April 9th

I was woken up by the train's announcement that I was about to arrive in Shibuya. I was wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue jeans. I remembered how I ended up here.

A man was forcing himself on a woman.

"Please, help!" I heard her cry.

I put my hand on his shoulder and he fell in a drunken stupor.

"Damn brat..." he said. "I'll sue!"

I tried to ignore it. It wasn't something I needed to dwell on at the moment. It was in the past. All I needed to do was accept what happened and move on with my life until everything blew over. It was how I dealt with the other hardships in my life. This time would be no different. I overheard some schoolgirls talking. The girls both seemed like airheads but I was interested in what they were saying.

"What? Are you for real? A mental shutdown?"

"It's the truth!"

"To a person though? That's gotta be a joke. You really love all that occult stuff, don't you?"

I was still getting used to my glasses. It a cosmetic choice to make me look more innocent. I noticed I was getting closer to the station. Time to start my new life in this city for the next year. I grabbed my black bag and swung it over my shoulder as the train arrived in Shibuya and I stepped off. Like the rest of the world, I had seen the famous crosswalk via video and photos but never in person. The mass of people seemed like an entity. My cellphone vibrated and I had been trained to look at every notification as soon as it appears. I saw what I at first thought was an error message but it was actually an app. The icon looked almost like an eye on a red and black background. It looked like malware so I tried to drag it to the trashcan but as I touched it, everything around me stopped. The people, the cars, even the clouds and the birds in the sky. Nothing was moving except me, it was like time had frozen. I looked around frantically to see some blue flames form a humanoid figure with wings on it's back. I saw myself within the flames.

After that, it all disappeared and everyone started moving again. I heard those girls talking about mental shutdowns. Is that what just happened to me? I dragged the app to the trash.