/jp/ - Otaku Culture

when i was young there was this dream world which was warmly colored with the pastillines I so loved. it was not a huge space but somewhere where you crawled under through a secret entrance to get into, a sort of secret castle.

they still sell these candies, though the tin design is new and modern--looking back at the semblance of the old tin and slowly sucking on each roundish-shaped drops, I feel as though I can conjure up the whole of my childhood: the snowy town I grew up in, the private Catholic school where everything and everyone seemed so close; the house I lived in seemed ridiculously big with its three stairwells, yet so secure in the warm alcove in the attic. I remember being terrible at sports like table tennis and tennis proper and getting horrible scores on the mile run every year, going to the Y every week or more and eagerly looking forward to getting some snack from the vending machine after swimming lessons or laps or whatnot, playing air hockey or foosball in the game room with my little brother--all of this too then must be a dream, one with an almost-tangible clarity and crispness.

There was a spare-looking vietnamese place where my mother, brother and I always ordered fresh lemonade soda and some dish which I can't quite place. Latin class taught by the same teacher as math, the former which I always failed the tests and the latter which I always aced--a time when I was pretty finicky about getting a perfect 100, where even a 97 or 98 was upsetting.