Promptober 2026 Day 31: Live
They stood up there in their school uniforms and got their nice loafers dusty with the scruff and dust of the stage. They only played one song, because one song was all they had. But it was theirs, and the energy and passion of that was so clearly obvious that it was enough to paper of the way Tomori’s voice wavered or the occasional off-step offering from the bass. It electrified the room. Forty or forty-five girls all between grades 9 and 12 went nuts.
And that was enough.
As the guitar faded and the cheers mounted, in the instant that the last last cymbal hit vibrated against her palm, one thought pounded through Shiina Taki’s head.
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
—
It never even really got to the point where she was making a plan. Even later, she doesn’t think she ever would have. It was never quite like that, never quite… real enough.
But some days, the thought preoccupied her:
I want to wake up as someone else, somewhere else.
Or:
I wish someone would just decide for me.
Or:
If there was an accident, wouldn’t that be a relief? Everything would be tragic and awful, but nobody would be at fault. Nobody’s memory would be ruined, nobody would blame my parents or my sister, and I would be off the hook.
Idle thoughts. That’s all they were. Just a background hum that she drowned out with earbuds in her ears (all the time). And if she ever gazed a little too wistfully at crosswalks, if she ever spent just a little too much time reading about accidents and kidnappings on her phone, it wasn’t even so much that anyone would notice. She didn’t even notice.
—
I want to live.
I want to live.
I want to live.
In a haze, she dragged herself off the drumkit and through the backstage door. She burst through it half-blind and threw herself into the arms of her savior and cried out her name and wept, whining and naked, like a child.
“Did… did I sing everything?” Tomori murmured, dazed. “I got… so lost in it…”
Unbelievable. She was unbelievable. Taki couldn’t help but laugh. She loved her so, so much.
That night was perfect.
—
It might seem like the whole thing was over and done in the blink of an eye. Looking back, it certainly felt that way. The whole affair - the pedestrian bridge incident, the first meeting at Hazawa, karaoke, the evenings of practice, the show, Sakiko’s inexplicable disappearance, and that last awful night - all of it happened before they even put on their summer uniforms.
The whole affair - drenched in spring sunlight.
Less than three months.
That’s how life is when you’re fifteen.
Your heart is so… precarious.
A monumental, earthshattering event will come and go in less time than it takes to air a season of television.
For some people, it might be… picking up a new instrument on a whim. Maybe seeing a movie that sparks a new interest. Maybe reading a book that changes the way you look at the world.
Sometimes, a chance meeting will alter the course of your entire life. Sometimes, ‘the course of your entire life’ is just a few weeks in spring, and then you’re off the tracks. You’re in uncharted waters. You’re working without a net.
—
Three weeks after CRYCHIC breaks up, Taki is at the doctor for her annual physical.
(At some point, doctor’s visits stopped being ‘check-ups’ and started being ‘physicals’, and while she would never admit that this makes her feel like an adult, she always sits with her back a little straighter on the examination bed.)
This is the year she gets a tetanus shot. It hurts for an unusually long time.
But even after her arms stops hurting, the protection stays inside her body.
I want to live.
She’ll get a job. She’ll see Soyo at the cafe from time to time.
Soyo looks like she’s doing better than Taki, but seems worse - it’s uncanny and hard to pin down. They try talking about it exactly once, and the experience is so awkward and painful that it never happens again.
She wouldn’t admit that she took up composition and production to stick it to Sakiko Togawa. For her, it just seemed like the thing to do, another way to keep out the background hum. But she’ll carry forward some flavor of contempt for years.
She hasn’t seen Tomori since that night, and it’ll be more than a year, and when she does, things will start happening so quickly that she’ll be acting purely on instinct, like a dog that bites and growls and hurts.
Her love, which was planted, grew, flowered, and went dormant all in the space of a single springtime, will not return suddenly.
No moment of sublime epiphany here. No trumpets, no clarion call, no castle walls crumbling to dust.
But it will return.
She’ll live.