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"Shin Tsukimi is such a good guy", I'm sure everyone has thought that at least once. In fact, all my peers know me by that appellation, although it would be more correct to speak in the past tense. To tell the truth I have no idea what people currently think of me and it's normal, everyone creates their own point of view, some positive and some negative, even on people you don't know: let's face it, we've all done it at least once, and it’s not as this makes us despicable or superficial people, indeed it’s perfectly normal. It’s true, it must be accepted, if any stranger stands in front of you, you will not be able to help but have an initial judgment: "what a shady guy", everyone must have thought that at least once of any passer-by; sure, the chances that they were right are as many as the ones that they were wrong, but by now it's too late to know, unless they’ve stopped this passerby to ask them, "Hey are you a maniac? You know, because you look shady”, although it sounds a bit far-fetched but hey, who am I to say they wouldn't have the nerve to do it? Everyone has their own conception of decency. So if you, through a simple glance, are already able to get an idea of the kind of person in front of you, can you imagine how many people have done that with you, how many people have imagined you as the exact opposite of who you really are? Doesn't it make you mad or at least frustrated? We spend our entire life taking care of ourselves and our image, our culture and our ability to be a part of the world without someone being our caregiver - although we all tend to attach ourselves to a person to the point of becoming dependent on them, to the point of not being able to imagine our life without them, because as Aristotle said "man is a social animal", unable to live in anarchy and total independence - and only those few people who really know us will be able to recognize such efforts, because the life we’ve spent spiritually enriching our ego won’t be recognized by anyone else: people will all base themselves on our appearance. If you learn to notice it, it works like this in every area: you surely have happened to spend days and nights on that damned theme of that damned subject aiming to get that high grade that you so deserve; as soon as the questioning time arrives and the professor begins to scrutinize you with those pedantic eyes, you begin to forget everything you have known until a few moments earlier and before you realize it he has already raised his eyebrow: "They didn’t study", and there’s no way to change his mind unless the tension magically fades. "But it’s an injustice", it’s normal that it is, if you think about it the world itself is an injustice, even society is based on the concept of justice even though it’s the first not to apply it, and it’s all too big to be changed by you, or by me, insignificant ants in a universe that hardly notices our existence.
Think about the pain. No one deserves to suffer, no one deserves to feel pain and no one has the right to inflict it - although criminals are apparently exempt from this concept and must by law be killed, even brutally, because the law can take the right to deprive someone of their own life - despite everyone has hurt someone at least once, perhaps unconsciously or involuntarily, and someone has surely cried because of you without you knowing; are we all bad people then? Pain undoubtedly changes us, it has changed you, it has changed me too, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse: I don't know exactly what my pain has changed about me, but it’s enough to know that if before everyone thought "Shin Tsukimi is such a good guy”, they don't think so anymore. "Have you done someone wrong?" you may ask me, but the truth is unknown to both of us if I have to be honest, since I don't know what a fault really is and what isn’t, nor if this is justifiable or not, but I know for a fact that old Shin would never have done anything such. But what, what kind of pain, exactly, has changed me?
We talked about first impressions. You see, my bummer started from my first impression of a boy, a boy with tousled hair of a bright green color that, towards the bottom, was tied in a thin pigtail so jarring that it seemed to be placed there at random; the emerald eyes and always wide open that never detached from yours, the mischievous smile always present.
It was a very normal if not particularly boring school day when I saw that singular individual for the first time: it was him who approached me first, actually it seemed like he was looking for me with his eyes before coming to meet me, and simply introduced himself, amicably, with that name that to date does nothing but rumble in my head, dragging with it an echo of thoughts and memories, doubts and reflections, anxieties, but above all fear. Here, fear, something that, when the boy approached me, my body naively refrained from feeling, contenting myself with simple discomfort and that shyness that has always characterized me. He was kind to me, disinterested, friendly and helpful, that someone I always would have liked to have but I never got to know as I’ve always been the lonely type; in short, a friend, or at least he defined himself as such:
«I'm your friend Shin, don't you trust your dear friend?»
