Monogatari Series - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.28

028

I’m a bit too empty-headed for thinking, a little too dull for feeling. There’s only one thing I’m much good at, and that’s running.

When I run, I can leave everything else behind.

They say the legs are like a second brain. I imagine that comes from people often having a flash of insight while they’re out for a stroll, but that only applies to walking. While they’re running, humans don’t do any thinking at all.

We may not be able to walk without looking back─but we can run without looking back.

Our minds, our worries.

We leave it all on the starting line.

That said I do usually have my course planned out beforehand when I go for my early morning jog, but that night I left even that up to chance.

Whenever I came to a corner, I turned it.

Traversing roads in my own town that I’d never been down gave me just the slightest feeling of freshness, but I left that feeling behind too.

It felt good.

It felt good to run with every ounce of strength I had.

Come to think of it, isn’t running really the only chance we have to use every ounce of our strength? Most of the time, people have a limiter in place. Whatever they’re doing, frankly they’re not giving it everything they’ve got because if they don’t regulate their strength, they’ll end up breaking something.

Themselves or their surroundings─something gets broken.

So they look at their watches, keep tabs on how many lives they have left before game over, and try to avoid leaning too far towards industry or sloth.

To avoid using their full strength.

In that sense, I guess people regulate themselves while they’re running as well─not a person alive can complete a marathon at the speed they would run a sprint. It’s always important to pace yourself, no matter what you’re doing.

But that night, I even left all thoughts of pacing myself behind─and ran with every ounce of strength I had. Push it too far and your pace drops. But even then, give it everything you’ve got.

Run to the breaking point.

Run until you run out.

It was an ugly run, without proper form or anything. My gait and breathing were all over the place.

The appropriate expression to describe it was probably less “mad dash” than “running blind”─or more likely “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

But I ran like that until dawn, all night long. I ran for over ten hours without a rest─I don’t know how many circuits of the town I made, but I must have run over sixty miles.

I was probably in for worse than just a few sore muscles.

I could very easily have pulled the muscles in my thighs or, yes, suffered a stress fracture.

Given that I slammed down hard onto the asphalt after pushing myself to the point that my legs literally buckled under me.

But it didn’t feel like a forfeit, it felt like I’d crossed some invisible finish line.

I had that feeling of elation.

Like I’d completed the race.

No one had told me to run, and I hadn’t actually resolved a damn thing with Numachi, but I nevertheless felt like my slate had been wiped clean.

“My legs…are killing me.”

Not just my legs, my whole body was killing me.

It was a struggle even to blink.

But it was probably nothing compared to the pain Numachi had felt─according to Higasa, she’d been dealing with a lot of other stuff too, but it was hard for me to believe that she’d chosen death for any reason other than that pain.

What besides that suffering would have driven her to die─since her emotional pain seemed to be eased to some degree by her unhappiness collecting, the foundation for which she laid even before transferring.

But maybe that was just what I wanted to believe.

At this point, I couldn’t really know how much of her story was true and how much of it was a lie.

Common sense dictated that she was nothing but a hallucination, something I saw at a particularly sensitive moment in my life with my seniors gone and my environment altered─including the devil’s arm.

“I guess I should have at least paid some attention to my form…” I muttered as I lifted my head slightly. It felt like lifting a ten-ton weight, and once I got it up I saw that the soles of my brand-new Reeboks had worn down to nothing. “But if I did, I doubt I would’ve made it.”

Only after the words got out did I realize that I had no idea what I’d made, and I looked up at the sky with a wry smile on my face.

“That reminds me…Senjogahara-senpai’s form…was always beautiful… So beautiful…”

Struggling even to blink was an exaggeration, but the fact is that once I closed my eyes, opening them again felt like too much of a chore.

What passed through my mind then, though I don’t know why, was the sprinting figure of Hitagi Senjogahara on the track of Kiyokaze Middle back when we were there.

She’d been a celebrity.

I hadn’t known, but according to Numachi, Hanekawa-senpai had been just as famous─and apparently she’d been the harder of the two to approach for everyone.

Knowing her now, I bet it was because she was too perfect. In that regard, Senjogahara-senpai could be silly, which made her more popular with her juniors─she might say that had been a performance, too, but when you get right down to it, no one isn’t acting when they’re interacting with others.

You can’t live your life without playing a character, that’s the way of the world─Numachi wasn’t totally off base when she said that I play the clown.

I can’t criticize Ogi on that score.

In that sense, Senjogahara-senpai’s “character” was perfect─in its imperfectness. When she was running, though, she could leave even that character behind.

Beautiful.

I’d never found the sight of someone running beautiful until I saw her run─never thought that the sight of a person huffing and puffing, desperately throwing out every ounce of strength they had, could combine to such beautiful effect.

Which is why I also thought, “I don’t want to run beside that.” I didn’t want to be compared to her. Having worked so hard at running to atone for the weakness that made me turn to a devil for help, I felt like I didn’t deserve to run beside her.

It was impermissible.

So no matter how many times she invited me to challenge her in a sprint, I turned her down, again and again, for two whole years. I could have just won, pact with the devil or no─but I don’t think I even wanted to beat her.

Running, not fast, but beautifully.

No match.

“She started running again last year saying she wanted to lose weight…and God, it was beautiful. How I’d love to be able to run like that─”

The uncouth blaring of a car horn dragged my mind─adrift on a cloud of reverie and helpless nostalgia no sooner than I’d stopped running─back to reality.

True, I’d collapsed in the dead center of the road, my arms and legs splayed out like I was making snow angels. It was only dumb luck that the car didn’t run me over.

Dawn had come, but it was still so early. I had my guard down and very nearly lost my life.

When I looked, a dazzling yellow New Beetle rested a dozen feet short of where I lay.

“I’m sorry, I’ll get out of the way,” I said in response to the horn, but my voice was much too quiet to carry to the driver.

I felt like a slug.

I was too exhausted to stand up.

I considered rolling out of the way so the car could at least pass by me, but before I could move, the driver opened the door and stepped out.

“Hey, you okay?”

Whether he thought I was a drunk sleeping it off or the victim of a traffic accident, he must have been worried. Approaching me, he crouched down and peered into my face as I lay there still unable to stand up.

“…Wait, Kanbaru?”

“Ah.” I sounded pretty stupid.

It was someone I knew.

“Araragi-senpai.”