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She stared down at the notebooks in front of her, expression morphed into numb disgust. So many notebooks, so many notes on her phone, and still her lyrics were not enough. Anyone could look at her lyrics and say they were good-great, even, but truly, none of them would win an award. She knew from experience. The award was not her point, but she needed to know she could accomplish something, that she could rouse deeper feelings in someone. Happiness, joy, hope was what she wanted to highlight-yet even then, she only found people who related.
The depressing, the dark, the sorrowed songs were the ones that succeeded. Humans so often found it easier to relate to depression as opposed to hope or joy, and it was a pitiful thing. After all, why would one go through pain for nothing, believing only more suffering would come out of it? Day by day, she wrote. Hour by hour, she decided that the majority of what she had written was a waste. Minute by minute, she searched desperately for the emotions she'd tried to summon. And second by second, she realized it was all in vain.
If the only emotions that could arise from her lyrics were painful, what was the use of them being there at all? Plenty of songs and stories went over that stuff, and one more meaningless song wouldn't make a difference. Smiles-that was what she wanted. She did not want to find people like her-there were too many of those even when she hadn't met one, and just herself was overwhelming. People should not be fans for crying together-that was an argument, not love or enjoyment of shared space.
Mafuyu enjoyed their time together, didn't she? No, it was impossible to tell, to distinguish between the faked smiles and the real ones-she didn't think she'd ever seen Mafuyu smile for real, and yet she wouldn't be able to tell the difference in the end.
No one would know the difference in the end.
No one would know or care the hours she'd spent of each day trying to illicit feelings in herself-and then altering them again to mold into someone else's brain. It was increasingly difficult to write about hope when she had only a feeble definition of it herself, and there was no way to match it to eight billion other people. She'd be lucky to get one of those eight billion to even listen.
Still, she choked out each lyric, each note she sang. Her breathless tone fit her well, didn't it? Did the bags under her eyes, her outgrown hair, her day-old clothes, her pale, half-starved appearance fit too?
She thought it did, and so she smiled.