Monogatari Series - Volume 7 - Chapter 1.01

Chapter Nixed- Tsubasa Family

001

It’s taken me long enough, but I’d like to think back to Golden Week, those days when I frolicked with Tsubasa Hanekawa to my heart’s content. They are harsh memories, they are astringent memories, but in a way they are bittersweet memories, too, and yet, if I could somehow forget them, I would─I would fly in the face of reality and make it all nothing more than fiction. Let me think back to those nine gleaming days.

Tsubasa Hanekawa. Seventeen years old. Female. High school senior. Class president. Model student. Braided hair with even bangs. Glasses. Serious, too serious. Virtuous. Very smart. Kind and fair to all. But it’s not like I think I can express a girl as exceptional as her to you by listing off these sorts of signifiers and character traits, not for a moment. Yes, there’s a certain something, about something about her, that can’t be expressed in any human language and that you can’t understand unless you’ve actually faced her, unless you’ve actually been in her presence. The reality of it is if you want to speak of who Tsubasa Hanekawa is, you would most likely need to do it in the language of the gods.

Or maybe the language of the devil.

So to be frank, and though I really couldn’t be any more sorry about it, I’ve given up from the start; I could go into every last minutia, from end to end, missing nothing, and I’m certain that I still wouldn’t be able to convey the truth of those nine nightmarish days, or the all-but-imperceptible imitation of the truth that those nine nightmarish days were. Having abandoned all hope of communication, I am the embodiment and avatar of resignation.

And anyway, it’s not as if I want at all to communicate to anyone the way I feel.

Only.

I simply─and plainly─want to mumble on and on to myself about my savior, Tsubasa Hanekawa, my friend, Tsubasa Hanekawa.

There’s probably no meaning to it.

There’s certainly─nothing at all to it.

No meaning, nothing at all for anyone, not even me.

It’s what you might call an empty shell of nothing.

That’s exactly why Hitagi Senjogahara or Suruga Kanbaru, whom I’d later meet─who charge headlong toward their goals, prepared to sacrifice whatever it takes, with such strength that at times they don’t hesitate to trample underfoot that which they hold dear─would see the nostalgic, revanchist act I’m about to attempt as utterly frivolous longing, worthy of a snicker, not even worthy of scorn, unproductive and backward-looking.

Those girls, both strong and weak, share a set of values that say people must live their lives facing forward, if not actively then positively, if not aggressively then ultimately.

They say it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Scrappy is fine, greedy is fine.

Those are their values─and they’re different.

I’m different.

Feeble and flimsy Koyomi Araragi, unable to hold a candle to them, is different.

A weak-willed coward who doesn’t just look left and right but back, too, before stepping in a pedestrian crossing, a mockery of a human─is different from those girls.

And.

Tsubasa Hanekawa and I are the same.

Lumped together.

Contrary to expectations, you might say.

Complementary to emotions, you might say.

However rude it may be to lump myself in with someone as exceptional and outstanding as her who is in a way beyond our ken, if there’s any concept that grows asymptotically close to becoming a moral learned over my Golden Week, that would have to be it. Using the word “moral” almost makes me sound like a fraud, but what else can I do, when it’s the unshakable truth.

I’ve resigned myself─there’s nothing else I can do.

The point in common between me and her.

The common denominator between Koyomi Araragi and Tsubasa Hanekawa.

What’s the same inside our hearts.

I understand it now─now that time has passed since Golden Week and second semester is just about to start, it hurts horribly but I understand it after all this time.

It is literally painfully obvious.

Why Tsubasa Hanekawa decided to call out to me.

Why Tsubasa Hanekawa allowed herself to encounter me.

Why Tsubasa Hanekawa saved me.

But this is something I’ve come to “understand now,” “after all this time.” In other words, it’s too late, it won’t come to anything. The only things I can take away from it are things that can never be taken back, undertakings that have already taken place.

Something just might have happened if only I’d noticed these kinds of circumstances, maybe not from the moment I met her but at least by Golden Week.

The two of us, feeble and flimsy.

We just might have been able to become something.

So that’s why these really are words mumbled to myself in an empty classroom after school, a detailed, standardized apology written from this dull seat.

Words of regret carved into a desk as graduation draws near.

I feel remorse about what happened, but I don’t feel regret─no, I’d never try to whitewash my situation with a line like that.

I feel remorse, and I feel regret.

I wish I could make it so that it never happened, and if I could do it over again, I would.

I’m just frustrated, so frustrated about that Golden Week. Why couldn’t I make it go any better? Why, why, why? I’m so frustrated that I’d want to die if I wasn’t immortal, so frustrated that it makes me want to cry, and even now I have dreams about it.

They are, without question, nightmares.

Tsubasa Hanekawa.

The girl with a pair of mismatched wings.

To go into the timing of this story, it took place around a month after I went through hell for two weeks, during the spring break between my second and third years of high school─though still plagued by lingering aftereffects, I had somehow resumed my everyday life after suffering, like a fool, the highly romantic experience of being attacked by a vampire, of all things, in present-day Japan. Mistaking me for some anachronistic juvenile delinquent, Tsubasa Hanekawa schemed her way into making me class vice president, and while I don’t remember whether I was still worried by that development or if I’d gotten over it by then─that was when it happened.

She was bewitched by a cat.

A cat.

A mammal belonging to Carnivora Felidae.

That’s why ever since Golden Week─I haven’t liked cats.

I’m scared of cats.

Yes─just as I’m scared of Tsubasa Hanekawa.

This preface has gotten a bit long, but there’s no need at all to fret─there’s more time after school than you might think.

Now then, I’d like to tell you about a dream I had last night.