped talking im not gonna lie
tomoko8: a bunch of ppl found my art and kind of pretended to be friends with me and then basically just made fun of me even though a lot of ppl thought i was cool but that kind of just made them stop liking me as well and they were using me being a weird person as a reason to mess around with me
tomoko8: idk if they stopped or not but im glad they didnt find out about the feelings i had for you. that i used to have i mean
tomoko8: they found out that i was kind of perverted and stuff though idk tbh they suck, they can go fuck themselves lol
tomoko8: i changed how i talk nowadays bc i ended up making a lot of other friends and i copied them a little but yeah. anyway im really glad that you added me again... would you like to call again someday? my parents are gone for a few weeks, they told me some "mandatory business" was happening i guess idk, i feel like they wouldnt even miss me if i was gone and they would just freak out over expenses or something lol
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: wow. well. psst. hey. i'll only go through with this if you're comfortable, but
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: want to meet up irl instead?
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: like. let's actually arrange to meet. i'm free.
tomoko8: yeah
tomoko8: thats a good idea
tomoko8: lol ive never done this before. i want to do it anyway
tomoko8: should i start preparing to go? i want to try doing chores first but whenever youre ready
FreeBaseLineJunkie666: yes, absolutely. i'm fucking floored that we're just doing this. lmao. anyway: if you have skype on your phone or tablet or whatever, call me in the next hour after you prep and we'll like, arrange where to meet. pack your bags like, right now. i don't remember what your situation is like but try to make it look as much as possible like you've never been in the house, like, ever. i only have today to make this happen. hey, better to be spontaneous than to make plans, lmfao
tomoko8: got it
That's good thinking there, Tomoko Kuroki. Tomoko is a kid with three or four days' beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down...
On the train, gazing out every so often at the winding trails of dryly oranged greenery that the tracks were cutting through, Haruko Haruhara lazed back and daydreamed about a parody of her considerably second favorite novel. Her laptop sat on a miniature foldable table charging through an electric port, and she slumped into the seating while her headphones blared mesmerizing and spidery-rhythmic electronic music from her music player. She had the whole day laid out, despite barely conventionally planning it. She hadn't schemed any of it at all, and that was likely for the better; coming off of a year and a half of gloomy self-reflection and clinical depression, her confidence had less plummeted and more undergone a series of brutally paranoiac corrective internal checks from her conscience that made her feel as though anything she enjoyed doing could unknowingly be profusely criminal. It had been a heavyweight feeling beating her up, and now it was a mere persistent tapping at one of her subconscious doors—it could still be heard, felt and thought about, but it wasn't quite there, not as much as it used to be.
Here she was, finally arisen out of the underworld, cruising through life as she had always meant to before her Internet addiction kicked in. In a moving public space, she luckily had no room to return to it and dwell on it. Granted that she was now used to doing interesting things out of her leisure, and had especially finally taken the burden of being a local everyday space cop town weirdo off of her back, she had unlimited free time. It was simple: this journey was happening in this place, at this time, entirely for the better.
Meanwhile, Tomoko Kuroki had packed up and was dressing herself. Gender-wise, essentially socially, she was not yet "out". Unable to find adequately feminine clothes that she could actually experiment with wearing for once, she resorted to breaking her self-impression of being an ideally feminine trans girl and instead dug through her parents' closets. After showering and drying, she straightened out her hair, grabbed one of her shirts with an electronic music producer's logo on it, put it on with a pair of jeans, half-buttoned-up a brownish-greenish military jacket on top, and calmly placed a gold chain around her neck. Better to come off as a douche, an almost imperceptibly douchey and really quite sophisticated, mainly reserved-appearing person more-so, than fake, she decreed in her inner voice. She saved a stockpile of albums by gritty experimental rock bands, 1970s German psychedelic ambient music groups and jittery British electronic artists that she had all enjoyed recently to the music library on her tablet. They reminded her of the online communities that she had participated in, which was an admittedly bittersweet feeling because she was now an orphan of them of sorts; friends from them had unexpectedly dumped her, and she had acquired a less than favorable reputation as an online eccentric, misconstrued to be impressionable enough to do anything anyone told her to. This had only been the case once. It didn't matter to her that people thought she was something that she wasn't. She was going places.
