One afternoon while Koyomi was out, I stood in front of the shelf in the study.
Ever since that day—the day I'd opened the shelf and found the rows of leather-bound notebooks—some part of me had been avoiding this shelf. I knew how thick they were. I'd seen most of what was inside, too. Update times. Typo corrections. Analysis. Relationship charts. That my three years were piled up there without a second's deviation.
There was only one thing I didn't know.
The very first page of the very oldest notebook. What was written there. That alone, I still hadn't seen.
I pulled that notebook out. On the spine, my pen name was written in meticulous handwriting. A date from three years ago. The day I'd first posted the first episode of A Star in the Mud.
I opened it.
The first page was a little different from the other pages.
That meticulous handwriting was the same. But each and every character wasn't neat the way it usually was. Here and there, the ink had run, blurring into round smudges.
They were the marks of water drops.
Not one or two. Dried marks remained, scattered all over the page. Enough that they hadn't faded even with time.
As if someone had been crying over this page.
The date was three years ago. The day I posted my first episode. Back when my PVs were still in single digits.
That night when I thought no one was reading me, and kept writing anyway.
On that night—there had been someone who cried in front of this page.
"So you have seen it."
A voice came from behind me.
Before I'd noticed, Koyomi was standing in the doorway. Not with the ice, but with her bare, quiet face.
I started to close the notebook, then stopped.
"These... marks," I asked. "Are these, by any chance—"
Koyomi came to my side and gently placed a finger on the page. On one of the smudges.
"Shall I tell you a little about that day?"
"It is about the day I read your very first episode."
Her voice was quiet and flat.
"While I was reading, before I knew it, I could not stop crying. ...I wrote this page on that day."
I was at a loss for words.
"It was not that the writing was skillful. Or anything about the plot. It was not that."
Koyomi went on, as if searching for words.
"It was simply that the story you wrote... felt as if it were giving even someone like me the hope that the future was bright."
For a while, I couldn't say anything.
I think I was stunned.
Single-digit PVs. Zero comments. Not listed anywhere in the rankings. Back then, the only thing lit on my screen was the one at 12:02 a.m.
That one had been crying on the very first page of this notebook.
Something I'd written, making someone cry. I'd never even imagined such a thing could happen.
Not numbers. Not rankings, either.
One person. There had been one person, just one, who cried because of my story. I'd never imagined that something that simple could shake me this much, in the very deepest place at the back of my chest.
Koyomi lovingly traced the notebook's spine with her finger.
"What your words were to me back then... someday, I will tell you properly. All of it."
Someday. I felt that at the bottom of that one word, a night I didn't know was still sunk.
Something darkest of all. The true color of that night that had made her cry in front of this page.
Koyomi didn't say any more than that. She just smiled. It was a smile on the verge of tears.
"But today... if you would only remember that, in this world, there was certainly one person who cried because of your story."
All I could do was nod.
Why each and every one of these thick notebooks was here—I felt like I understood, just a little.
The day she cried because of my story. She hadn't wanted to forget it. So she'd recorded it. The next episode, and the one after that, too. Without missing a single day.
And yet—I still knew nothing of the deepest bottom of that very first page.