The other day I was sitting with family, and the ac and the fan were turned on because it was starting to get hotter. And when the wind from the fan and ac hit me, I was reminded of a very specific memory.

I was in my room, laying on the floor, reading manga off my phone, my ceiling fan turned on along with the ac. It was crisp and fresh and smelled like the night, but it swept into my nose because of all the breeze in my room. I would read manga and then stare at the carpet and go back to the manga. If I really liked it I would crawl into bed and keep on reading till the short hours or even after. That cool, crisp, fan and ac wind swirling to and away from me like ocean waves.

The manga I was reading at this point were either romance slop, loner manga, and a few classics. I would switch between mangadex and mangasee123 and binge a series in a night. Or reread one I really liked while I waited for an update from another.

Yofukashi no uta, I sold my life for 10,000 yen per year, boys abyss, Shikimori san, My Monster Secret, Nagatoro, Komi cant communicate, Love is war, Happiness, Watamote, Insomniacs after school, pun-pun, girls last tour, shimeji simulation, scott pilgrim. All these little manic pixie lives being lived at the end of the day because the the middle was already reserved.

Im pretty sure I liked these shows because of that feeling. The idea that mundane evenings could have color and life breathed into it by some convenient narrative event. That the monotonous business hours wasnt all there was.

When I read these manga and smelled that fan and ac, I felt like the small world around me was alive like the manga's were. All that time I read those manga were definitely me just escaping after the day, engrossing myself in another world, deindividuating and shrinking the scope of my experience. And that period of whiplash after I stopped reading made it feel like those worlds were meshed together a little bit. Like something could happen when time was finally mine.

I was smart enough to not let myself get totally sucked into this, I went out and did stuff with others or just by myself. But this was when I first found manga, and with it a new world. New stories, a new way to tell them, and a new smell that got drug along with them. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes I feel a twinge of it now and again. And thats enough. There will be another night where I smell something weird and think of something else instead.