At night, I like to look at stars from the roof of the school.
There are two mistakes in that sentence. Can you spot them?
One is a very simple, elementary error in tense─instead of “I like,” I should have written “I liked.”
That would be the case starting the next day.
On October 10th, my fourteenth birthday, I would stop looking up at the night sky forever.
So this was the last night.
The other mistake is a little trickier─or rather, it’s one that only I could find. Because only I know about it.
But, what to make of that?
If only I know about it, maybe it’s less a mistake and more a case of me being mistaken.
I’d been making the same mistake for almost ten years.
I erred with confidence and failed with pride.
But that ridiculous little tale was about to end.
I will stop my childish games when I reach my second year of middle school.
That was the promise I made to my “dear parents.” I managed to interpret the words broadly, as in “until I turn fourteen,” and I stuck to my old ways even after entering my second year of middle school, but the struggle seems to have been in vain.
Pointless effort. What could be more depressing.
It’s better to regret doing something than to regret not doing it─the author of that famous saying is unknown, but my guess is that whoever came up with those striking words must have written them after an all-nighter or something, because the phrase is missing a crucial perspective.
It’s not very common for people to regret not doing something.
No─people feel a sense of accomplishment precisely when they don’t do anything.
People who say, “I should have done that!” even strike me as somehow joyful. After all, the feeling that you might have been able to do something if only you’d tried is less a regret than an aspiration.
The ones with regrets are always those who did something─so please don’t tell me it’s “good” that I apparently threw away ten years of my precious childhood.
Generally speaking, regret is definitely “bad.”
I never imagined my life would be pointless.
What unbelievable idiocy.
Incidentally, time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing something else─and in that sense, regret over having done something may be synonymous with regret over not having been able to do anything.
If I hadn’t been chasing dreams these past ten years, what might I have accomplished?
When I think about that─it’s like complete devastation.
Though, when it comes to it, I can’t come up with anything a person like me would have been able to accomplish anyway.
Still, I never know when to quit, so that night too I climbed up to the school roof to see what I could see, clinging to the slenderest of hopes, but nothing dramatic happened. They say that he who laughs last, laughs best. If that’s true, then I suppose she who cries last also cries best.
If only I were the charming type of girl who could cry in a situation like that. I leaned on the fence around the edge of the roof and sighed, thinking despondently about the fact that in the end I hadn’t managed to become that kind of girl, or for that matter, to be much of a young lady at all, and here I was about to become an adult.
“Looking for something?”
“Ack!”
The voice came from behind me at the precise moment I slouched against the fence, and my back went ramrod straight as I screamed. Since I tried to wrench myself around and look behind me while in that clumsy, in-between posture, my legs got tangled around each other and I tottered dangerously.
Oh.
Crap.
Since the roof is off-limits to begin with, the fence isn’t very high. I felt my weight teetering on the fulcrum of that fence. My feet were no longer touching the ground. I had a floating sensation like I was riding an elevator─was I going to fall?
Which way? Onto this side? Or that side?
No way─was this going to be my last night in that sense of the word? Wait, wait, wait, you’ve got to be joking. How uncool would it be if everyone thought I’d killed myself at this young age because my dream had been shattered?
As I rocked back, I came to be facing straight upwards and the star-filled sky came into view─ironically, the heavens were clear and cloudless, which, as my last vista ever, wasn’t too shabby.
Beautiful.
And yet.
It still wasn’t the starry sky I was hoping for─
“Argh!”
I’d been lost in sentimental emotions for only an instant when a pair of arms yanked me forcefully back to “this side”─and once again, I let out an undignified scream that even I could tell was less than adorable.
I wasn’t screaming about the forcible rescue, but instead about the passionate embrace into which I was pulled, as if the rooftop were a ballroom or something.
It may have been unavoidable given the unusual situation, but I’m extremely lacking in experience when it comes to being held like that─I probably would have screamed even if it had been a girl holding me, but my reaction was all the more extreme because, although small, the person holding me was definitely a boy.
I was too close to say for sure, but judging by the school uniform, he seemed to be a student at my school─still, since my social circle is so small, I had no idea who he was, what grade he was in, or if he was the same age as me, or older, or younger. He could have been an old-looking first-year or a young-looking third-year, but even if we were the same age, I was having a very hard time imagining he was a second-year student like me.
He did not look “like me.” Not at all.
“Are you okay? You ought to be more careful. There’s a reason the roof is off-limits, you know─it’s dangerous.”
As this mysterious character delivered his teacherly reprimand, his face inches from my own, I suddenly got hot under the collar─despite being the gloomy type, I have something of a short fuse. I wanted to point out that he was up here, too, and the reason I almost fell in the first place was because he started talking to me out of the blue, but the words jammed up in my throat, and instead of saying all that I stood there silently.