I squeezed her hands back. As I did, she let out a slow, quiet sigh that I did not understand. It was so quiet that I could hear the air conditioner again.
“There’s a dream I have often. I had that same dream again this morning.”
“What…kind of dream?”
“I dream about a girl. This girl is smart and reads tons of books and knows a lot of things, which makes her think that she’s a very special person. Different from everyone around her.”
Was this a story? Before I could ask, she continued.
“It’s important to think that you’re special. However, this girl is mistaken in her thinking. She thinks that everyone else around her is stupid. Although this isn’t true at all, because this girl’s cleverness is what makes her special, she thinks that being clever is the only path to becoming special. She thinks that as long as you have that, you can become someone important.”
She gave a little cough.
“This girl is an important child, but someone who belittles others will never be liked by anyone. She becomes more and more hated by the people around her. The worst part is, this girl thinks that that’s just fine, because she hates all the idiot children around her. Well…now that I think about it, she doesn’t really hate them. It’s just that she can’t seem to think about any of them.”
She gripped my hands.
“There are probably people who try to understand this girl, but this girl grows older and older, not giving a thought to anyone. She’s locked up in her own little world, devoting her time to growing smarter. She believes that as long as she does that, one day she’ll be happy. But she’s wrong.”
I gripped her hands back.
“By the time she’s an adult, this girl is very smart. But that’s all that she has. One day, she realizes that there’s nothing else around her. She should have become an important person, but she realizes that there’s no one around to praise her.”
This sounds just like…
I suddenly became very worried for this girl. “What happens to her?”
“I can tell you the rest of the story from here, but I’m not sure that you would understand. Even if you did, I can’t tell you what it means. I don’t want to. Do you still want to hear it?”
I nodded, my face still buried in my knees.
“Okay, well, this girl begins to think that her life has no meaning. Then she starts to think that nothing matters, and begins abusing her body, and mistreating her own heart. She goes to dangerous places, gets into dangerous things, and suffers dangers to herself. Still, she’s not unhappy about this. It feels good to destroy herself. Although her life is something that she built for herself, she hates it. She ruins and ruins and ruins, but she still needs money, so she neglects her own well-being in order to earn it. Before she knows it, she finds herself dwelling in that place. Of course, even down there, there are proud and wonderful people. The circumstances and the job itself aren’t at fault. That girl is the bad one here. And surely enough, more and more ruin is visited upon this prideless girl every day. But humans can get used to anything. Once she grows used to it, she realizes one more thing: there is no point in destroying herself, either. And so she thinks that she may as well put an end to this life.”
I was quiet.
Just as she said, I did not understand the meaning of her story. I could imagine, but only vaguely, and I had no idea what she meant by “dangerous things” or “mistreating her heart.” There was only one thing that I was certain of. “That girl is you, isn’t she?”
Skank-san was silent.
“What does ‘putting an end to a life’ mean?” I asked, worried about this girl’s future.
“Who knows?” Skank-san said. “In the end, she doesn’t end her life, so I don’t know what that would have meant. On the day when she thinks of ending it, a visitor suddenly shows up at her home. It’s a little girl, carrying a little friend with her.”
I finally lifted my head and looked at her. I gave her a clear look at my face, messy with snot and tears. I don’t know why I did that. I guess I just wanted to look at her face. She was smiling at me kindly, as she always did.
“From there on out, her days are so much fun. She didn’t have any friends before that, but she realizes how much better things could have been if only she had learned to love someone sooner. But you can never take back the past.”
You can’t get back time. I remembered Minami-san saying that.
“I’m excited to see what kind of person you grow into, but I’m worried about you. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because you’re just like that little girl. You can’t let yourself walk the same path. You have to find happiness. That’s why you can’t talk about disconnecting from everyone.”
As I thought about what she was saying, I squeezed her hand again.
I was so confused. I felt as though I was trapped in the middle of a labyrinth.
Because I was clever, I understood what she meant. But understanding what she meant and being able to follow through were two wholly different things. I had already decided that I wished to have nothing more to do with the people who had hurt me, after all. Plus, even if I could change my thinking, I still didn’t think that anyone besides Skank-san and Granny would want to be near me. Even Ogiwara-kun and Kiriyuu-kun hated me. There was no hope.
I suddenly wanted to hear more about this girl, who was so much like me. “That girl liked books, right?”
“Mm, yes, just like you. She loved books, and she was always reading. She once thought that she might become someone who wrote stories herself, but when she realized there was no one around her to read them, she forgot that dream.”
“What about her mother and father?”
“I’m sure that they’re still living happily together somewhere. She hasn’t seen them in a long time. Once, she thought that she’d go back home, and went all the way to her old house, but she couldn’t ring the doorbell. She was too afraid.”
“She didn’t have any friends to talk about books with, or friends to eat ice cream with, or friends with short tails?”
“Nope, none. And so, there was no one to tell her when she was wrong.”
“Did she have any favorite phrases, like me?”
She answered my flood of insolent questions directly, one after the other. This made me happy, and so I piled on more questions.
“Phrases?”
She stared out the window, as if digging for some day back in her memory. My eyes were trained on her face. She put her fingers to her chin and thought about it.
“Phrases, yeah, there was something she was always saying. So much so that I wonder why I forgot about it. Her catchphrase was…wait…hm?”
She eyes turned from the window back to me, her eyelids fluttering. Then, she stopped blinking and her eyes opened so wide I thought they might just go flying off.
“What’s wrong?”
“My…catchphrase when I was little. It was: ‘Life is like…’”