Chapter 8: The Taste of Forgetting
Time stopped. The fork with the piece of katsudon hovered centimeters from my lips, an unmoving pendulum at the epicenter of absolute silence. Each of the Valerias lining the infinite table watched me with that vacant smile, their eyes like dark wells of expectation. The system wasn't asking me to fight a monster. It was asking me to become one. To consciously consume the kindness I had taken for granted, to choke on the proof of my own parasitism.
My hand trembled, not from fear of physical pain, but from the desecration I was about to commit. I closed my eyes, a useless gesture. There was no escape. With a slow, forced movement, like an automaton whose gears are rusting, I brought the food to my mouth.
The instant my tongue touched the egg and pork, the flavor exploded. It wasn't the taste of dashi, nor soy, nor sweet onion. The first taste was exhaustion. It was a metallic, heavy taste, like sucking on an old battery. I could feel in my own bones Valeria's fatigue after a double shift, the way her feet must have ached in her work shoes, the dull ache at the base of her neck. The flavor was so overwhelming it made me gag.
I chewed, and the act became torture. With every movement of my jaw, the taste broke down into layers of misery. I felt the stress of her final exams, the anxiety about rent, the constant worry about her sick mother in Veracruz—concerns she rarely mentioned because my own self-pitying monologue always took up all the space. I swallowed, and the mouthful went down my throat like a ball of barbed wire, scratching my insides.
I opened my eyes. One of the Valerias at the table, the closest one, was no longer smiling. Her porcelain mask had cracked, and her expression was now one of infinite sadness. Her eyes, formerly vacant, now gleamed with unshed tears.
The maître d', with Valeria's stern face, again pointed to the plate. Almost all of it remained. The test was not in a single bite. I had to devour it all.
The second bite was worse. The taste this time was patience. It tasted of stagnant water, of stale bread. I felt the countless times she had taken a deep breath and forced a smile as I canceled our plans last minute because I "wasn't in the mood." I remembered the night of her architecture exhibition, the culmination of a semester's work. I had promised to be there. And I didn't go. I texted her thirty minutes before: "Sorry, had a bad day, can't make it." The truth was, I was in the middle of a winning streak in a video game and didn't want to stop.
As I chewed that mouthful of eroded patience, I saw the memory from her eyes. I saw her reading my message on her phone, her face lit by the screen in the dim gallery light. I saw her smile falter, how her gaze drifted to her perfectly built model, and how a shadow of loneliness enveloped her, even surrounded by her peers and professors. She didn't get angry. She simply accepted the disappointment with a resignation that I now understood as the sound of a crack forming in her heart.
I swallowed, and the taste of ash coated my tongue. Tears began to roll down my own cheeks, silent and hot. I looked along the table. More Valerias had lost their smiles. Now their faces showed a range of sorrows: one with disappointment in her eyes, another with trembling lips, another with a look of distant compassion, as if she were watching a wounded animal.
I forced myself to take a third bite. This one was different. It wasn't a taste; it was an absence of taste. It was a void, a hollow, the blank space where my questions should have been. It tasted of all the times I didn't ask her, "And you? How are you doing?" All the times I assumed her silence meant everything was fine, when in reality it was the sound of her giving up, of her realizing it was useless to try to share her world with me, because I was too busy inhabiting my own.
This time, the memory was the end. We were sitting on the same sofa where I had spent countless hours complaining. The evening light streamed through the window, drawing long golden rectangles on the floor. She had been quiet all day.
"What's wrong?" I asked, my voice tinged with barely disguised irritation. Her silence made me uncomfortable. It broke the routine.
And I saw her through her own eyes. I saw myself, with my frown, my impatient posture. And I felt her calm. A terrible calm, the calm that comes after the storm has passed and the decision has already been made.
"Kenji," she said, and her voice, which came from my lips in the memory, was soft, without a hint of anger. "I don't think we can do this anymore."
I felt my own confusion, my own disbelief. "What? Why? Did I do something?"
The question was so stupidly selfish that, reliving it, I choked on the mouthful of void in my mouth. I started to cough, to retch, but the rules of this place did not allow me to vomit. I had to swallow it.
"It's not something you did," she continued in the memory, and I felt her deep sadness in knowing she was about to hurt me, even as she knew it was necessary. "It's what you don't do. It's... that you're not here. Your body is here, but you're not. I'm... I'm lonely, Kenji. I'm lonelier when I'm with you than when I'm truly alone."
And then she said the sentence that broke me.
"I don't remember what it feels like to be cared for anymore."
That was the truth. The truth that had been underneath everything. It wasn't just that I didn't care for her; it was that my presence, my constant need, had made her forget the very feeling of mutual care. I had stolen not only her energy but the memory of what a healthy relationship was.
The memory faded. I was back in the banquet hall. The fork clattered from my hand, making a sharp tinkle that broke the silence. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It wasn't the hysterical laughter from school, nor the tears of frustration. It was a deep, gut-wrenching cry, a lament that came from the ruins of my soul.
I cried for her. I cried for the kindness I had crushed under the weight of my own self-pity. I cried for the girl who had loved a black hole until she almost disappeared inside it.
And I cried for myself. I cried for the blind idiot I had been. I cried for the love I had lost, not due to one big mistake, but due to a slow death, a thousand small cuts of selfishness. I cried because I had never asked her for forgiveness. I cried because, at the moment of the breakup, my only concern had been my own pain, my own surprise, and I had never considered hers. Her sadness was not a weapon against me; it was her last, most honest offering, and I didn't even see it.
I looked up, my face drenched. All the Valerias at the table had lost their smiles. Not a single one remained. Their faces showed no anger or accusation. Only a collective, overwhelming sadness. It was like sitting in a room full of the ghosts of what might have been. They looked at the half-eaten plate in front of me, and then they looked at me, and in their eyes, I saw the reflection of my own irreparable loss.
The maître d' was gone. The table, with its dozens of sad Valerias and its untouched feast, began to fade, dissolving into the warm light like sugar in water. The opulent hall vanished with them.
Soon, I was left alone.
I was sitting in my carved chair, which now felt too large and uncomfortable. I was facing a simple wooden table. And on it, the half-eaten katsudon plate. It no longer looked appetizing. It looked like what it was: a meal interrupted, a half-finished ending, a damage that could not be completely undone. No matter how much I cried, no matter how much I understood now, I could never go back and eat the rest of that meal. I could never undo the void I had created in her.
The understanding that forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness, was impossible for certain wounds, was the final taste of this feast. And it was the bitterest of all.
I stood up, feeling older, heavier, and sadder than ever. The emptiness I felt after the school level had been a blessing compared to this. That was an emptiness of nothing. This was an emptiness filled with a sharp, piercing pain. A void in the exact shape of Valeria.
Before me, where the banquet hall's end had been, the staircase appeared.
I stepped onto the first stair. The cold was a familiar comfort. I began to climb, not towards darkness, but with the darkness within me. Every step was an echo of a goodbye I never said, a "thank you" I never offered, a "I'm sorry" that came too late to matter.