Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 2.01

Chapter Two- Koyomi Flower

001

I don’t mean to sound like a whiner, but in early May, in other words around the beginning of Golden Week, when a strange fate bound me to Hitagi Senjogahara, I was both mentally and physically spent. Mentally and physically spent, or beaten to a pulp─at any rate, I was a mess.

Or should I say a bloody mess─such a mess that the idea of an ordinary life didn’t even seem real to me anymore.

Only the deck separates us from hell─I believe fishermen on the high seas use that expression, but it seems like pretty much the same thing on land.

Only the ground separates us from hell.

I’d become painfully aware─how unreliable the ground we walk upon is, how fragile the Earth’s crust, how easily it can give way.

I’d become aware of it along with the pain.

I had come to know how precariously balanced it all is─the road I blithely take to school, the road I blithely take home, how blithely it might all collapse.

Come to know?

Uh-uh.

I don’t know anything─I don’t mean to sound like Tsubasa Hanekawa, the girl with the mismatched wings, but I really only know what I know, and what I know is that I’m a fool.

Hitagi Senjogahara.

My classmate, who some kids called the Cloistered Princess, well, she knew how fragile everyday life could be long before I learned that lesson.

You could say she’d had no choice but to learn it from her life, her lifestyle. Even lending half an ear to the more restrained rumors I’d heard about the fraying tightrope of her life thus far was enough to scare me half out of my wits.

“To begin with, it’s a mistake to imagine that there’s a wall between the ordinary and the extraordinary─you have to distinguish between the two, of course, you can’t go on living if you don’t, but they’re contiguous─here and there are connected,” she said flatly, in an even, level tone devoid of emotion. “It’s not a question of above or below─you don’t fall from the ordinary into the extraordinary, and you don’t crawl up out of the extraordinary to the ordinary. It’s more like you’re walking along and suddenly you’re somewhere else, somewhere you don’t recognize…”

Like straying from the path?

You’re walking along the sidewalk when suddenly you realize that you’ve stepped out into the street without knowing it─her analogy made sense, more or less.

It’s certainly true.

That if there were no guardrails or crosswalks, there’d be no distinction between the sidewalk and the street.

“Right. And before you know it you’ve been in an accident─though between the car and the pedestrian, who’s to say which is ordinary and which is extraordinary. And there are things like your bicycle, Araragi, that blithely move between the street and the sidewalk…”

Strictly speaking, it contravenes the traffic laws to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk, but then again, from the cars’ perspective it’s a pain in the ass to have people riding in the street. Modern problems, right?

“Yup. In other words, you can still get into an ‘accident’ even if the ground you’re walking on doesn’t collapse, even if you keep to the straight and narrow─and not because you’ve lost your footing and fallen from the ordinary into the extraordinary. But you know, Araragi,” continued Senjogahara without much in the way of emotion. “Sometimes you fall from ordinary into ordinary. And sometimes you crawl up out of the extraordinary and find that wherever you are now is extraordinary too.”