There was laughter—brittle, bright—oranges burned into the long black. Memes arrived like lanterns to distract from the ache: cats in samurai helmets, rewrites of anime taglines into punchlines about rent and laundry. We used jokes the way people use flashlights in a cave: not to dispel the dark completely, but to map a safe route through it. Between jokes, words slipped out that were not meant to be funny: confessions about abandonment, about doors slammed in gaslit apartments, about months of unanswered texts. And always the night—modorenai—sat like an ocean beyond the shore.