The first thing Yuuma felt every morning was not the chill of the early morning air, nor the soft sunlight piercing through the thin bedroom curtains. It was the unrelenting, sharp vibration of his phone beneath his pillow, a cold, merciless alarm dragging him out of a three-hour sleep.
6:30 AM.
He swiped the screen to silence it without making a single sound. Keeping his left eye shut to ease the sharp, burning blurriness that had been bothering him for weeks, he slowly sat up on the edge of his worn-out mattress. A dull, heavy ache immediately settled right behind his forehead, almost like someone was pressing a cold lead weight directly against his brain.
He didn't pause to feel it or rub his temples. He didn't have the luxury of time for that.
"Yuuma! Are you awake yet? Breakfast is on the table!"
It was his mother’s voice calling out from the kitchen, accompanied by the familiar clatter of stainless-steel plates, sizzling oil, and cheap plastic spoons.
"Yeah, Mom! I'm up," he called back. His tone was smooth, gentle, and completely composed. It was the exact voice of a dependable eldest son who had everything completely under control.
When he stepped out of his tiny bedroom, the routine chaos of the household met him instantly.
At the cramped wooden dining table, his second-youngest brother, Mark, sat with a thick textbook propped against a plastic pitcher of water, eating in quick, eager bites. Mark was a college student in military training, practically burning with ambition to enlist in the armed forces the second he graduated.
"Bro, did you see the news about the army recruitment drive?" Mark asked without looking up from his study guide, his mouth still half-full of rice. "They're opening more slots for officer training next year."
"That's great. Just make sure you pass your finals first," Yuuma said, offering a small, encouraging nod.
Beside Mark, their two youngest siblings, Leo and Maya, were aggressively arguing over the last piece of hotdog while struggling to pull on their school socks.
"Hey! I called dibs on that hotdog last night!" Maya yelled, reaching across the plate with his fork.
"You did not! You ate three pieces yesterday!" Leo snapped back, swatting his hand away with her pencil case.
"Both of you stop yelling," their mother, Elena, sighed as she walked over, carrying a plate of garlic rice. She looked exhausted, the faint lines around her eyes deepening as she glanced at the clock on the wall. "Your brother worked until midnight again. Lower your voices."
Leaning against the wall near the sink was their father, dressed in his faded driver's uniform, quietly sipping black coffee while listening to a crackling radio. He barely glanced up when Yuuma walked into the room.
"Take it easy, Maya. Watch your stitches, okay?" Elena gently reminded their middle sister, Hannah, assisting her toward a low wooden bench near the table.
Hannah had undergone major abdominal surgery the previous month after a sudden hospitalization. She was strictly forbidden from lifting heavy objects or moving too quickly, her face still pale from the long recovery process.
"I can walk on my own now, Mom," Hannah mumbled, looking down at her lap with a guilty expression. "I'm not completely useless."
"Nobody said you were useless, sweetie," Elena said softly, smoothing down Hannah's hair before placing a plate of rice and two fried eggs in front of Yuuma. She pulled out a stool and sat beside him, offering a look laced with quiet worry. "Did you even get three hours of sleep, Yuuma? You came home past two again last night."
Yuuma smiled. It was a practiced, automatic curve of the lips that required zero thought.
"I'm fine, Mom. Honestly. It was just the usual queue spike at the center. Management needed extra hands to cover the shift, so I took the extra hours."
Elena patted his shoulder softly, her hand warm and trembling slightly. "Thank you, son. Seriously. If it weren't for your overtime pay, we wouldn't have been able to buy Hannah's antibiotics this week. And the kids needed new notebooks for school."
"Don't worry about it, Mom," Yuuma replied, keeping his voice light. "I've got it covered. It's fine."
"Yuuma," his father's deep voice cut in from the side. He finally set his coffee mug down on the counter, his eyes fixed cold and flat on his eldest son. "Make sure you send extra money for the electric bill tonight. The landlord said the rates went up this month because of the aircon in the kids' room."
"Sure, Dad. I'll transfer it as soon as payroll hits at midnight," Yuuma answered smoothly.
His father grunted, picking up his car keys from the table. "Good. Make sure all those extra hours at the office actually amount to something useful. It's not like those useless digital drawings you wasted your whole high school life on. At least this corporate job actually pays for the food on this table."
The room went quiet for a fraction of a second. Mark stopped chewing, and Elena shot her husband a sharp, pleading look, but no one said a word.
Yuuma didn't react. No anger surged in his chest. No resentment flashed in his eyes. There was just a hollow, dead quiet inside him. He simply offered his father a polite, compliant nod.
"I'll be heading out first," his father said, sliding his phone into his pocket and walking toward the front door without another word.
As the door clicked shut, Yuuma's eyes briefly drifted toward the bottom shelf of the old wooden cabinet in the corner of the living room. There, buried beneath stacks of unpaid utility bills, hospital receipts, and dusty tax documents, the glossy edge of a long-abandoned digital drawing tablet peeked out. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, completely forgotten and dead, much like the teenager who used to draw on it every single night.
"Don't mind your father, Yuuma," Elena whispered softly, reaching over to squeeze his wrist. "You know how he gets when he's stressed about money."
"It's fine, Mom. He's right anyway. Art doesn't pay the bills," Yuuma said, his voice entirely flat despite the polite smile still stuck on his face.
He scooped a spoonful of rice and egg into his mouth. It tasted like nothing at all. Neither the saltiness of the fried egg nor the warmth of the fresh rice registered on his tongue. It was like chewing wet cardboard. He wasn't eating because he was hungry, he was simply pouring fuel into an engine so it wouldn't shut down over the next twelve hours.
After finishing his meal in silence, Yuuma stepped into the tiny bathroom and shut the door behind him. He turned on the faucet, letting the cold water run over his hands, before looking up into the cracked mirror above the sink.
He stared directly at his own reflection.
The dark, sunken crescents beneath his eyes looked almost purple. His lips were dry and cracked, and his dark eyes looked completely vacant, like two empty rooms with the lights turned off.
Yuuma raised both hands and pressed his index fingers to the corners of his mouth. Slowly, forcefully, he pulled his lips upward, forcing his face into a wide, bright, cheerful smile.
One. Two. Three.
He dropped his hands. His face instantly collapsed back into a blank, lifeless mask.
"Perfect," he whispered to the mirror.
Dressed in his freshly ironed work polo with his corporate ID lanyard slung around his neck, Yuuma grabbed his backpack and stepped out into the humid morning air. The narrow street greeted him with the deafening roar of traffic engines, thick black exhaust fumes, and a sea of tired commuters jostling for position on the narrow sidewalk.
Plugging his black earphones in, Yuuma didn't turn on any music. He didn't want to listen to songs. He just wanted the rubber tips to muffle the overwhelming noise of the outside world.
He pushed his way into a jammed, swaying bus bound for the central business district, squeezed tightly between a guy in a suit and a college girl reading a document on her tablet.
Standing there in the dark, crowded aisle, Yuuma's mind drifted straight to the computer screen waiting for him at the office. Today marked his exact third year with the company. Today was also the day management was scheduled to release the annual performance appraisals and merit increase notices.
Three years of never calling in sick. Three years of taking every single holiday shift, every weekend overtime, and every sudden queue spike without a single complaint.
He tried not to think about it too much. He tried not to hope.
As the heavy bus doors hissed shut and the vehicle lurched forward into the morning traffic, Yuuma caught his own reflection in the dark, tinted window glass. Surrounded by hundreds of people rushing off to live their lives, Yuuma knew the truth deep down.
He was just pretending to be one of them.
ns216.73.216.48da2
and then Add to home screen.