I was a truant during my junior high school days—though I've somehow managed to make it to university now and will be starting a job soon. There was a period of about a year, starting from my second year of junior high, where I stopped going to school.
It was a school with a really strange vibe, you see. After school, when I was chatting with everyone in the classroom, things would suddenly fall silent, and the room would be completely empty. Before I knew it, I was all by myself. It felt kind of... like the atmosphere was stuck in a perpetual sunset from morning till night. None of my friends felt that way at all, though. Since it’s a depopulated village, I'd known everyone since we were kids, so there's no way they would pull a prank like that on me...
Thinking I might have some kind of mental illness, I went around to see psychiatrists and internal medicine doctors, but they all told me there was nothing wrong with me. Growing a bit neurotic and not wanting to go to school anymore, I faked illness and kept shutting myself away at home.
But you know, while I was shut away at home, a underclassman committed suicide. His family had rebuilt their house, he had parents and siblings, he wasn't being bullied, and he was a popular underclassman who played the funny, goofy role in the group.
I guess it was around that time? That awful feeling from the school completely vanished, and I became able to go back. I know it's messed up of me to link my own problems to a junior high schooler's suicide, but... Well, nowadays that school has been torn down due to a declining student population.
Though, when I talk with my old junior high friends, apparently the teachers had explained my absence during my truancy by telling the class, "He has gone off to a distant world." It just seems weird that they would use an explanation like that to be considerate of a truant student... especially in junior high. What on earth was that junior high school?
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