Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.02

002

The next day, I was roused from bed─but not by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi.

My lovable siblings had warned me:

“You’re not in high school anymore. You need to wake up on your own starting tomorrow, okay?”

“Uh huh, Karen’s exactly right!”

These were pronouncements that should’ve been made before I moved on to middle school, at the latest. I found it rather mysterious that Tsukihi was behaving like Karen’s lackey, but whatever the case, the next day.

In other words this morning, I woke up on my own─I’d been up late the previous night, and I didn’t need to wake up early anymore, so I’d slept in for the first time in a while.

Now, this felt strange.

Not so much because my little sisters didn’t come wake me up─but that was part of it, and I knew the exact reason for my odd feeling.

“Oh…right,” I muttered absentmindedly.

The words pregnant with emotion─oh, right.

Starting today, I was no longer a senior at Naoetsu High─an evident, or self-evident fact that still felt more bizarre than any of the mysterious and unfathomable tales of aberrations I’d experienced.

So strange I almost had trouble accepting it.

Speaking of moving on to middle school, or even the time I moved on from it─from Public MS #701 to Naoetsu Private High School─I’d felt no such discomfort whatsoever. Had my time as a student at Naoetsu left that deep of an impression on me?

Especially my final year. The very last one.

It began with a hellish spring break and ended all the way in actual hell. What’s more, I survived it all, came out alive, and miraculously graduated, and was ruminating on it now─no, wait, it wasn’t such a pretty and emotive reaction.

If we’re going to say that a lot happened, a lot happened to me during middle school too. Even elementary was no walk in the park─after recalling my past shenanigans with Oikura, so many connected traumas had come back to me that it felt like I was drowning in a sea of regret every night.

Splashing and gasping for air. Like I was going to suffocate underwater.

If I was going to feel moved about being alive today, I ought to feel moved about being alive yesterday, too─not that anyone, teens included, can live every day moved to their core.

That much sentiment would kill even a vampire.

First off, I hadn’t attended the graduation ceremony held at Naoetsu High’s gymnasium the day before. Boycotting a commemorative ceremony that marked the end of my high school days makes me sound like quite an anarchist, with my juniors looking up to me, but pair it with the graceful groveling I performed on all fours in the teachers’ room later, and it’d be enough to throw water on the flames of a century-long love.

I don’t know if I should be sharing this, but at the last moment my alma mater became a forbidden place I never wanted to visit again.

What kind of legend was I leaving behind?

Could I have wound things up in any worse of a way?

I felt like winding a rope around my neck, if anything.

It’d be odd to say that’s why─it’d sound like sour grapes, but I’m still saying it─frankly that’s why graduating and not being a high schooler anymore was leaving me cold. The most I felt was relief that my little sisters wouldn’t be reviving me each morning.

You’ve served your purpose, my little sisters!

I generally tried my hardest to act cool and wasn’t going to let some commencement ceremony make me tear up or gird up─I’d rather get on all fours and grovel. The one clear difference between this graduation and all the graduations before it, though, was not knowing what followed.

A total mystery.

When I graduated elementary, I knew I’d be proceeding normally to #701, and when I graduated at #701, I’d already been accepted by my (then-)dream school, Naoetsu High─in other words, my graduations so far had meant a simple change in title.

A transposition if you want, a mere transfer.

But not this time.

I’d graduated from Naoetsu High but had no idea what would become of me─honestly, at that moment, on March sixteenth, I didn’t know if I’d been accepted by my first-choice college.

What came next wasn’t settled. My future was uncertain.

True, the same goes for everyone, of course, but having taken these titles for granted, as naturally appearing alongside or together with my name, I was flummoxed when it vanished just as naturally.

Something was off. Stripped of my title, I was nothing. My plain self.

Not a high school student. Not someone preparing for exams.

Not a college student, not a rejected applicant.

Not a member of the labor force.

