Zero

The world moved on
And left me behind

Sometimes she just stood there on the bridge. Maybe for hours, maybe for days. It didn't matter though- it was all a passing blur, like the faces she would gaze upon below her.

There were faces with dreams. Faces with futures ahead. Faces that had the unexpectedness of tomorrow lying in front of them. Faces that knew nothing and were completely ignorant of the existence of the Wired and simultaneously, Lain.

They knew nothing of the timid introverted middle schooler Lain that had lived in a normal family with her parents and teenage sister. The Lain that had no friends, eating lunch by her lonesome, surrounded by the sounds of camaraderie that she had no part in. At least until one of her classmates, Alice, and her friends held their hand out to her, offering all of that and more. They knew nothing of the Lain that used to escape to the hidden garden of the Wired- the Lain that slowly merged with her Eden, becoming one with it, bringing it to wield its true power by melting the barrier between reality and virtual reality to a mere foggy haze. Or should she say that it wasn't that they didn't know, but that they had forgotten it all?

And she had made them forget.
Eden was forbidden for a reason.

She remembered a time where she tried to ask her father a question but then forgot it, and he said that if it was something that she could so easily forget then it must not have been that important to start out with.

But the thing was this- if the thought itself wasn't important, if Lain herself hadn't considered the thought important enough, then she wouldn't have ever tried to share it with him. She wouldn't have ever conceived the thought.

And in the same way even though Lain herself was forgotten, turned into a wisp of an existence of a passed universe, Lain did exist. She did play of part of importance in the grand scheme of things. At one point she did have a family, friends, and a life. She did breathe the same air as everyone else did. Even if no one knew, and the only universe she truly existed in now was inside herself, held in her own memories. Even if the universe she longed to be a part of was better off without her.

For Lain, that was the hardest thing to accept.

Clutching onto the familiarly unforgiving coldness of the metal railing to the point where her knuckles turned a pale hue of white, she held back a phantom wave of nausea that she had learned to suppress over the years.

Alone.

Once in a while, she would catch sight of a familiar face, a face that looked like an aged former acquaintance of hers. Sometimes she would see her sister, now matured, with only one man instead of the many she clutched onto before. Just recently she had even began to see her with a little baby girl on her hips, her daughter. Lain's niece. Occasionally she saw her mother, glazed eyes as tired as ever, her face covered in an ever increasing number of wrinkles, carrying bags of groceries in her arms. Her father used to walk through as well, quite often even, but as time passed Lain saw him less and less until one day he just stopped passing through. That was what Lain gauged to be a few years ago.

Her father black hair was beginning to be laced with thick streaks of gray. The years had treated him well; he looked nearly the same as when Lain was his daughter, and his hands were gripping his brown leather business briefcase.

Whenever he'd pass by she'd see him muttering enigmatic nothings, smiling to himself for reasons unbeknownst to any others, eyes wild with excitement. He was his own anomaly, convinced he was right on the brink of realizing something remarkable about the burgeoning world of technology surrounding him.

But the last day that Lain saw her father was different. He didn't smile. He didn't mutter his familiar enigmatic nothings. His eyes weren't wild with excitement, or any emotion at all. Lain knew. She knew because that was the day he had looked up at her, seemingly straight into her own eyes.

It lasted only a fleeting moment before he turned away and resumed walking, but Lain felt the connection. Just as the connection she had felt in the Wired, as increasingly more empty and desolate the deeper she dug, right up until she fell into her own hole, trapped.

Lain never saw her father after that moment.

But the world grew around that too, making its point as an ebony crow flew past her on one of Lain's routine days. It grabbed her cap too, with it flying far away, away into the city's distance, eventually disappearing into the smog and rising buildings with t. It reminded Lain of herself.

She was the crow, just as she was the cap, just as she was the world. The aggressor and the victim. Just as the crow stole the cap from Lain, Lain stole herself from the world. And both would have to move on, and both would have to grow around what they had lost.

The world around her, the world that contained no trace of her existence was growing, moving, changing, completely unphased by the "past". All things she wished she could do.

She wanted to move on. But one cannot move on if they don't have anywhere to move on to. So she kept standing above on the bridge, watching the numerous passing blur of faces below her.

The faces that were part of the world that moved on. The faces that were part of the world that left her behind.

No.

The faces that were part of the world that she left behind.