Warning, this story will be lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng. Very, very long. And cheeky. Very, very cheeky.
My name is Rin. Yoshida Rin according to my birth certificate, but I have no attachment to my surname. I don't have a family, they… I don't know what they did, never met them. I'm certain they were great people though, even if they left me behind.
Okay, can I have a do-over here? That's a terrible opening, just have to say, and this is my life I'm writing about here. This is the record of me; my autobiography if you will. I don't know if I really want to start it with such a depressing sentiment.
Let's try this again.
Today is my fifteenth birthday, and today I've decided I will start my autobiography. I've always kept records of my life, diaries I keep locked in the top drawer of my desk. This is different though. Perhaps it's just my excitement over finally getting a laptop that makes me think this is such a great idea, but I really think me writing down my life sounds good. Day after day; what adventures will I find myself locked in? What stories about my life would I not remember elsewise without this when my hair is grey, and I'm as old as the earth itself? Yeah, this is what this is. A record. A record of who I am, me, Yoshida Rin, for all the future generations to read once I've past from this earth. I've got a word processor, a memory stick, a lap top, and a stack of notebooks that already have a record of my first fifteen years which I will sum up now in this prologue.
I was born February 28th, 1998 to Yoshida Aimi and Yoshida Takehiro. As I already stated in my failed attempt at a beginning, I've never met them. I was abandoned on the doorstep of the Orphanage at six months old.
Kaede, the head caretaker of the Orphanage, loves to spin stories about how I came to be in this world, and how I ended up at their doorstep. Often the tales weaved are elaborate ones. She speaks of fairytale-esque tales. My favorite ones of these tales is the one where my mother is the step-daughter of a hateful widow. The widow, as my diary states, was a spider yōkai living in the guise of a human being. It ate its late husband's head, and was waiting for her step-daughter to grow up so she could eat her too. My mother however, ran across a handsome business man who was a skilled man in the arts of kendo. They fell in love and my mother got pregnant. She carried me for nine months, craftily concealing her body so that she didn't look very large and whenever her stepmother said something about her being fatter, my mother saying she was gaining weight from all the good food her step-mother served. One day, six months after I am born, the step-mother bursts in on my mother and my father meeting. My father fights my step-mother as my mother escapes into the streets. She gives me to the Orphanage and hopes that my life will be better than anything she could provide. Kaede first told me this tale when I was five years old, and even then I knew it was just a story. Still, I remember it fondly.
My own theory since I was twelve has been that my mother was some reckless woman who got pregnant, the dad ran out on her, and she decided she'd keep me. When she found out though that rearing a child was tough, she left me on the doorstep of the Orphanage and never looked back. I like Kaede's theory better though.
For most of my life, I haven't spoken. I can speak, and as I get older I find that I have more and more to say. When I was four, I was out playing with the other children in the yard. We found a piece of a glass in the yard in the far corner near the dead cherry tree. One of the older girls, whose name is Kikumi if Kaede's notes are to be trusted, decided she wanted to play out how her parents were killed. She made stabbing motions and ended up pinning me against the ground. She held the knife against my throat, but then one of the older boys who were playing ball nearby backed into her and the knife penetrated my skin. I was rushed to the ER but the damage had been done. Ever since then, speaking has been everything from a dull agony to a blinding torture, but mostly a dull agony now. I carry a little notepad around with me everywhere, but if necessary, I can and will speak and try to rather than write since writing can be kind of weird.
I'm looking through all my diaries right now as I sit on this bed, reading each of them with a smile, but I notice something. They're not very well detailed. Important events for me back then are well written, like how I lost my first tooth eating sushi at one of the other orphan's birthday party. But there's nothing important, nothing that I really need to record. I see lots of I want a puppy and I want to be adopted, but nothing that great. There's an account of when it seemed like I was going to be adopted by this older gentleman in his fifties when all of a sudden he just stopped showing up and no one mentioned him anymore. I know why now; he was a child molester and he was arrested.
Not much. Kind of disappointing for a prologue, but hopefully my life moving forward is more interesting than this. I hope so. Maybe I'll fall in love, likely not, or something soon, or make a new friend. I am transferring to a new school tomorrow after all.