When I think back on my childhood I remember the constant struggle to breath. My lungs felt like tissue paper, crackling at the slightest disturbance, and I spent nights trying to quietly pull in a comfortable breath while I slept next to my greatest love and my greatest fear—with whom I was constantly trying to please and still breathe, survive. I couldn't run away, I could barely run at all without feeling as though every particle of oxygen around me had sunk into the ground never to be breathed by my dilapidated human lungs again. She would laugh sometimes. Sometimes yell. Sometimes hold me gently has a coughed out all my hope. Sometimes hold me desperately. It was concern I later realized, and fear that pulled such strange reactions from her in the face of my weakness. It is so strange now to look upon her feverish body, trembling for oxygen, for life and to feel so healthy and whole beside her. So strange to see that she is the one dying. And now I wonder if her concern, her fear was for me or for herself. If I was a mirror for her, for her grim crippled future. Kyou and Honda-san are oblivious to this strange switch. They have rarely seen me ill, though it used to seem that was who, what I was. An illness. A walking illustration of decrepit human form, coughing and gasping to keep up with the living. It should be me there. I see that truth in her dying eyes. It should be me.
