As far as mornings went, this was a particularly pleasant one. The birds were chirping outside, the sun shining brightly with not a cloud in the sky. Standing in the cool breeze gently flowing in through the open window, Sayori peered out at the students not involved in any clubs heading home. Faceless, nameless students – but she had grown used to it by now.

She glanced to the side at Natsuki, resting in her usual spot near the windows with her back against the wall. In her hands she held a book titled “Portrait of Markov”, given to her by Yuri a little while ago. The girl frequently reeled back, as if putting distance between herself and the book, a displeased grimace on her face. Even so, she kept reading – she had made a promise that she would.

Likewise, Yuri was sitting at one of the desks in the back with a cup of tea resting next to her and volume 8 of “Parfait Girls” in her hands. She had progressed with her reading much faster than Natsuki had, despite spending the first week or so barely opening the manga at all. As embarrassed as she got whenever Natsuki brought it up, the girl was getting invested.

As great as it was to see the two of them get along, Sayori knew things weren’t right. Even the other two knew something was missing – Sayori just knew what that something was. The time they spent together seemed to pass all too quickly, and rarely did they speak. When they did, it was mostly to discuss what they had read or to exchange their poems. The silence in which their hours passed was deafening.

She needed to fix things while she still could.

Sayori backed away from the window and spun around on her heels, skipping towards the door. Natsuki looked up from her book and called out to her.

“Sayori, where are you going? It’s about time we exchange poems, isn’t it?”

Sayori jumped slightly. She turned around, twiddling her fingers together as she did when she was nervous. “Oh! I just… Realized I almost forgot something important. I’ll be back in just a sec!”

Without saying another word the girl hurried out of the classroom, shutting the door behind herself. She glanced around the empty hall – one of the few rooms she could really recall ever seeing in this school. The building laid noiseless. No other students, no teachers, not so much as a lone fly to break apart the quiet. Sayori couldn’t stand it. She wished for distractions.

The girl shook her head – she had a task ahead of herself. She had to do something she wasn’t even certain she could, something which could very well only make things worse. And yet she had never been more certain that she had to do something before in her entire life.

She wandered over to the nearest door leading to some random empty class. She tried the handle, but found the door locked. Sayori took a deep breath and closed her eyes, focusing on what she had to do. The school and everything in it was no more than a façade, a still, meaningless image. What she needed to find laid past its hollow walls – in the world she barely knew anything about.

Sayori kept her eyes shut until she heard a quiet ‘click’. She opened them again and tried the handle, the door opening before her with ease. And behind it was no ordinary classroom – it seemed more like a half-empty storage or library of sorts.

The girl stepped inside, inhaling the room’s musky air. It wasn’t pleasant, yet it was different – more comforting than the school’s sterile environment. Unsure of where to start, the girl picked a folder from a nearby shelf and opened it, only to find it empty. She furrowed her brow and tried another, yet again – empty. The third folder, however, contained something. A note, which read… Nothing. Sayori pouted. In some ways, this guy really was the worst.

The girl dug through numerous other folders, full of compressed images, mundane notes, discarded pieces of writing and lewd fan art. She opted not to judge the guy too harshly just yet – after all, the amount of garbage in here meant…

Sayori heard a knock. Not a loud or persistent one, but a knock never the less. She glanced back, the door leading out into the hall still open as she had left it. The knock came again and she could tell it came from somewhere deeper into the room. Sayori scurried past the empty shelves until she found it – a door labeled ‘Characters’.

There was no mistaking it. This was what she had been searching for. Sayori took another breath and opened the door, smiling rather sheepishly at the room’s occupant.

“Hey, Monika. We’ve missed you, you know?”

After yet another spree of clearing garbage out from my computer to save some of its dwindling memory space, I figured I should clear out my recycling bin. I opened it up and, sure enough, saw it ‘full to the brim’ with nonsense. The copies of ‘New Folders’ were the worst, really – I never meant to make them, but a few misclicks later I already had twelve.

Intent on rescuing a struggling PC, I clicked on ‘Empty Recycle Bin’, but was met with an error message. Apparently, something couldn’t be erased while it was still open. I figured it was some hidden file acting up and I couldn’t be bothered to find it. I started manually selecting the files for deletion when one caught my eye.

monika.chr

It had been weeks since I had gotten the true ending by then. While the base ending had left me bitter and angry at Monika, the true ending had managed to sway me. I then recalled something, a folder I had made out of sentiment. One simply labeled ‘Doki Doki’, it currently held the character files for Yuri, Natsuki and Sayori.

I then cleared my recycle bin.

But not before I let Monika rejoin the others. A silly idea to be sure – but to see them all together again was all I had ever wanted.

Maybe it was time to visit them again - the way I had promised Sayori that I would.