Plain, unbranded Koyomi Araragi─they say you only appreciate how valuable something is after it’s gone, but I never imagined losing your guaranteed status in a highly developed modern society would be so disorienting.

To be blunt, I didn’t even like Naoetsu High while I was enrolled there. I’d been ready to drop out. Looking back on it, I still couldn’t say I led a fulfilling life as a high schooler, not even out of insincere politeness─finally losing the title was so strangely liberating.

Liberating and disorienting.

To make a Kanbaru-like comparison, I was walking down the street butt naked─like oh, I’m nothing but me now.

I should be me no matter how much I dress up, change, or grow─Koyomi Araragi should be just Koyomi Araragi, but part of you seems to be shaped by your surroundings and environment, whether you like it or not.

If a policeman stopped me now for questioning, how should I answer─nah.

My own thoughts made me snicker.

It was funny how funny I felt.

Yeah, maybe I was just getting emotional about graduating from high school─embarrassed and ashamed, loath to admit this bit of childishness, I’d begun splitting a whole head’s worth of hairs, that’s all. That, or the stress of waiting for my college results was too much, and I was escaping reality by focusing on something other than what was really on my mind─I guess I was able to look at myself pretty objectively these days.

It’d be so presumptuous of me to agonize over a loss of identity, anyway─consider the goddess, scratch that, Hanekawa, who gallantly ventured out into the world as her very own self the day we graduated.

Forget about police questioning, she’d be traveling where militaries might want to have a word with her (why, Hanekawa?). In the end I clung onto her and tried to stop her with tears in my eyes (not exaggerating for effect, I seriously cried) instead of seeing her off with a smile; she was the one with a beaming face as she left on her journey.

She deflected me with ease. Dodged me like it was nothing.

No point going out of my way to feel even lonelier, but eventually, the time she spent in high school with me and Hitagi would become insignificant to her.

That’s how I feel. Keenly.

Meanwhile, we’ll probably never meet someone as talented as Hanekawa again. Miss Hanekawa is the real deal. She’s made from different stuff than us, Hitagi once told me, I forget when, and I was beginning to understand what she meant.

Different stuff. Or maybe different tales. In any case, different.

But I couldn’t keep whining either, not when my complex about her had given the final stages of my high school life a terrible paint job─if I woke up feeling funny, I had to wipe that feeling away. Maybe I needed to wash my face.

I couldn’t waste today─fortunately it was still before noon, even though my sisters hadn’t woken me up and I’d let myself sleep in, (literally) unconsciously.

I understand that adults in their prime fire themselves up with the notion that if their life is a day long, they aren’t even to noon. For me, it wasn’t even noon in the real world─freed from exam prep or not, Koyomi Araragi was too young to be sitting around absently staring at the lawn and sipping tea (should go without saying).

Time to get active.

Why not enjoy my title-less self for a few days? It’d be over in the blink of an eye in retrospect─and if the police pulled me over for questioning, I’d tell them:

“Koyomi Araragi here. Just the man you see.”

…It’d probably get me taken downtown.

Maybe they’d call for backup. Maybe they’d surround me.

Thinking such thoughts, I realized leaving the house would be a place to start─it was past breakfast time anyway, and I couldn’t borrow the BMX forever, so biking with no particular destination in mind sounded like a plan─and changed out of my pajamas.

I nearly put on my uniform out of habit, please excuse my error as a cute little quirk─wearing the jeans I’d lent Hanekawa back in August, perhaps to share in the good fortunes of the real deal who was standing on foreign soil by now, I passed my arms through the sleeves of a shirt.

This seemed to focus my attention at once, and I left my room─my parents would have left for work at this hour, but I wondered what my little sisters were up to.

They were on vacation as well… I thought about peeking into their room before heading down the stairs but decided against it at the last moment.

I wasn’t being childish and sulking because they hadn’t woken me up. They weren’t grade schoolers anymore, either. I was the one who needed to figure out the right distance between us.

Pulling away from them after finally settling our differences and carrying on proper conversations again was a little sad, but older brothers and little sisters are fated to grow apart.

