Zaregoto Chapter Volume 2 Prologue

Dreams don’t co true so easily. Well, yeah. I an, I can barely handle reality. So, in other words, all wishes are nearly unattainable. Well, yeah, but not all nearly unattainable things are wishes. That’s a single fragnt of Zerozaki and . A small sample of our conversation. Let’s suppose that it hadn’t been a nonsensical babbler like who was there. Imagine, instead, it was soone who harbors at least a soupçon of doubt about the world—the person would still have had a more or less similar experience in conversation with Zerozaki. When you were in conversation with him, the exchange wasn’t influenced by cheaply supplied empathy, or a pathetic desire to conform. Nor was it ever a product of the miraculously common synchronicity you see everywhere. Instead, a conversation with Zerozaki was a ditative realm within a mirror, that preceded aning and conceptualization; It simply said, “This is the way it is.”There was no speck of realism, or any fragnt of necessity, or any segnt of a theoretical formula, or clarification or clownification, not a single puff of congruence and no such word as allusion, no solution nor illusion, not a drop of cogency, not a streak of the world order, and above all else, there was no romance. The true cody of it, however, was that in spite of all the things conversation with him wasn’t, there was still sothing. It was the kind of cody that bred sorrow, demanded compassion, and that had an even poignant air. I think he was an irregularity to begin with. An untouchable. When I think about Zerozaki as soone “on the other side of the water”—as the person I saw on the other side when I saw my reflection on the surface of the water—that’s the only way I can think to make any sense of him. And without being able to make any sense of him, there’s absolutely no point in trying to put his existence into words. But then again, regardless of what he may have been, was there even any aning to Zerozaki in the first place? If he was like and possessed no aning whatsoever, then to look at Zerozaki from the outside and expect to co up with any kind of judgnt was a misguided train of thought from the very beginning. How could one go about describing this sensation? Explaining this miraculous, entirely too familiar tale? Being with Zerozaki was like looking into my own face and talking to myself. Yeah. It was an impossible, chance eting to begin with. P R O L O G U E ■■■ i x Maybe it had all begin long ago, with our very first experience. The very first word we ever heard. Our root mories. A past both easy to recall and easy to taphorically describe. We were traveling in the sa direction from the sa point. From before the beginning of days. Like reflections in a mirror. That is to say, I think we were similar. We were like two congruent figures, so similar that there was no need for a geotric proof. And we were both incredibly aware of this. From a subjective viewpoint, when we spoke to each other, I was, of course, myself; and Zerozaki, of course, Zerozaki. Neither of us was anything more or less than just that, and we were well aware of this. And yet we identified with each other, were unified with each other. That was the paradox that we shared—a paradox that surpassed the limitations of language. He was on the opposite side of the water’s surface. Now imagine an innocent young girl. Imagine the first ti she ever looked in the mirror. Surely, in her perfect innocence, she didn’t know that the image before her was a re reflection of the light. Instead, she imagined. She created sothing more: On the other side of the mirror, she saw an endless world, separated from her by a single pane. A perfect replica of her “here,” yet existing in an infinitely distant place. An enormous paradox of a world— living inside of her imagination. It wasn’t ignorance that allowed such a paradox to exist. It mattered little which world was the true one and which was false. If one side was real, then the other was fake, but if reality was in fact fake, then both sides had equal value, and equally lacked value. That’s what I think. So did Zerozaki. In a sense, my relationship with Zerozaki was very much like that. We realized we were the sa, but we also understood that, at the sa ti, we were completely different. “I might have once beco like you, so I feel a certain affinity.” “I definitely could not have beco like you. That’s what I like about ya.” This was another fragnt of us. Truly nonsensical. Ultimately. I’m pretty sure we both despised ourselves. Likewise, we despised our own kind and scorned our own species. We both hated ourselves, resented ourselves, cursed ourselves so much that we were able to acknowledge each other with a bit of irony. I think it was sothing special. Wait, of course it was: I was the passive onlooker and he the homicidal monster. We existed at such extres; it really did feel like there was a mirror between us. But as soon as that drear of a girl reached out her graceful hand and placed a finger on that mirror, all she would feel was a void. Nothing but nothingness. The thing she had allowed to exist, soone else had not. Moreover, the thing she had allowed to exist didn’t an anything to anyone else. And this she finally realized. For that girl, in that mont, without any exaggeration, a world had been destroyed. And so begins the story of the downfall of a single world. A world that fell apart not due to the interference of an azurehaired Savant or a crimson-haired Mankind’s Greatest, but simply because that’s the way it was. When a fallacy bearing a justifiable paradox descends upon a human failure and , a pile of damaged goods, everything goes back to zero. So . . .