Humans Yearn
The truth is, when you wander from place to place scavenging, there are things you can't help but see.
Never mind the corpses I always talk about. What I mean are the objects that still hold someone's memories.
Photographs, mostly. A couple's wedding portrait blown up and hung on the wall. A family photo of a mother and father with two children nestled between them, all of them wearing the same smile. The tender shots of lovers who were still together. The ones steeped in the deep, easy affection of friendship. Those, too.
In apartments, it was always the first kind. In studio rooms, always the second. Every time I stepped inside to scavenge, those were the first things that came out to greet me.
I won't deny that in the beginning I walked past them without a thought. Back then, staying alive was already more than I could handle. Until I was with Harin, my head was full of nothing but slightly more selfish calculations. I was probably just jealous of people who held precious things I'd never had.
But now, whenever I come face to face with the memories other people left behind, my mind starts running. It's uncomfortable. Complicated. My guts twist and my head feels like it's ringing.
The starting point for all these feelings was probably the sight of a woman who'd died in the most wretched way. A middle-aged woman, dead, clutching photographs of her child tight against her chest.
That's the one that stays with me. Still vivid. Still a shock. She'd gathered all of it — pictures from childhood, pictures from after her child had grown, even the ultrasound — and died with her arms around the whole collection. That sorrowful way of dying made even someone like me, who'd never had parents, understand what a mother's love actually looks like.
She was the only one in that house. Corpses had long since become familiar — more than familiar — and still I couldn't bring myself to take a single thing from that scene. I turned around and walked out.
And then, later, after I'd gotten my head on straight and told myself that scavenging supplies wasn't optional, I went back. What came out to greet me was two of them.
A woman who looked exactly like the photographs, dead with her arms wrapped around the corpse.
"..."
In the end, I've still never scavenged that house. I don't even feel the urge to go back. I'm afraid that if I do, the scene waiting for me will have added something else.
That's why. Even when I was busy and out of my mind. Even when I was exhausted and depressed. Maybe even in a few moments when my life was actually on the line. There is one thought that never, ever leaves my head.
"Haah..."
Was all of this my fault after all? The world went to hell and everyone died, and I walked out of it alive. Is that supposed to be a decent story?
I don't know. The more I think about it, the more tangled and uncomfortable it gets. The more I turn it over, the more it sours and chokes me. It's hard to stand.
Do you regret it?
"...Maybe."
Great. Now I'm dizzy. Every time my heart goes quiet and calm, things like this always find a crack and squeeze their way in.
But this is the outcome of the scenario you wished for, Sesame Ramen Tuna Mayo.
"..."
You said it quite clearly. You wanted the world to end. Your wish has come true!
"Fuck off."
When I was struggling and depressed, those feelings filled me so completely that nothing else could get in. The moment a gap opened, they slipped through and started stirring around inside my skull.
I carefully laid the picture frame that had been standing upright face-down, shook off every last tangled thought, and went on scavenging.
Maybe if I were more of a piece of garbage — the kind of human who couldn't feel even a shred of guilt — I'd be better built for staying alive.
Hell if I know. The more I think, the more I sink into the past, and I forget that the ache is coming up from my fingertips.
It's cold.
The truth is I don't even have room for idle thoughts, and yet every time Harin steps away for a bit, they find a crack and start this all over again.
Then the radio crackled with static.
Oppa, I'm here!
"Yeah. Introduce yourself once."
Generator fabrication authority Dr. Rin, reporting in!
"That's the one."
Hearing Harin's voice settles my heart right back down, calm as anything.
Find anything good? Catch a big one?
"Yeah. Got an airplane. Planning to fly far away now."
Bullshit.
The tangle in my chest came undone on its own, and I locked back onto the original point of all this: scavenging.
"Watch your mouth. How'd a rich girl end up with a tongue that filthy?"
That's your fault, Oppa. I picked it up watching you, so take responsibility.
"That's on you for learning it. If a few months was all it took to stain you like this, you were a lost cause from the seed."
