Bleeding Flower

This morning as I opened my shoe locker, a piece of paper slipped off, slightly flattered in the air before it met the ground. Not long before I noticed that it was an envelope. I peered around, looking for a certain person, and eventually crouched down and picked up the paper. 

"Oh, is this what I see it is?" I felt some sort of demon whispered to my ears. As I looked at Ichikawa over my shoulder, I saw her grinning from ears to ears. "A love letter!" she added as though she was announcing what she had seen to the whole world.

On the other hand, I looked at the envelope and silently analyzed it: there were no words on its exterior. Next, I looked at my shoe locker where the envelope came from: no lock could be seen. Privately, I started to get worried about the security of our school.

I pushed my knees and got to my feet. I felt weird crouching down at the side of the walkway. Casually, I placed the envelope back in my locker but Ichikawa suddenly stopped my hand.  

"Miss Ichikawa?"

I looked at her baffled but it seemed like she was more confused since you could literally see her eyebrows meeting each other

"What do you think you're doing, Miss Fujihara?"

"What am I doing you say…" I took a glance at the envelope once more. "I don't have to read it so…" *I'm taking it back to the dark, cold world of my locker.*

"You can't do that, you know!" she chided, now I was more baffled why. It seemed like it was okay to put an envelope in other people's locker but it was not allowed to ignore it. Was that too one-sided?

I was about to voice my thoughts but then the bell had chimed. It seemed like talking to my big sister this morning made me forget about time, she had a lot of interesting things going inside her mind, after all. Then, ran into Ichikawa. Now that I mentioned it, it was the first time I'd run into Ichikawa in the entryway. I knew her as the girl who was often late in the class.

"Make sure to respond to his feelings. You never know what sort of courage he had to muster up before putting that letter inside your shoe locker," she remarked, waving her hands as she started to walk off. "Not that I know it, of course…"

"Ah…"

Envelope in hand, I followed her and strode through the hallway to our classroom. I had my grip tightened but not to the point that it would wrinkle.

Slowly, my mind started to drift away to a distance. I knew how bad I was when it came to things that didn't take my interest. Gradually, I started to look at the younger version of myself. I remembered her saying she wanted to experience all sorts of things in the world, then did she want to experience this too? If I was the younger me, what would I do? Because as a high schooler, I knew the answer too well.

Fully aware of that answer, I felt a cold sweat trickle down my back. My body had begun to shiver by how bad the current me actually was.

The elementary me never looked at the people around her.

In middle school, I never acknowledged anyone.

I wonder what the current me would be.

I thought experiences make you learn something but as I watched myself growing this past few years, I felt something along those words didn't feel right. *Do I have to experience complicated things such as this? Or should I turn my back and walk away from the things that I know could hurt me. What sort of experiences did I want back then?* Right now, all I know was no book could help me search for my answers. And without any references to guide me, it felt like I was lost inside a dark forest, yearning for something I didn't know.

Just like the water full of ripples, my mind went all over the place, searching for the answers. Just then, I noticed how I depended on the past too much. I shook myself to rise back to reality. Coincidentally, as I sat in my seat our teacher entered the class. 

Looking at the vague past, I let myself get absorbed in her lesson and left this complicated thought to the future me.