I found just the right thread... This is something I experienced when I was a child, back in kindergarten. I've always wanted to tell someone about it.
When I was in kindergarten (I'm a 32-year-old male now), I lived in a place called Yoshikawa in Saitama Prefecture. I don't know what it's like now, but back then, it was just a few apartment complexes clustered in the middle of rice paddies, and at night it was pitch black with almost no streetlights. The moment you stepped outside the apartment grounds, you could see the horizon.
When I was a kid, I used to hear rapping sounds frequently. Once, I thought I heard my dad—who was supposed to be out at work—calling me, only to receive a phone call from him right after. I saw ghosts and had all sorts of bizarre experiences. Even now, when I'm out exploring unfamiliar towns (my hobby, lol), I'll suddenly stop in my tracks and find myself standing directly in front of a bouquet of flowers. Compared to back then, though, nothing really happens to me anymore.
Anyway, one day at dusk, on my way back from playing at my usual park, I rounded my usual corner just like I always did. Beyond that corner was the building where I lived, and I should have been just a few steps away from home.
Dusk is a time when—in my experience, at least—you're more likely to run into uncanny things and phenomena than in the dead of night, so I was running as hard as I could, urged on by the desire to reach a safe, warm home.
The moment I turned the corner, I froze in my tracks. What was there wasn't the familiar apartment building, but a landscape I had never seen before.
The scenery was burned into my retinas so vividly that I could describe it in detail if I were painting a picture, but I'm not sure if I can express it well in words. The space that suddenly opened up before me—how should I put it—was filled with a sky the color of a bright yellow mixed with brown, like it was hazy with Asian dust. The horizon was about a third of the way up the space, and where it met the sky was blurred as if painted with an airbrush.
The ground felt like sand, now that I think about it, and the thin soles of my children's shoes felt freezing cold. On the right-hand side, there was a structure made of a complex tangle of thick, iron-colored pipes. On the left-hand side, there was a slightly distorted, irregularly assembled building—or something like a building—made of glass or some transparent rods close to it.
A cold wind was blowing strongly, but no sand or dust was swirling around. It was a lonely landscape. There was nothing there except sand, the horizon, a bright yet brown sky, and two inorganic buildings.
I couldn't look back. I was too scared. If that same scenery had continued behind me, I probably wouldn't have been able to bear it. I took one or two steps forward just like that. I thought I'd never be able to go home again. And then, I tripped.
When I tripped and banged my knee hard, it was against the stairs of the apartment complex. I scrambled up them desperately. (My home was on the 5th floor.) I burst into the house, dived onto my bed, pulled the futon over my head, and cried.
It wasn't because I was scared; I felt an unbearable, unreasoning sorrow. I just cried and cried, choking back my voice.
Ever since that experience, something inside me has been missing. Right after this, I started elementary school and moved to Narashino City in Chiba Prefecture, but I have almost no memories of elementary and junior high school. According to my mother, I became a sickly child who caught colds easily, and on top of that, I stopped smiling much. She often laughs and says, "You used to be so cute, too. What happened to you?" Learning the multiplication table and how to read and write letters also seemed extremely delayed for me.
My memories only finally become reliable from high school onward. There is an unbridgeable fault line between the young me before that experience, and the me from that moment to the present.
Still, it can't be helped. It's not the kind of thing you can get back now, so I have no choice but to give up. However, that landscape. What was that lonely, sorrowful landscape? And what was the part of myself that I left behind in it? Even now, that question never leaves my mind. I feel like it was something very important... Every now and perhaps because of that, a deep sense of loss still hollows out the pit of my stomach. Maybe that's why I'm still single.
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