Promptober 2026 Day 18: Mirror
Somewhere out in the infinite expanse of the universe is a world where everything went better. A girl who bit off more than she could chew came back home with her head held high and started a band. Five people wandering in the dark drew close together and kept warm by the fire. The love between them grew. They were happy.
But here, for want of a nail named Chihaya Anon, the whole kingdom was lost. She made a braver decision: to tough it out. To double down. To get her mouth around English, to enunciate - Chihaya Anon, thank you very much, and, yes, Chihaya is the family name - and in surprisingly little time, she makes a friend. She starts succeeding in class. By the end of the first semester, her grades are good. By the end of the first year, she is not popular - exchange students cannot be popular, exactly, but they can be a novelty, and she is extremely novel.
She has a small group of friends, most of whom are social misfits in their own right - a girl with slightly too much acne to be ‘cute’; a girl who simply cannot stop getting into fistfights with the other girls; a tall girl with angular features and long, slender fingers and a contralto that makes Anon sigh with pleasure to hear (but in hissing voices, the prettiest girls in class call her a word that Anon does not know and refuses to look up).
Integrating into this new life is the most difficult thing she has ever had to do. She is both alone and lonely, separated from even her closest friends by a gauzy and only semi-permeable barrier over which she has imperfect control. Sometimes, she desperately wants to give up and go back home. She has vivid fantasies of living among other Japanese people, of speaking and being perfectly understood, of going to school in a poorly-air conditioned building built in the 1950s, of baseball on television and 200% humidity and cicadas in the summer. She is homesick for things that it never even occurred to her to remember - the smell of bookshops on the second floor of pencil buildings in Shinjuku, the inconveniently narrow streets in her neighborhood, the blisters she got in the first week before her new indoor shoes were broken in.
But she stays. She sticks it out. It becomes easier. It becomes… normal. And she, at least, is able to find happiness out there in the wildness, to find a measure of strength within herself and use it to keep pushing on.
She doesn’t see what she leaves on the table. She doesn’t even really know there is a table to leave it on.
The seat behind Tomori is vacant all year. On a certain day, on the other side of a mirror, Anon would have caused a scene outside of a livehouse cafe that led to Shiina Taki being reunited with Tomori and another of her old bandmates - but it doesn’t happen.
(All through that day’s shift, Taki is uncomfortable and restless, like she’s forgetting something. The shift ends without incident. She goes home. The next time she sees Tomori will be in the waiting room of a hospital more than a year later, and there will be no joy or love in the room with them.)
On the other side of a mirror, the breakup of CRYCHIC gouges deep wounds that Anon (albeit inadvertently) was able to begin staunching. On this side, the wounds bleed and fester and itch, and nobody is happy.
Soyo has the easiest time of it. Without the temptation to reform the band, she buries her wishes deep and continues to smile. She continues to develop on the contrabass - she really is quite talented, after all. When her nails become too ragged not to draw attention, she simply clips them short. She can continue in this vein for years before anyone notices, and by the time anyone does, well,
Not being blessed with her sister’s talent, Taki throws herself into school and work and keeps desperate hold of a memory: A breathy, stammering voice in her ear whispering you should continue to live. Eventually, that memory fades. For a while, she tries living for the sake of other people; then, for a while, she can’t think of any reason at all.
Genius is not so heavy a burden to bear for a girl who so readily moves at her own pace, but Raana cannot for the life of her find a place to breathe. She is aimless, unpredictable. One day, she eats a parfait at the livehouse, and the next, she is gone for six weeks, eight weeks, a month. A school administrator asks Taki some questions. A policeman asks around the cafe. Nobody seems to know anything.
Without an anchor, Tomori drifts out to sea, and stays lost.
Yet perhaps even in this most broken shard of the mirror, the nightmare of adolescence might be endured. This time, their paths will not converge in an on-stage reunion. There will be no tearful and loving catharsis. But one day, they might take some comfort in the fact that stories continue, and that on a long enough timeline, all paths converge again.