«My friend...? Yes, I trust you, of course I trust you.»
It's so easy to trust someone just for the will to do so, almost as easy to betray that trust, yet I really believed that word, "friendship". What is it, then? Can it really be said with certainty that it exists? That boy was my friend, I’ve always defined him as such, but over time the concept of friend that he transmitted to me surely was no longer what you find in the dictionary: have you ever been afraid of a friend of yours? Have you ever feared that he might kill you, that he would hurt you if you didn't obey him? In all honesty I hope you've never had any friends, or I'd genuinely feel sorry for them.
My world wasn't dark or sad, Shin Tsukimi's world never was, but as soon as that boy approached me it was like changing dimensions: for some reason my common sense would leave me after hearing a few simple sentences come out of his mouth; he managed to make me his subservient with disarming ease, he managed to convince me so much of his ideas that they didn’t abandon me even afterwards, I continued to obsessively repeat them to myself, letting them consume me, “if my closest friend said it then it's definitely true”, “he only says it for my own good”; sometimes I still remember his pale lips gently approaching my ear, as if to balance the so bitter words that then came out through a whisper:
«You’re good for nothing Shin, how do you expect to accomplish something in your life?» and he gave me a pat on the back of the neck, in fact the first few days I could even let myself burst into tears, and just then he would almost aggressively squeeze my shoulders with both hands and then give me a kiss on the forehead; it wasn't an affectionate gesture, it wasn't a method to comfort me, it was another of his many ways to submit me to his words: I do it for your own sake Shin, I know the truth hurts, but it must be told, and inside me I thanked him, nodding in resignation.
«Mom... do you think I'm good for nothing?»
«My goodness, dear Shin! I've never thought of that in my entire life: you’re a smart boy. Why do you ask me?»
«A friend of mine, the slightly creepy one, you know, at school... he thinks I’m good for nothing, so–»
«Your “friend”?» she laughed.
«I correct myself, dear Shin, you’re a smart boy but you still have a lot to learn about the world» she stroked my face affectionately, warmly: it wasn’t the cold caress to which I was placidly accustomed.
«You’ve grown a lot, and yet I still see in your eyes those of an innocent child».
You wouldn’t be able to say the same now, mom.
«I’ll give you one more piece of advice from mother to son like you were still little, but you’ll have to apply it by yourself: a person that tells you such things isn’t your friend. You must ignore them, find a way so that their words won’t penetrate you, and believe in yourself until the end. Whoever they may be, they're nobody to tell you who you are and who you’re not.»
I smiled, feeling that someone had finally given me some courage. "Tomorrow I will face him", I deluded myself, just before falling asleep.
The time of the day had come when the green-haired man approached me and then mortified me with his usual and now annoying voice. He approached me with a smile, spreading his arms, to greet me, while without my noticing my hand pressed his chest to keep him from approaching any further; he remained still, with his gaze fixed on it, while I could not muster the strength to tell him once and for all to leave me alone: painfully, without the time to realize it or stop it, my body began to tremble.
«Shin...» I felt the torso of the green man straighten under my hand, while his gaze met, hostile, mine. Suddenly, the boy burst into a chilling laugh, a laugh that I never imagined coming from him, or rather, I had never heard from him: the laugh of a real psychopath, enriched by the dark but mocking look he gave me. I felt my blood stop and freeze in my veins for an instant, but neither my hands nor my knees wanted to spare themselves from pawing;
«L-leave me a-alone... S... S-S...» I tried frantically to push him away, in vain.
«You're trembling!» he continued to laugh and then stopped abruptly and looked at me seriously.
