Chapter One- Koyomi Stone
001
You want to know how I was feeling about going to school back around the beginning of April, when I had just met Tsubasa Hanekawa, and we’d just been put in the same class? You want to know what I was feeling on the way to school, as I trod that path? Well, I wasn’t feeling much of anything at all.
My feelings as I traveled that road.
Even the road itself, didn’t seem concrete to me.
I couldn’t find any concrete reason for going to school.
Get woken up by my little sisters, change into my school uniform, get on my bike, head to the out-of-my-league private prep school Naoetsu High─I’d been busy repeating that routine, that homework-like routine of busy work, for two years already, but I’d never once considered what that repetition meant, or didn’t mean.
Or no, maybe I should say that I’d given up considering the question ages ago, because no matter how hard I thought about it, I was never going to find an answer.
But the same could be said of almost all the young men and women who have the honor of calling themselves high school students in this great nation of Japan, or I expect it could, so I wasn’t actually the least bit special in that regard─the truth of the matter is that virtually all the young men and women who, despite having completed their compulsory education, continue to live the life of the high school student, who at least superficially “attend school of their own volition,” can’t even discern an abstract meaning in doing so, let alone a concrete one.
So it’s perfectly understandable that the extremely small number of well-grounded students who do find a sense of fulfillment in their schooling would be left scratching their heads, dumbfounded by the fact that an outsider like me, who must seem to them like some kind of monstrous apparition, would still come to school every day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m dissatisfied.
When these sorts of thoughts pop into my head I do find it the tiniest bit disquieting, but no, I’m not dissatisfied─it’s not like there’s anything else I’d rather be doing, or even anything else I could be doing.
Me, I’m nothing─but precisely because I’m nothing.
The fact that I’m a high school student.
High school itself.
Provides me with the assurance that I’m me.
Especially, particularly, because over the spring break before the first term of my senior year─I went through hell.
I saw into the depths of a hell that could very well have made me forget I was a mere high school student, and put an end to my school career altogether.
It was a spring break that made me unpleasantly aware of the verity, the venerability, of banal aphorisms like ordinary is happy and nothing beats an uneventful life─and that assurance should’ve been a real lifesaver for me. Nevertheless, as I rode along the road that April, I thought about how strange it was that I still blithely went to school as if bound by some hard-and-fast rule, as if it was normal─and that after class, I went home again the same way.
It’s funny.
Having been through that kind of hell, you’d think I’d feel truly grateful for an ordinary life, that I would live each day as if it were my last─but the me that had returned from hell was still just regular old me. They say danger past and god forgotten, but I guess you forget hell, too, once it’s past.
I asked Hanekawa about it once.
Asked her if the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to feel grateful for the grace of everyday life meant that I was made of stone─and this is what she said.
What she told me, her face lit up by a wonderfully reassuring smile that, as always, made me wonder if she really did know everything.
“Of course you can’t, Araragi. Because everyday life is something we take for granted. How can you take to heart something you take for granted? There’s a road, and you walk down it, that’s all. Take it from me.”
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login