"Ponchu Love Story 2"

I was still dating Etsuru.

I was still dating Yumi too.

No, we just met up and had sex, right?

That's the kind of person he was.

Dating a girl? What's that? I was like that.

I think he went to love hotels about three times a week.

When you do drugs, you want a girl.

He'd do it and then go home.

No, he wouldn't go home.

He'd take a little gamble there and then.

Mahjong, baccarat, anything, anything that had a chance of winning.

He'd carry 500,000 or 1 million yen folded in half in his pocket. When he had more, he'd wrap 100 with a rubber band and put it in a bucket at home.

His win rate was decent.

Those were good times.

Oh, that's right, I left the hotel, had lunch, and then went to a baccarat parlor in Suo-machi with him to kill time.

I gave him 100,000 yen in chips.

He was betting 10,000 yen each.

I ran about 400,000 yen.

When she saw that, she started putting 10,000 yen each upside down on mine.

"I'll get it back!"

She was serious and worked up.

No, I thought I bet 50,000 yen each upside down on you.

Even if you win, it's minus 40,000 yen, but I didn't feel like saying that, so it was funny.

I laughed and said I should go home.

When I told my friends about it later, they all laughed.

"She's a funny girl, right?"

She was cute.

We started living together.

She often came home later than me.

At 3am, I was in my room when the phone rang.

"Mmm, the light's on."

"Yeah."

"I'm so happy."

When I found the light in the room in a taxi, she called me.

I was waiting with my fox-colored Chihuahua Tara in my arms.

The two of us went for a walk to the convenience store in the middle of the night.

A little while later, we got a white and reddish brown male chihuahua.

We named him Rico.

The two of us ran around the park in the middle of the night.

It was fun.

We ran around the park in circles, excited. Everyone was so into it that we just couldn't help but have so much fun in the park.

Every day was like a sudden dream that had started and it was so much fun.

It even felt like we didn't need anything else,

but work was waiting for me and him at night.

I had betrayed him.

The next day, I was using meth.

He didn't know that he was using meth yet.

I got a call from Kyoko, who I had loved since I was a teenager.

"How are you, Muchin?"

I'd forgotten.

I'd said something insensitive on the phone.

I'd blabbered on about how happy I was.

Maybe the meth had made me go crazy.

Every day, I'd get up at noon and order food delivery from a nearby restaurant.

I rented a DVD from Tsutaya in the middle of the night and watched it.

I remember watching Chungking Express and Angel's Tears.

Takeshi Kaneshiro was good, wasn't he?

In the middle of the night, I'd open the door to someone else's hot dog stand or something and start operating without permission.

Every night a girl would show up there.

Every scene was colored by our love.

Like you said later

Those were my youth too.

"Can you whistle?"

I showed him I could.

I hummed an old Utada Hikaru song.

For a while I was happy and everything else was fine, or maybe it was fine even if there were lots of problems.

There was Tara and Rico and him.

And that was good.

Doubt began to grow in his eyes.

His drug use was obvious.

And with the other women.

There was a drug-addicted yakuza who had told me off.