She neatly bundled everything she felt like saving into a suitcase with rolling wheels, closed the door on her generally vacant and now computer-less room with a freshly cleaned bed, switched off the water and electricity following Haruko's bold advice (considering how failsafe it was) from a moment beforehand, and set out to properly leave her house for the first time in months. Her parents had her number. Didn't matter what they could or would do with it. They were completely out of the picture at this point for the greater good, seeing as they had battled to raise her for a decade and a half. That they would someday phone her and ask her if she was "hanging in there without us" to unwittingly guilt her was inevitable, but they wouldn't be able to predict—nor do anything about—their kid finally getting a life. The door from the front porch closed on the household that failed to give her one. The symbolism of the act sat with her as she crossed the street and went uphill.
Haruko got off on a well-timed stop, rushing to take her Vespa off of the cargo rack, slowly carrying it with confidence out through the subway exit onto a city avenue. There was almost no traffic, and people were generally at work; it was a pleasant Wednesday, and in the context of her meet-up with Tomoko, it gave her a new kind of peace of mind that it was so particularly quiet. It felt like her environment responding to the beckoning call of her dumb, hastily devised plans. She still felt undeserving.
Call between FreeBaseLineJunkie666 and tomoko8 began at 1:50 PM, April 8, 2016
"You there?"
"Oh, yeah, um, I am. Can you hear me? Sorry about the noise and stuff. I'll try adjusting my microphone."
"It's fine! ...Yooo, nice, are you on the subway? Emancipated!"
"Yeah... I used to do it when I went to school but... I don't go to school anymore, so–"
"I bet it feels, like, so freeing, right?"
"Yeah."
"Libertarian!"
"Pfffhehehe..."
Tomoko had occupied a seemingly magically empty car in the train. It wouldn't be a concern of any kind if someone else took a seat, but the happenstance otherwise made her feel esteemed. As they both continued, at different rates, to approach the beachside square by the esplanade that they had pinpointed in back-and-forth texts, she was talking for some time with Haruko about what had happened in her life. Her school life was a mere footnote to her online shenanigans. While the acrid lighting of the tunnels wavered in and out of her carriage, she relayed all-too-familiar stories of finding out she was being gawked at in private group chats full of people who ought to do better things with their lives, and splayed herself across the carriage seats while recounting the moment she saw the hilariously unhygienic face of the lead group's key administrator: one of the dead past's stupid emblems. Haruko laughed at quite a lot of it out of empathy. It was that feeling of getting to know someone a second time—with the first time reemerging as a serene cloud over the present time—that was flooding her synapses; she had first interacted with Tomoko while coming down from LSD, a no-brainer for friendships of this caliber.
"You know, the first time we talked I was tripping balls," Haruko began while gleaming. "And being in the presence of like, a literal child... It levelled me. I didn't feel guilty about it, I just had to confront the fact that I was talking to a kid. The conversation was happening between me and a kid. It made me feel positively different about myself. I used to get all high-and-mighty and manic if I indulged too much in social interactions, and you taught me to be real. So I thank you in a kind of indirect way for that."
"Yeah." Tomoko paused and thought of something, hesitated, then tested it. "...Do you think we'll do anything um... Um. Significant... is that the word? Do you think we'll get to do anything significant together? We could get employed, and–"
"PFFFT. Pfffhaha... Wait, shit, sorry. I just thought that sounded funny. That is not what I thought you were going to say..."
Tomoko laughed a little too, but she was trying to make a serious point. "Haha... Yeah, but we could find employment. I want to... Hm. I want to move further ahead than my parents for sure. I want to get a good job and make my own money and then move onto something bigger and more um, private. Cuz' I don't see a lot of people my age doing it. I feel like at school all the few times when people used to see me, they thought I was never gonna make it. But... those older people there used to tell me I was really ahead of my time for my age. So I think I have a chance. Prolly a couple of chances. I dunno what the world is going to be like in a decade though. I feel like it's going to be really weird. I've gotta like, um... prepare for it."
"Wow. Damn. ...Do you think of yourself as like... Do you want to be—rich?"
"Yeah." She chuckled. "I-I do. Yeah."