Instant rice on the shelves. Three-minute curry pouches under the cupboard. Fresh kimchi in the fridge. Butane canisters in the storage closet, paper towels and bath towels left out on the veranda.
Fucking bullshit.
"Hey, hey."
I stepped over the sprawled corpses, ignored the photographs on the walls, carefully turned the frames face-down, and just kept scavenging.
Oppa, you idiot.
"I know."
This landscape that was anything but normal had, in a little under half a year, become ordinary. Become the new normal.
Give a person even a sliver of room to breathe, and they'll start dragging out things they wouldn't have given a second glance before.
I finished scavenging and came home late. The moment I lay down in the tent to sleep, the radio called my name.
Oppa. Oppa.
"What."
Do you like Pokemon, by any chance?
"Pikochu? Pikichu? I only know that yellow thing, whether it's a mouse or a rabbit. Never actually watched it."
It's Pikachu....
"So what about it."
Harin was bored, apparently. Had time on her hands. You could tell from the way she opened a conversation by dragging up some cartoon out of nowhere.
Anyway, do you remember when that Pokemon bread with the collectible stickers inside was all the rage? Even back when you'd come into the convenience store and grab nothing but sesame ramen and tuna mayo, the shelves were piled high with them.
"Ah. Yeah. I remember that. The packaging with those weird-looking animals on it."
Yes, that's the one. That bread is here too. The warehouse is stacked with it, and the kids here throw out the bread and just keep the stickers so they can collect them.
"Hmph. I ought to line every last one of them up and start with a beating. They've got no idea how precious food is."
Spoiled little shits. People outside were starving to death for lack of anything to eat, and the golden-spoon brats living in the PH129 Bunker were throwing away that precious bread. The whole thing sat wrong with me, so I was in the middle of cursing them out when Harin kept going.
I kind of think so too.... No. That's not it. I just suddenly wondered if you never liked that kind of thing. It occurred to me we've been living together and we've never once talked about hobbies.
"Hobbies?"
Yes. What was your hobby, Oppa? Mine was collecting Pokemon stickers while I was working part-time at a convenience store.
Hmph.
Does running a multi-account upvote-manipulation scheme with Hyungjaedeul-ui Cyburger count as a hobby? Watching that power-tripping bastard pull a Multi Shadow Clone Jutsu to rig the upvotes was a sight that pulled genuine gasps out of me. Thinking about it again, it was actually pretty fun.
But even if that counts as a hobby, it's the embarrassing kind, so I went with something a little more normal.
"I used to like reading, back in the day. Didn't really care what kind."
Oh, right. You liked books. Didn't really suit you, though.
"Bullshit."
Just kidding~ So is there a scene that stuck with you?
A scene that stuck with me.
I turned it over, and something did surface.
"There's a page from a comic I read a long time ago that I still remember."
What is it?
A long time ago. Back when the world was still intact. There's a scene from a comic I read then that I still haven't forgotten. The landscape was the same as now — a blizzard that never stopped, a field of white piled high with snow. And the line that came out of a character I took for a raving lunatic and a quack doctor went like this:
"When do you think a person dies...?"
"When they've been forgotten...!"
There was a character dying of an incurable disease who still delivered the line that a person dies the moment they're forgotten.
I thought he was a moron.
And the reason I still remember that scene anyway is probably this: the thought that my own worthless life wouldn't be remembered by a single living soul. That there was no one left around me, that nobody would come looking, that I wouldn't just be forgotten — I'd never leave even the smallest trace on anyone at all.
I think I just didn't want to be forgotten by people and die like that.
"..."
Oppa?
The closest thing I had to leaving a trace was clinging to Hyungjaedeul-ui Cyburger — a guy with a fixed username — giving him my address, and asking him to come deal with the body. Looking back on it now, it was a pointless little performance.
Instead, the whole world died, and the only ones left are a handful of people including me. I was the one who'd been forgotten, and I survived. The ones who hadn't been forgotten died in droves.
"The scene where the quack doctor who said you die when people forget you gets blown to pieces."
No. What even is that....
"Hell if I know."
Thinking it over again, yeah. Still a dumb-as-shit scene.