A music box waltz that echoed grandly enough to make your ears go numb. A feast of neon signs so bright they felt like they would burn your eyes. The moment he, dressed in a splendid uniform, took your hand and escorted you.

Chirp, chirp-chirp...

As if it were a lie, the music cut off abruptly. The colorful lights that filled your vision were nowhere to be found, and the dusty morning sunlight leaking through the gap in the window pricked your eyelids. An eerily quiet morning. In your ears, having just woken from the dream, the afterimage of the parade you heard moments ago hummed lowly like tinnitus.

It didn't feel like you had slept, but rather like you had been forcibly dragged to a festival that ground up your entire soul. The brief faintness that came at the end of persistent insomnia was, as expected, no rest at all.

You dragged your exhausted body up and barely headed for school. Your limbs were as heavy as water-logged cotton. Perhaps because your nerves were frayed from extreme fatigue, the area around your spine and forearms itched slightly with every step. It was an unpleasant sensation, as if fatigue were sprouting over your skin without any relief from scratching, and you trembled slightly while clutching your bag straps.

Rattle.

Opening the classroom door, reality unfolded before you. You saw the blackboard, and him, sitting diagonally on a desk surrounded by kids at the front of the room, laughing brightly. A school shirt without a single crease. That being who reigned omnipotently in a gold-embroidered uniform in your dream looked somewhat ordinary now.

You passed along the classroom wall, taking him in with blurred vision. Your footsteps were heavy due to the terrible fatigue.

—For a long time, he had acted as if he knew something.

His voice, which had been laughing kindly at the children's jokes, stopped in an instant. He cut off his words mid-sentence and turned his head to follow your path as you passed. Not a single drop of the warmth he held moments ago remained in his eyes. A chillingly expressionless face, a deep gaze that didn't blink like a doll's, dug obsessively into your hollow eyes.

Meanwhile, as you gradually woke up and became accustomed to the classroom, the chattering of the classmates buzzed in your head. It might be that your hearing became sensitive due to exhaustion. You buried your forehead on the desk and covered your ears with both hands.

Then, as if nothing had happened, he curled his eyes and laughed brightly again.

The lively voices of someone hitting a friend's shoulder and continuing a conversation drifted away. You were still lying face down on the desk. The everyday noise was being buried by the sound of the music box, like an auditory hallucination lingering in your ears.