まよなか
きいろいかげ
すがお
midnight / yellow shadow / the naked face
At exactly 3:17 a.m., the refrigerator began humming in a way I had never heard before. Not louder, not broken. Just purposeful. It sounded like a large, metallic lung trying to remember how to breathe, inhaling the silence of the kitchen and exhaling a low, vibrating regret.
I was sitting at the wooden table, my hands cupped around a mug of cold coffee I had forgotten to reheat three hours ago. The liquid was black and flat, like a pond where nothing lives.
Outside, the streetlight flickered with the patience of someone waiting to be forgiven. The city felt hollow, scooped out. It was as if the buildings were just cardboard props, and all the people had stepped out for a cigarette and forgotten to come back.
That was when the cat appeared.
I do not own a cat. I am not especially fond of them either. I prefer dogs, or silence. But there it was, sitting on the counter next to the toaster. It was gray, the color of wet pavement, and entirely unremarkable. It was licking its right paw with professional concentration.
It stopped, looked at me with eyes the color of old moss, and spoke.
“You are early,” the cat said. Its voice was dry, like leaves scraping across asphalt.
“For what?” I asked. I was not surprised it spoke. At 3:17 a.m., in a hollow city, surprise felt like an unnecessary expenditure of calories.
“For the shift,” it replied. “For becoming someone else.”
I stirred my coffee with a spoon, even though there was nothing left to dissolve. The clink of the metal against the ceramic sounded violent in the quiet room. Somewhere deep inside the walls of the apartment, the pipes knocked twice. Thud. Thud. A cautious agreement.
The Man in the Window
The cat jumped down from the counter. It moved like liquid shadow. It walked to the window and sat on the sill, its tail twitching.
“Look,” the cat said.
I looked.
Down on the street, under the flickering light, a man in a bright yellow raincoat stood perfectly still.
It was not raining. The pavement was dry. The sky was clear and indifferent. Yet, he was buttoned up to his chin. He was staring up at my building, at my specific window. He was holding a paper bag that sagged at the bottom, heavy with invisible weight.
“You could become him,” the cat continued, nodding toward the glass. “He is very reliable. He has a pension. He has opinions about politics that everyone agrees with. He is safe.”
The cat turned its head back to me.
“Or you could become me. I sleep eighteen hours a day and I do not pay taxes. Most people pick something convenient at this hour. The membrane is thin at 3:00 a.m. You can slip through.”
“I was planning on staying myself,” I said.
The cat considered this. Its tail stopped moving. It stared at me with a mixture of pity and boredom.
“That is the hardest option,” it said. “To be yourself, you have to give things up.”
“Dreams?” I asked.
“No,” the cat said. “Habits. You have to give up the habit of being liked. You have to give up the habit of the yellow raincoat.”
The Smell of Oranges
The refrigerator stopped humming abruptly. The silence that rushed back into the room felt heavier than before. It had texture. It felt like velvet.
Suddenly, I could smell oranges. Sharp, citric, peeling oranges. There were no oranges in my apartment. There was only stale coffee and bread. But the smell was overwhelming, brighter than the light.
When I blinked and looked back, the cat was gone.
The counter was empty.
I looked out the window. The man in the yellow raincoat had disappeared too. There was no footprint. There was just the streetlight, buzzing with its quiet, electrical resolve.
I finished the cold coffee. It tasted bitter, muddy, and exactly like it should. It tasted like reality.
At 3:18 a.m., I stood up. I turned off the kitchen light. And I felt, for reasons I could not explain to anyone, that I had made a small but irreversible decision.
The Legacy of the Unworn Coat
Which brings me to the question. You asked, “What is one thing you hope people say about you?”
I do not want them to say I was successful. Success is just a matter of timing and gravity.
I do not care if they say I was talented, or charming, or that I was the smartest person in the room. Those are just costumes. Those are yellow raincoats we put on to keep the world from touching our skin.
I hope that, when they look at the empty space I used to occupy, they say this:
“He never drifted.”
I hope they say that when the cat appeared, when the convenient identities were offered, when the world handed me a script and told me to read it, I put it down.
I want them to say that I did the hard, heavy work of remaining myself.
It sounds simple, but it is a constant war. It is a war against the urge to please, the urge to fit, the urge to wear the coat because everyone else is wearing one.
I want to be remembered as someone who was the same person in the dark of the kitchen at 3:00 a.m. as I was in the bright, noisy light of the afternoon.
I want them to say: He didn’t wear the mask. He was just… him.
life 
Leave a comment