In the quiet corners of a small town, wrapped in dust and daily routine, lives a girl named Rika Arisawa.
From the outside, her life looks perfectly ordinary. Her mother is a housewife. Her father teaches at the local school. Her older sister, four years ahead of her, works in New York City as a computer engineer. Their home is tidy—filled with calendars, ticking clocks, and framed report cards.
And Rika?
She's the girl who never quite fits in.
But inside her?
Inside Rika, galaxies swirl.
She spends hours beneath the mango tree in their backyard, stitching tiny dresses for her dolls using scraps from worn-out clothes. She paints skies with colors no one else sees. She dances in her room when no one is watching. She hums lullabies to her plants and spins stories from clouds drifting past her window.
"Rika, stop wasting time with those silly drawings," her father says one afternoon, not looking up from his newspaper.
She glances up, fingers stained with watercolor. "But Papa… it's not silly. It makes me feel—"
"Feeling won't get you a job," her mother cuts in, placing a tray of tea on the table. "You need to study. You need marks. Your sister got a scholarship and a good job. Remember that."
Rika lowers her eyes.
She remembers.
That night, she packs away her paints and brushes, locking them in a box beneath her bed. The click of the lock feels final—like burying something alive.
At school, numbers blur in front of her eyes while poems hide in the margins of her notebooks. Teachers sigh and say, "She's imaginative… but distracted." She comes last in math, barely scrapes through science, and forgets history the moment the bell rings.
Still, she hums in the shower.
She folds discarded notes into delicate paper flowers.
And she dreams.
Years pass. Rika learns to get by—with a soft smile and silent regrets. She finishes high school, drifts through college. She studies because she's supposed to. She smiles because it's expected.
In college, she tries to blend in.
"Hey, Rika, want to come out tonight?" her classmate Umi asks once.
"No, I've got homework…" Rika lies, clutching her sketchpad instead of her books.
By then, she's living a quiet double life.
Online, she follows artists, dancers, and most of all—Naoki Jinnai, a rising indie singer from Japan.
His voice is like nothing she's ever heard—rough, yet gentle. Like wind rustling through autumn leaves. He posts videos from rooftops, old bookstores, and art galleries. And sometimes, he speaks to the camera.
"You don't need permission to be who you are," he says once, eyes steady. "You're enough. Just as you are."
She watches it at 2 a.m., curled beneath her blanket, tears running silently down her cheeks.
She whispers to her screen, "Why do you feel like the only one who understands me…?"
After graduation, Rika takes a job at a small graphic design agency. The pay is low, the pressure high. Her manager yells a lot. Her desk is crammed into the corner, beside a creaky window. Some days, she stares out of it and wonders if she's disappearing.
Her boyfriend Aoki—if he still counts—rarely looks up from his screen. Their conversations are about bills, not dreams. He doesn't get why she cries during songs or why she paints instead of sleeping.
"I don't get it," he says one night. "You act like life's some kind of story. It's not. It's just… life."
Rika doesn't answer. She just turns off the light and pretends to sleep.
But inside her, the story keeps unfolding.
One evening, alone on the rooftop, notebook in her lap, she looks up at the sky and whispers:
"Is this it? Is this all I get?"
The stars stay silent.
But somewhere, deep in the folds of the universe… something begins to stir.