"Big dreams." Haruko's tone became direct. "You know, the bigger your dreams get, the smaller the world looks. The smaller it looks, not gets. It never actually gets smaller. You have to change how you see things to get your dreams in edgewise. You have to have luck, if not luck then hope, and crack open the right path in life without really thinking about it if you want to steady yourself and just, like... Get your dreams to work out for you. Just like me, you have to pass it down to the people you care about once you experience it too. And I care for you."
"...You care for me..." With zero intention of sounding coercive and really just out of mimetic habit, Tomoko put on an innocent tone to sound convincingly affected, but Haruko wasn't listening to any of the tone in the slightest. This entire time, she had been listening to people as they are, deciphering their patterns, bewilderingly self-taught in her own art of bettering people without coming off like a barking drill sergeant teacher boss authority figure—whatever society wanted from stubborn people she simply couldn't be, just by not being stubborn in the first place. She didn't have the tickle of a laugh coursing through a single nerve in her body. It was pure circumstance.
She tensed and relaxed. "Of course."
The train's announcement system could be heard sounding off through her phone's mic input, echoing with a tinny timbre that was caught in the hum of the train. "Oh, um, I'm arriving now, I think. ...Yeah. I am. Okay." Tomoko turned on her camera, showing, through a digital haze, her leaving the car and stepping onto the platform; she held up her phone to a sign hanging from the ceiling indicating the city she had arrived at, only because the gesture would potentially look cool on the other receiving end. She stopped for a second to glance up at it, letting out a little "E-eh..." that luckily couldn't be heard through her mic.
"Hell yeah. Right on time. Aight. See ya." Haruko ended the call and clicked her phone onto the center of her Vespa's steering wheel as she drove and drifted along a street road. Tomoko creaked out a timid "Bye..." despite the call having already ended; she did that in general, even in person. The residuum of her anxiety was now just in her usual personality. Everything else was hunky-dory.
It was a fine afternoon, and the beach was unoccupied. The square would likely have buskers anytime soon. After disregarding her GPS and cruising along the tourist paths, Haruko Haruhara pulled over by the esplanade gate and docked her Vespa; in a brief moment of embarrassment, she unintentionally slid her finger twice against a button that briefly made it cartoonishly shrink before returning to its original size. She cringed and gestured at her moped, taming it for the time being. "Now sit." She gazed out at the square with its looming streetlamps and pavilion-style tile patterns while Tomoko navigated onto the beach in the horizon, getting closer to the beachside walk from the left-hand, still carrying along her suitcase. Fifteen minutes later, Haruko was finally able to spot Tomoko, and vice versa. They opted, in the moment, to try not to get loud about seeing each other.
They rushed to hug and clumped together. "Wow... The first person I've made physical contact with besides my parents in three years..." "PFFFFHAHAHA!!! Shit... Shit. Sorry." Haruko's laughter echoed out into the street corner—it really didn't matter as much as they thought, as every "wagie" (a term Tomoko had inherited from the Internet, like much of her vocabulary) was doing their business in their big shiny offices, and dog walkers seemed to be on a dog walking strike. "No, I'm serious Haruko..." "Naw, I know, I know. That's literally the first thing you decided to say to my face in person, though. That's so sad..." She smirked, and they continued to hold each other. They strode over to a wall cutting off the shore from the square and sat on it, talking freely about stupid things that had happened in world politics and inside jokes that were lingering from their Internet forum days; they were quite naturally connecting as real friends.
However, as their conversation yielded open and intimate laughs, a pink-haired girl in a well-attuned pink sporty-looking jacket shyly approached the gate, paused, and walked over to a corner of the square. She was a regular busker in the area. She carried a guitar case on her shoulder, and seemed to be struggling with it. She lay it down to rest, opened it up, took out a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar that looked like it had been manufactured only a month ago, and unravelled the cord for her equally contemporary looking boxy amplifier. Haruko and Tomoko paid attention without making the girl, trembling as she held her guitar, feel like an uncontrollable spotlight was on her. The amp made a popping sound as it turned on, and she began to strum; initially it was louder than she intended, and she timidly turned down the volume. They continued listening to her, taking mild interest in her ongoing loose attempt at indie rock. This live demo was nice.
"I don't recognize what she's playing, but it doesn't just sound like she's testing chords," Haruko said, quietly. "...Yeah, wait, she's probably trying out stuff that she's written. ...Creative busking. I don't mind it."