«Don’t you ever tell me what to do», and before I knew it, my body had collapsed to the ground: it was the first kick I ever received, and then another straight in the belly. I stifled a scream, clutching my torso as well as gritting my teeth, while my eyes became moist. Don't get me wrong, as fragile as my body is, that wasn't the only pain it was enduring: humiliation, failure, imagining disappointment in my mother's eyes after what she had told me the day before, the awareness of being helpless. If I had to find a reason for this reaction today, I could stay here thinking about it even until the end of my existence, but it’d be useless: I’ll never understand what was going on inside his head from then on. What I know is just that at the time, the only conclusion I had come to was that I had "disrespected" him, not as a person can do to another equal to them, but as a servant to his master.
«You're weak, Shin.», he gave me one last look and then left.
It was in that moment that I really realized it, even though it could have been already obvious by then, I had never ascertained it: that boy wasn’t my friend, nor was I a friend of his. At least not anymore, and for a long time now.
From that day on he stopped using "good" manners, so being attacked by him in any way became part of my daily life, and I didn't even try to push him away. He would come to me, humiliate me, sometimes he would take me by the neck and squeeze it until I fainted, and every day it proceeded like this, without my reacting. What I couldn't help but wonder was simply "why?", why did a seemingly normal peer appear out of nowhere to occupy my days to hurt me on a regular basis? Was it a punishment for being weak and incapable? For a long time I was convinced of this, without asking any more questions either to me or to anyone else, and every morning as soon as I got up from my white bed I just waited for the day to end and for the time to come when I could go to bed again. By then I was living like this, passively, and I could no longer even find the strength to look my parents in the eyes, who despite everything continued to spoil me unconditionally. Was I really so pathetic that I had to be spoiled by my own parents, like a baby?
Without giving time to time I found myself an "adult" and graduated, making as the first choice to move away from my home and live alone: I couldn’t bear the idea of depending on someone, especially now that I was, at least by law, an adult. At the same time, along with both those who shared my student life with me and my family, that boy suddenly vanished from my life, as if it were just some apparently interminable nightmare, a dream too real to be considered such, a demon who seemed to never want to stop persecuting me. Did giving myself a wake up call and settling down somewhere independently exorcize that being?
Yes, although inside I was sure that the words of that green-haired man no longer hurt me and that I had created a barrier around me, the more those things were repeated to me and the more I believed in them, it was like a daily brainwashing. I wonder if this is still the case, if today I still believe in his words: I probably got so used to them that I made them my own, without taking them out of my head, and right now I’d no longer be able to distinguish them or abandon them.
You know, as much as I hate and hated you, to my detriment you’ve become a part of me, a bigger part than I ever wanted. At every critical or important occasion I never stopped asking myself "what would he do?", because despite how unpleasant you were and I despise you with all my heart, nothing and no one has ever put you in trouble: in my eyes you were perfect, strong, clever, you knew how to subdue the weakest, and you were the opposite of how you described me; I realized that at least I had to learn from you, and so I did. So, all in all, your influence on me wasn’t entirely harmful, you still managed to give me something positive; should I thank you? No, even today if you miraculously crossed my path I would address you with the same look filled with hatred as much as with fear that I’ve always preserved for you; have you ever had a vague idea of the countless and now irreparable damage you’ve caused me? However, if I told you that I’ve literally stolen from you what I’ve been able to absorb from your personality in order to show myself strong and survive, would you laugh at me? Such a stupid question, right? Of course you would, you always did. Did I really make you laugh that much? Are you laughing even now?
But you see, here I probably managed to make everyone hate me as much as you did with me, even though I don't feel satisfied at all, albeit lucky to be alive; and how did you feel? I'll never get to know, huh, Sou? Have you decided to ruin me and hurt me and then vanish into thin air, without taking any responsibility? I must say that it really is like you, though, to die without a trace like that. Who ever managed to extinguish the harsh smile on your face?
But after all you’ll never be able to answer me, you’ve never given yourself any weight to do so.
You truly are a mystery to me, Sou Hiyori.
You’re like an open book to me, Shin Tsukimi.