"I love you."
It's a simple sentence you hear all the time in anime's, manga, and the like but have you ever really considered what it means?
Well, the internet defines love as "a strong feeling of affection and concern for another person accompanied by sexual attraction." Which in my book is a very loose meaning of the word.
Love, to me, is the want to be with someone so much that you would do anything to be by their side. The feelings of friendship evolving to a point where you no longer just want to "be friends", but where you can have something with your loved one that only the two of you can share together.
Love is beautiful...
But...
Love is unreachable.
"Kosuke! Get your head in the god damn game!" The sudden screams from the sidelines of my coach break me from my trance, the roaring of cheering fans and sounds of squeaking heels and pattered feet playing rhythmically on the glossy hardwood floor suddenly return to my fully focused mind.
I shake my head to fully pull myself from my trance, slapping my cheeks a little to ensure that I'm finally awake from my vulnerable position.
My eyes narrow back on the basketball court with my focus regained. We were ahead by nearly triple their score so I simply stopped paying attention, preferring the company of my own thoughts over that of the other players scrambling for the basketball.
After a few more minutes of playing, the game came to an end with the foxes, our home team, winning 83-35. The sight of the score made me rub the back of my head in regret.
"I could have done better..." I said under my breath. I know to most people that's a pretty sizable gap, but I'm supposedly some kind of "basketball prodigy"...or at least that's what my scholarship says.
Moving my eyes from the giant red scoreboard, I turn around just in time to see a familiar looking brown haired nuisance pull me into a head lock.
"Nice going out there loser, you zone out again?" The brown headed devil said as she rubbed her knuckle into my scalp in a noogie.
"Quit it!" I say as I attempt to slap my hands against her to get out of the headlock. "I only zoned out because we were ahead by so much."
"Oh yeah, forgot mister prodigy here gets special treatment and doesn't have to play!" She pulls my headlock tighter for a moment before releasing it finally, causing my body to go limp a little and make me gasp for air.
Looking up after a few seconds through my blond bangs, I can see the "beautiful" (Note that that was in quotes) Kokoro Fuyuko in all of her boyish glory.
I've known Fuyuko for about as long as I've been in this country and she's never really been much of a girly girl. Sure, she'll occasionally wear a dress to a dance or maybe even wear a Kimono to a festival, but I would drop dead if I ever saw her hair reach below her shoulders.
"Shut it, just because I'm better than you at the game doesn't mean you need to get all pissy about it," I push my hand down on my knee to make myself stand up. "Anyway, where's everyone else? They run away when you got too close?"
I feel a sudden impact and a blunt pain hit me straight in the nose, causing me to grunt out in pain.
"Oh, nevermind. They are right here." I hear the brick tumble to the ground that hit me square in the face and my vision slowly return. I've become accustomed to that at this point, it's one of Evangelina's, or Eve for short, favorite attacks.
I see the red head approach with her hands in her hoodie pockets, a blank look on her face like always as she looks down at the brick on the ground. "What, didn't like my hello?"
"I don't even want to know where you keep those things on you." I say as I reach into my pocket and pull out a tissue, shoving it in my nose to stop it from bleeding.
"A girl has her secrets." Eve said back to my statement simply. Her good looks and odd hair color make her a common target for desperate guys looking for a relationship. But the one thing they never account for is that she's a total prick.
I sigh at the inconclusiveness of her remark, then look around the mostly empty gym where we stood on the sidelines of the court
"Just the three of us now? Could the others not make it?" I say in regards to our notable absence of other people.
"Yep," Fuyuko says as she nods her head to my question. "I mean, once you see one of your games, you've seen them all. You're lucky even we came out this time." She says with a smirk, gesturing to herself and Eve.
"Really? I wouldn't call getting hit with a brick lucky." I say with a short sigh.
"I heard getting hit twice will bring back your luck, want to test it?" Eve says as she tosses a brick slightly in her hand in a threatening motion.
"N-No, I think I'm good with my bad luck." I say while waving my hands out to decline her generous offer. "Let's just get going...I need a bath."
The three of us begin heading for the door as we all have a like-minded reasoning to leave. My bath remark seems to have made Eve think that she needs to say "You smell like shit" every 5 seconds to get her point across.
But despite our laughter and banter, I can't help but get this feeling off of me as we are about to walk through the exit. It feels as if someone is watching me...
I spin my head around to look back into the now completely empty gym, but there is no one there. I look all over the red and yellow stands and even check the ceilings for anyone that could be watching from the rafters, but I see nothing.
With a slight shrugging motion, I turn back around and wave the feeling of suspicion off as nothing more than tiredness, following behind my two friends.