"Yeah... I don't either... She seems okay. Do you want to, um... Should we acknowledge her?"
"When she's done, yeah."
Eventually, her general use of four chords began to wind down, until it sounded like it was a reasonable time to clap. Haruko turned around and began to applaud, cheering a little with a few "Yeah!"s out of pure whimsy, while Tomoko hesitantly clapped as she stood close to her. The girl noticed them both and squeaked, totally startled; she hid her face in her hands. "Wh–... Nonono, I liked what you were playing!" Lifting her head back up, she nervously smiled and nodded, getting ready to play something else. "H-hey... Um..." Tomoko interrupted, and Haruko glanced over at her, a little surprised by her sudden attempt at socializing. "You seem cool... What's your name...?" The girl abruptly stopped playing her guitar and let out a "Eep!", before deciding to accept the exchange with some curiosity. "I'm Hitori... ...D...Do you recognize me from the Internet?"
"No."
"Ah..."
"I'm Tomoko. ...Is this... Fine with you?" She stuck out her hand, gesturing for it to be shaken. Haruko showed a smug and satisfied expression that only Hitori had noticed, but paid no mind to simply because she wasn't familiar with the two, or with that many people in the real world at all. She's one of those kids, Haruko thought. "Y-yeah... You seem cool... U-um... Do you..." Hitori turned to the side, showing herself to be a very particularly nervous little character. "Play any instruments...?" Haruko let the conversation ride onward and sat back down on the wall facing the sea as she used a vape, blowing out a wispy cloud with a look of blank serenity on her face. "No. I kinda wish I did though." "That's okay... N-not everyone knows how to play an instrument... Hhheh..." "Yeah."
Tomoko leaned in and made a bold, overconfident suggestion. "Do you uh, wanna come with us? We're traveling, we came here to meet each other. I make art, and uh, Haruko over there, I'm meeting her for the first time, and she's older than me but she's a really cool... She's this really cool, um... Um..." She turned to Haruko. "What are you?"
"Don't start." There was a pause, like she was trying to additionally hold the tension for fun. "...Pfffffthahahah! No, uh, I'm like... I'm an artist as well. I see Tomoko over there as an apprentice, I think. ...Yuh." "An apprentice! Really! Is that what I am!" "Fuck it, yeah, sure." She got up from the wall, puffing out another cloud. The girl continued to watch, absorbing the novelty. "She's like... She got her start on the Internet, kind of? Like, people saw her as a weirdo or something, but she approached me at some point, and I just kind of think she's a totally, genuinely unsung genius. I've never met anyone like her before. I don't see her as being like a younger version of me, she just kind of feels like my apprentice." "I-is that a good thing?" "I mean, yeah. I'm at a point in life where I need an apprentice. She's matured." Haruko vaped, and the girl now understood the two's utterly unique dynamic; she didn't have a lot going on in her life, especially after not managing to get the gig as the lead guitarist in a local rock band. The only contact Hitori had maintained from anyone she had met through the group was with a girl, slightly older than her, who she funnily enough saw herself as an apprentice to; a stoic blue-haired girl named Ryo Yamada who was living in a state of precarity and couldn't help but become fond of Hitori. Despite both living particularly precariously and uniquely facing their own awkwardnesses, their dynamic was a lot more adjacent to societal norms. They had even leaned into becoming a lesbian couple, despite always drifting. They figured that it would eventually stick. However, Haruko and Tomoko were something else.
Tomoko leaned in. "Do you uh, want to walk with us? We've been traveling and stuff. We came here to meet for the first time. You seem cool too." Hitori nodded and let out a shy, engaged "Mm". "Yeahhhh. ...Yeah. Cool. They initially paced up and down the esplanade pavement until they found a park that led to the outer roads, presenting the sprawl with an allure that would come in handy later on. Hitori bugged out slightly while Haruko led the walk, Tomoko marching by her side. A sculpture of a bird with huge, fluffy plumage stood in the middle of an arrangement of greenery in a circle marked inward from the converging paths; it had the appearance of one of those Buddhist shrines that tokens of good bidding and other nice things were generally left at, which Hitori was familiar with annually visiting (although she showed no current interest in faith). It was nice to be in a place so nearly devoid of meaning that you could just stand in it and not have to think about much. Haruko preferred small neighborhoods and Tomoko wanted to see the big city, but Hitori (and likewise Ryo) were quiet people quietly invested in quietude.
