Chapter Text
“If you can’t be medicine, be poison - otherwise you’ll just become water.”
Those words, the sound of her voice, always comes back to me in my dreams, like ripples on water.
It feels like I always start and end big parts of my life with those words.
Kanbaru Toee, my mother, is often present in my dreams. Her voice is clear, and I can see her expression that never seems to match what she’s trying to say. Unlike my precious senpai Senjougahara Hitagi who says odd things because she forgot how to express herself properly, my mother expressly said things she might not have even understood herself.
Like that she was a loving mother.
I don’t recall her ever being loving or doting by any normal standards. A mother that called her child “stupid girl” or “born weak” would be considered the opposite of that.
Verbal abuse, you could say.
The most abusive thought being that she also said she loved me.
Will love. Loves. Has loved.
You could also say a parent will never stop loving their child unconditionally. I wonder if that was continually true for the both of them.
They felt they loved each other enough to elope.
Then they died together in a car crash, and left this world together.
Will die. Dies. Has died.
There once was a study on the nature of love between parent and child - an American scientist named Harry Harlow put infant monkeys with two fake surrogate mothers - one made of cold iron and spikes that provided food, and one cloth doll that provided comfort. It was found that despite needing food to live, the monkeys would seek the cloth doll the majority of the time. It was touch, not taste, that creates the bond between mother and infant, and it was touch that continues to grow that bond into something memorable and lasting.
It also sparked the need for new ethical standards for animals in science. The man became a monster when the same depression he was studying took himself over.
My own mother’s standards of love was like an incomprehensible language lost in translation.
I was a child, not a scientist.
And yet I still hear her talking to me in my dreams or in passing visions.
Maybe one day, I’ll go mad. Maybe one day, I’ll forget about her.
I live in a traditional Japanese style house with my paternal grandparents, so we don’t hang framed pictures on the entryway walls. There are pictures of her that exist, packed away safely in an album and kept in a paulownia wood box.
I know which box has those photos of her, but I haven’t bothered to seek them for a long time now. Photos of her, of my father, of us as a family.
Stored and passed onto me the same way as the Rainy Devil’s left hand.
I could ponder if that’s why I never bothered to look for those photos to refresh my muddy memories. But in the end, would that change anything?
You could say I’m running away from the problem, like I used to do with the Rainy Devil or with Akuma-sama — with Numachi.
Could, would, should.
Thinking about the meaning behind things weren't like me anyway.
I can run fast in my current form, but I can’t seem to outrun my mother. Even if I don’t think of her, others do. Like a shadow cast over me. Almost like how Shinobu-chan is living in Araragi-senpai’s shadow.
Almost.
Instead of giving me immortality and a cute companion, my mother gave me—
I don’t know what she left for me.
Physically, she left me the Rainy Devil’s hand.
As a parent, she gave me part of my life, my genetic structure.
As a Gaen, she’s left a legacy - acquaintances of hers drift in and out of my life in consideration for her, not me.
And in my dreams, these sayings she insists are lessons to be learned.
Yet she herself didn’t leave me any family.
“If you can’t be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you’ll just become water.”
I told her once that I was clear as mud. But the question came up again in my dreams because it’s being asked of me.
As a third year at Naoetsu Private High School, everyone is asking me what I’ll become. I’m studying for university entrance exams, but beyond that I didn’t know exactly what the future holds for me.
That’s the answer I have yet to find.