Book 3: Chapter 4: 25th of August (Tuesday)
After waking up, I remained in my bed, thinking to myself. Did I mess up yesterday?
“I probably did, huh?”
The voice I let out to my room’s ceiling didn’t reach anybody’s ears, and came back down to me again. I turned my head to the side and checked the time of day. It was already noon, but I was still sleepy. Because of all that had happened yesterday, and myself pondering about it all night, I didn’t get much sleep. Just how can I break Ayase-san’s stiff and thick-skinned consciousness? After all, Ayase-san’s mentality feels sharp and sturdy at the same time. Yet it was frail all the same.
After living with Ayase-san for the past two months, I’ve at least learned a lot about her. Even more so since we’ve been working together each day at our part-time job. If I had to guess, Ayase-san’s thought process probably went something like this.
Being a child means you get things given to you for free. Basically, you’re much more on the taking side than the giving side. When she was a child, she was as normal as any other child, asking her mother for ice cream, or that she would take her to the pool. She was always asking to take. Of course, that made perfect sense, and that’s how things are meant to be. However, Ayase-san doesn’t feel that way. That’s what’s so crucial about this.
Because of her family’s circumstances, Ayase-san stopped her childish days early in her upper years of grade school. She couldn’t allow herself to stay a child anymore. The world works on give & take relationships, but she chose to live more on the giving end of the spectrum. This was probably her own way of making up for her days as a child when she lived on the take side, under the wrong impression that she had troubled her mother by it.
She wanted to grow up as quickly as possible and ease her burden on her mother. Being given something for free probably reminds her of her dark past when she was a child. She would think that as soon as she was a bit selfish, she would only increase the burden on her mother. What irony. After all, Akiko-san herself told me the opposite is true.
‘I wanted her to be able to stay a child for longer.’
I felt my chest grow heavy just thinking about this. Even though they both care about each other, they want the wrong things. The mother wants her daughter to stay a child for a bit longer, whereas the child wants to become an adult as quickly as possible. Making both parties happy is impossible. They contradict each other, after all. Not even adjusting worked. Ayase-san was still a child after all.