"You asked us if we knew you from the Internet, right?"
"Mm..."
Haruko looked back forward. "Yeah, we're not like that. I don't mean that in, like... A self-assertive way. We use the Internet for sure, like, a lot. but we're from a really niche area of the Internet." "I'm... Kind of niche...? I think... I don't know... I'm not sure... I call myself 'guitarhero' on the Internet... It's kind of... Silly..." "Yeah, I get that. Me and Tomoko both went under our own dumb aliases for a while." "No, I just called myself Tomoko..." "Oh! Pffft, yeah, you did. Literally just 'tomoko' with a number after it. Super minimalistic." "Yeah. Heh." Tomoko turned to Hitori. "Do you come here often? ...I would, if I lived here." Haruko let out a chuckle. The girl looked and sounded a little let down. "Yeah... I wasn't able to join the band that I wanted to play in... I have housing but I don't have a life. My family really wants me to work but I don't know how to work, I don't know how to get employed, I just kind of try to make use of my time but I feel awkward all the time... Sorry, um... Nowadays I just busk here when I want to."
"...Do you want to head back with us, actually?"
"...No thank you..."
"Oh... Huh... That's alright." "Nah Tomoko, it checks out. She just... Yeah, she seems like a local. An actual local."
Hitori's sense of quietude culminated in a set of reclusive tendencies. She would pass down anything, regardless of the context or circumstance, if it wasn't immediate and exceeded her particularly small, confining boundaries. She even nearly severed her friendship with Ryo over a simple suggestion to busk at a local coffee shop, because she kept anxiously defending her own low self-esteem against making a tiny appearance as a local musician. It wasn't clear if she had a diagnosable disorder, but her precarity extended to her entire psychological and social condition in ways that were hard to accommodate to. She wasn't a tough nut to crack, but there was nothing much else that came after understanding her.
Tomoko felt better about herself.
"Yeah, we..." She thought aloud. "We're actually planning to head off elsewhere, I kind of want to go somewhere. Can we go somewhere else, Haruko?" "Yeah, totally! I know a couple of places in this district that we can scooter over to, that's why I decided on us coming here... There's this sick arcade with a–"... Tomoko gave Hitori a glance, and walked over to her before Haruko made it back over to her Vespa as her conversation faded. "You're 'guitarhero', right?" "Y... Yeah." "Yea. ...I'll hit you up the next chance I have online. You seem cool. Like... I kind of see myself in you. I used to have a lot of really bad anxiety like you." "Anxiety...? Huh... I do..." "Yea... A lot of people do. But you can become less anxious like I did. I don't really know how, but it'll just happen." "Oh, I... I don't talk to that many people except my friends..." "Oh. Yeah, that's cool too." Tomoko glanced over at Haruko in the distance by the gate, adjusted her chain, and waved goodbye without continuing her sentence. She really did feel better about herself—it was like looking at a sad yet therapeutic funhouse mirror, what all good awkward interactions should become. Tomoko ran over to the esplanade gate, hopped on the backseat of Haruko's Vespa, and let her drive off to wherever she wanted. Pondering on the day so far, Tomoko felt a little bit like she was Arthur Rimbaud, and that Haruko was Paul Verlaine; only in this case, the relationship was much happier, much more humbled, and it even felt like the roles were flattened out. It was just the distance between their ages that made it feel that close to the original analogy. She put in her headphones, opened up her tablet, pressed play on a 1970s German minimalist rock album that steadily chugged along with bare guitars and drums, and let the city breeze past her. She had the urge to go on her direct messaging app and try to reach out to Hitori; with some initial hesitance, she made the attempt, daydreaming a little about striking up an actual friendship with her. Then, she suddenly felt the ennui of the possibility that she could just ultimately be boring.
Sorry, guitarhero is not allowing friend requests at this time.
People are like that. Besides, something better was already going on.
Haruko handed Tomoko her vape, telling her quickly to just push down on it, inhale, then exhale. After following her instructions, a queasy, enthralled smile appeared across Tomoko's face, just gratified off of the feeling of doing something cool as is, drunk off of doing something better with her life.