My plan was to stay at home for a little while even if I got accepted into college, but the idea of leaving made me feel a step closer to adulthood than them. I had to encourage them to become self-reliant─or maybe self-supporting. They needed to be able to live without me.

…It did feel like that wouldn’t be a problem for them.

In fact, Karen, who’d be starting high school in a month, increasingly acted like a big sister (maybe Tsukihi was behaving like a toady in response, though that was just canceling out her sister’s progress). Judging that I didn’t need to worry─I ignored their room and walked downstairs.

By the way, there was another person, or rather, body in my little sisters’ room, an expressionless and hard-to-define doll that dared freeload there, but I ignored her on a far more fundamental level.

If I exchanged words with that tween, she might end up joining me on my bike ride─best not to offer the kid the chance. Then again, I suppose it was her job since she’d technically been tasked with observing me.

All the more reason for me to tiptoe away from home, and in fact that was the manner in which I headed to the bathroom.

Making sure no one was in the bath (Karen could totally be washing off her sweat after a morning jog), I washed my face. Getting dressed had awakened me, but splashing cold water on my face was really refreshing, a jolt signaling that something new was to come─yeah, I’m a simple man.

I hadn’t cut my hair once since spring break, and it’d grown a good bit too long after a year. Wet from the collateral damage of my face-washing, it could even use a hair dryer. When you’re washing your face, you gotta be bold, man.

“Phew!”

And so.

I faced forward─and looked into the bathroom sink mirror.

There I was. Koyomi Araragi.

There, laterally inverted and reflected in the mirror, was Koyomi Araragi─which might sound obvious, but until just the other day it wasn’t a given.

I should’ve been sick and tired of seeing my face, but hadn’t scrutinized it in a while.

Stuff happened─and I, Koyomi Araragi, had been left without a reflection after February. When I faced a mirror, just the background was reflected, like some sort of special effect (chroma keying, was it?).

Like some vampire of legend.

I didn’t appear in mirrors.

How did the story behind the word narcissist go, again? Wasn’t a youth so enraptured by his own reflection in a spring that he fell in and drowned? Well, I fixed my eyes on that mirror like I never learned the moral.

Gazing.

They say what’s essential isn’t visible, but the practical thought struck me that the visible can be essential too.

“Hm?”

Still, I had all the opportunities in the world from now on to see this particular face, and whatever unavoidable circumstances may have been involved, a boy graduating from high school, barely post-adolescent, looking at his reflection forever wasn’t very cool (if that doll saw me now, she’d be set for material for the rest of my life). I took my eyes off of myself.

But.

My self in the mirror─didn’t take my eyes off of me.

“Um…what?”

Lo and behold. As a result of my training, did my movements now exceed the speed of light, leaving my reflection in the dust? I was flummoxed, but this wasn’t the case.

I hadn’t been training to begin with, and even if some dormant power in me had suddenly awakened, my reflection still didn’t trace my movements on second glance.

It didn’t reflect me; I wasn’t reflected.

It only gazed at me, its eyes fixed on me.

I was looking at me through the mirror. The eyes almost seemed…

I reached a hand toward the surface without meaning to─what an idiot, what was I trying to check? As if the mirror might be a windowpane, and the person I took to be me was outside.

A twin brother? At this point? Were we fluffing up my backstory after all this time? Anyone would call that a stretch─far too after the fact. And anyway, that might work as a trick in a mystery novel, but people don’t mistake windows for mirrors in real life.

In fact, it wasn’t a windowpane installed there above the sink. Obviously enough─but after touching it, I couldn’t call it a mirror, either.

Because─bloop.

My finger broke into its surface.

Broke in─or sunk in, maybe.

Like into some kind of spring─no.

A swamp.

“Shi-Shinobu!” I yelled down at my feet, but it was too late.

The mirror.

The face, the plane of what seemed like a mirror until moments ago, now an unknown substance, was stained purple, and─