Chapter Text
Tsubasa Hanekawa once told me that the reason people need friends to get through life is because, internally, they have a fear of being alone.
Of being abandoned.
To be honest, anything that came from her sounded poetic, even if I didn’t really understand what it was she was talking about.
There was a distant point in my life when I thought having friends lowered my intensity as a human.
If you get too attached to them, the heartbreak will hit you like a trainwreck once they’re gone.
When you’re—
Abandoned.
I know I’m not one to bicker. Having that type of mindset back then made me seem like some kind of edgy, outcast high schooler with no morals on the importance of support.
Even now I cringe at the thought of my younger self, even if that younger self existed no longer than a year ago.
Before I met Senjogahara, Hachikuji, Kanbaru, and everybody I’ve come to know and love, Hanekawa decided to introduce this topic to me on our walk home from school, as I dragged my old granny bike alongside me.
“I think friends are a wonderful thing to have, Araragi. What’s not to like about someone you can be yourself around, who you can joke and laugh with?”
“You make it sound like the essence of world peace. Some people do just fine on their own, don’t they?”
“That is true. Certain people do enjoy being a one-man army. However, if you think about it, that’s only what you see on the outside.”
“The outside?”
“Yes, the outside. Externally, we express ourselves the way we want the world to see us. We’re afraid of being judged by separate parties in this dog-eats-dog world. We want to make ourselves feel accepted in society. So we put on acts of happiness as a way to say ‘I don’t need you, I’m doing just fine on my own!’
“On the inside, however, we feel things we don’t want other people to see, such as our true emotions. Someone who’s smiling on the outside could be sobbing on the inside. They may say they want to be left alone, to not be spoken to. But internally, all they really want is a hug. That’s what makes us human.”
“Wow. That’s… deep, Hanekawa. But how does that relate to fearing loneliness? How does that make us human?”
“Loneliness is something we all fear deep down,” Hanekawa told me. “We may act tough, we may act happy, and we may say we’re fine, but in truth, when we’re hurting on the inside and have no outlet for these feelings, we become desperate; touch starved. We crave solace. It's the way we’ve always been. Our worst nightmare is being abandoned, deserted, with nobody to go to, with nobody to talk to. A baby bird can’t find food on its own. It needs its mother to feed regularly in order to dispel chances against premature death. In a sense, we’re like that—we need friends in order to have a reason to keep going. Having friends we can trust, who we can open up to, who we can be ourselves around—they are the comfort we seek in silence.
“That is what I think makes us human, Araragi. We need friends the same way we need food and water; we can go on long enough without them, but after being deprived for too long, we start to crumble from the inside out.”
Hanekawa’s staggeringly deep philosophy came off a bit eerie to me when she could say all this without so much of a second glance.
It did make sense, though.
Why we—as humans—need friends to get through life. Baby birds need mothers, human beings need connections…
I know my past self would have laughed out loud if he heard this, but he can kiss my ass.
Tsubasa Hanekawa was a good friend, one I was happy to have connections with.
One I was happy to rely on.
“So what happens when we don’t have any luck making friends and succumb to loneliness?”
Hanekawa mulled this over, fixing her glasses as she calculated an answer. I could see her brain’s clockwork shifting gears in her eyes.
She turned to me with that same smile.
“Then we become a shell of who we once were. When we fall victim to this pit of loneliness, we tear ourselves apart, and we become empty, depressed, knowing our true colors are unaccepted by this world.”
“Are you okay, Hanekawa?”
I asked her this on her behalf, mostly because this was some heavy stuff for a high schooler to be freely divulging, but she apparently took my concern as a joke and laughed, directing her eyes forward.
“Ha ha hah, I’m fine, Araragi.”
She absconded the subject.
“Friendships form a mutual trust between two or more people. That’s your daily definition for you, savor it. Normally we don’t tell each other I trust you unless the context of the statement requires that kind of clarification, like handing off a task for someone to complete, but defining someone by that phrase, that’s a different kind of I trust you. That one is special. Whoever you define this by is special. Your best friend, your parents, your lover…”
Hanekawa turned to me again, eyes agleam with clouded ambiguity.
“It shows that you care for them unconsciously. That’s the best part about friendship, Araragi—being cared for without direct reason. When you’re friends, the natural thing to do is care for them with everything you’ve got. Even if it kills you, you can’t help but care.”
“…You really do know everything, don’t you?”
I humored our heart-to-heart by engaging her in her catchphrase.
“Ha. I don’t know everything. I just know what I know. And I know that my worst nightmare would be never getting to meet you, Araragi. I’m glad I can rely on you.”
“................”
I didn’t have the guts to say it then, like the arrogant bastard I was, but… deep down, I felt a heavy solace in the way I could say the same about her.
I realized then, too, that I wouldn’t trade our friendship or trust for the world.
This dog-eats-dog world.
Even if—
Even if it meant I could become human again.
…
Hey.
Allow me to tell you a tale of friendship.
Will you lend me your ear for a while?