words #3 'Here, too, the moon floats.'

I was drunk.

Was it December 30th the year before last? Or the 31st?
I couldn’t match schedules with a friend,
so I ended up drinking beer with mandarins for snacks,
getting drunk alone in my mother’s bedroom.

A variety show spilling endlessly from the TV.

The heater warming the room.

And yet I was cold, wrapped up in the futon.

Comic books rolling around on the floor.

Whenever I got bored, I would swim smoothly through the online sea inside my phone.

If there were an assignment that said, “Give shape to the word laziness,”
I could probably earn full marks with that scene.

“Ah, the year is ending,”
I thought—again, nothing interesting—
as I absentmindedly looked around my mother’s bedroom.
Looking slightly upward, I noticed a fabric carnation
I had made and given to her on Mother’s Day when I was young, half as practice on the sewing machine.

She’s kept it up all this time because she was happy.

I thought, and felt something similar to the feeling of looking at the moon
from the rooftop of the office.
Not exactly happiness, not exactly warmth—
perhaps the closest phrase would simply be “something lovely.”
The moon can float in a room, too, I thought,
and wondered if I could make a moon like that float within my heart as well.

I’ve always based things around uniforms,
but not uniforms with practical functions—
rather a fashion where something functions inside the heart.
That is what I want to call the uniform of SHINYAKOZUKA.

Thinking about that for a moment, I looked around the room again,
and saw my own face reflected in the old dresser mirror
my mother had brought with her as part of her wedding trousseau.

I was drunk.