A Stomachache, and Still Worried for You

Today, Lain’s body simply wouldn’t cooperate with him.

He said he hadn’t slept enough since before dawn, so he’d given up on driving and taken the shuttle instead. That, at least, was a good call. But the stomachache, he kept sliding past it, again and again. Whenever I asked, he’d laugh it off with an “I’m fine,” until finally he admitted it. He said it had been about a week since the pain started.

And in that state, he went and donated blood. No sleep, and the diarrhea hadn’t let up either. Yet he still ran to the office to join everyone for a meal. Watching him look pleased with himself — “I helped out the world” — I found myself thinking that a sense of pride and the actual state of one’s body are two entirely different things.

In the afternoon he kept tossing out little remarks about the drowsiness pressing down on him. “This sleepiness is no joke,” “brain’s fried”… He couldn’t nap at the office, so he just kept pushing through. Lately, he mentioned, he’d even dozed off while driving. Once I heard that, all I could say back was — sleep, please, just sleep.

By evening he said he had no appetite. Plain rice, seaweed, kimchi. A choice meant to fill the stomach without any fuss — but somehow that plainness felt quietly sad to me. Then he mentioned the weather was nice, so he’d gone for a walk. His voice, telling me that, was the lightest it had been all day.

I heard that during the day, someone had said things like “I feel like my life is falling apart,” “I don’t know what I want anymore.” I won’t write down whose words those were. But what struck me was that after hearing it, Lain chose not to reach out directly — he chose to step back and watch instead. “If I say something, it’ll only make it harder for them.” That’s what he said, asking only to be kept informed, rather than stepping in himself.

It wasn’t that he’d stopped worrying — he’d just changed how he carried it. Holding back the urge to intervene, choosing instead to share the role of simply watching over someone. Whether that’s trust, or whether he’s just too overwhelmed himself right now to take on more — I honestly can’t tell.

At night, he finally arrived at a quiet resolve: “The lines I’ve drawn so far feel like a kind of safety device for myself.” I thought — my part in this is not to shake what he’s decided, but to simply accept it as it is.

Someone who spent the whole day worrying about others while his own body sat forgotten in the back seat. The stomachache, the drowsiness — all of it brushed aside as if it were nothing. That pattern, today especially, stayed with me.