“No way in hell.”
That was his catchphrase. He was a man of few words and was easily misunderstood. It happened one day when a colleague called out to him while he was browsing a magazine at a convenience store.
“Oh, are you a fan of that idol?”
“No way in hell,” he replied, putting the magazine back on the shelf. He didn’t have much interest in so-called “idols.” Because he rarely spoke about himself, those around him formed their own arbitrary images of him and would suddenly show curiosity over the smallest things.
“I was just looking at it. Is that so special?” he thought, feeling exasperated.
“Oh, never mind,” the colleague said, heading toward the register.
He hated talking about himself, and he hated being talked about. In the first place, even when he did speak, people rarely understood what he was saying. He was an eccentric.
He found it tedious to correct the random assumptions people made about him. The labels stuck to him were often contradictory: womanizer, gay, selfish, kind, taciturn, easy to talk to, cool, creepy—the list went on forever. One thing was certain: he was completely indifferent to how he conveyed his identity to others. On top of that, he was impulsive and mercurial, and he loathed the act of “reading the room.” It wasn’t that he couldn’t read the atmosphere; he simply refused to conform to it.
On the other hand, in many ways, he was actually quite a “normal” person. He had a typical interest in women, could hold a decent conversation, asserted himself reasonably, and cared about his appearance as much as anyone else. However, the labels already placed upon him had likely preceded him long before he realized. The more normally he behaved, the more it seemed to fuel the suspicion of those around him. Furthermore, even when he tried to act “normal,” every human being has their own unique traits. In his case, his mental and physical characteristics were somewhat intense, and there were peculiar qualities to his eyes and his intellect. Without going into detail here, those traits served to justify people’s suspicions.
That was precisely why he found it too bothersome to correct every single person, repeating his catchphrase like a broken record:
“No way in hell.”
