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“I reached adulthood while still a baby.
“To be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t die. To think that I was a baby for longer than you’ve been alive, Araragi-kun—it’s hard to believe.
“Sometimes I wonder if it was all a dream… And I want to wonder if I had actually been raised warmly in a happy family.
“By the way, although I said I’d reached adulthood, the age of adulthood is different in Switzerland compared to Japan. Moreover, I’m pretty sure they never filed a birth registration, so I surely wasn’t even recognized as a person.
“At the very least, my neighbors hadn’t been aware of my existence… Apparently, there are countries in which it’s a crime if you don’t report hearing a child’s cries, but as mentioned before, I was an abused child who didn’t cry.
“Daddy and Mommy. Their abuse was most likely made possible due to their strong bond and their cooperative attitude.
“However, it seems their opinions clashed when it came to how they wanted to educate me—and, as a result, it saved my life.
“But it was only as a result. The process involved me getting stabbed in the back, you see…
“Daddy wanted to make me a child prodigy.
“Mommy wanted me to remain as a fool.
“In other words, Daddy wanted me to be cute on the outside and smart on the inside, but Mommy wanted me to stay a baby on the inside as well… In reality, it wasn’t so simply divided, and both of them probably had mixed feelings, but the basic attitude was that Mommy kept talking to me in baby talk, while Daddy tried to teach me the four languages of Switzerland.
“He was a doctor, so did he have a belief in education? Or maybe he was just infatuated with the baby genius archetype… The only exception to that strict ‘no growth’ policy was ‘education’. Behind Mommy’s back, that is.
“That ‘education’ eventually led me to my current job, but before that, one of the few things I’d been given was the ability to speak, which was what saved me. I’m sure that wasn’t Daddy’s intention, but children don’t grow up the way parents want them to.
“No matter how much I suffered from malnutrition, I wasn’t just in a daze for twenty years. No matter how much I thought being in a cage was completely natural, if I devoted myself to reading the example sentences for language-learning, I would end up learning what was outside the cage.
“There were even hints from listening to my parents’ conversations… If I could understand the language, I could talk. And if I could talk, I could converse. And if I could converse, then I could persuade.
“I set my sights on Daddy.
“Thinking about it, I was a terrible daughter, to try and drive a wedge between her parents… But if their cooperation was the key to their success in concealing my abuse, then I had no choice but to destroy that partnership.
“I didn’t think I could stop their abuse.
“But I did think I could make it end—it was about when I was a fifteen-year-old baby, or perhaps a little later. I began to beg my dad.
“‘Please kill me,’ I said.
“…I wasn’t being serious. I was just trying to appeal to his conscience.
“Well, that’s just what I’d like to say, but I probably was being serious. There was no doubt that I felt that I wanted Daddy to kill me if possible. That feeling was probably stronger.
“‘If you love me, then kill me.’
“‘Use that fruit knife to stab me.’
“‘I don’t want to be alive. I want to die.’
“Whenever Mommy wasn’t around, I kept trying to appeal to Daddy… The process of persuasion wasn’t very easy, and it took quite a long time, and I couldn’t even say it was successful.
“But, about five years after I’d begun to say that.
“Daddy finally stabbed me in the back.
“His love was real.”
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