I was dropped on my head as a child.

And why didn't you die, one may ask? Well, the answer is that I did. My skull cracked like an eggshell, my tiny heart ground to a halt, and at the fresh age of three months old, I perished from the inattentive hands of a seven year old child.

It wasn't fun, dattebayo.

As I was bundled in a threadbare cloth, and placed atop a mound of trash to be burned into a crisp pile of ash, I drew breath and wailed hours after I had, in all technicalities, passed away. The poor sap in charge of the waste that day had the scare of his life, and almost hurled me into the incinerator. Which would have been disastrous, as I'm sure I wouldn't have survived that.

This particular memory I don't remember, but Sayu (the seven year old murderer) gleefully recounted the event to me––and you went splat! Just like rotten fruit!–as I got older. Childhood trauma, in her opinion, was a perfectly fine bedtime story. If you ask me, I totally blame that for messing with my sense of morals in the first place.

Well, that, and I was raised in a brothel.

A well-to-do red-light district establishment, my infant years were spent being passed around from kid to kid, apprentices and reluctant laundry women alike stuffing me into baskets or blankets. All while the majority of the adults in the building cleverly pawed their way through the coin purses of wealthy customers. You can't possibly expect a healthy kid to grow up in a place where he watches inebriated customers stumble through the doors the moment the sun sets.

Tsubaki, (never call me mother, she had told me. It made her feel old.) excelled at her job, and she had the mile-long list of clients to prove it. My Before mother was a kind woman, with a sunny smile, and a near-fanatic obsession with city pop. Tsubaki, on the other hand, was an immature person, and she never truly gave a single effort to raise me. She complained on several occasions that I was the product of a drunken night, which quickly quashed my dreams of meeting my father. Family hours were instead relegated to me watching her brush her hair as she griped about her customers, and frankly, I had (still have) the attention span of a gnat.

Case in point, I didn't even begin by explaining what the Before is.

See, my memories aren't from this world. Or dimension.

I won't go as far as to claim that my mind was perfectly transplanted into a wholly new body. It'd be more accurate to explain that who I currently am is more of an amalgamation between my past and current selves. The reason for this wasn't particularly hard to parse. My brain going through the omelet treatment had killed my baby self, but in turn, had jumpstarted my past memories. I'm me. The Before version of myself is also me.

I really don't know the mechanics of the process, but I handwaved it away with the word "magic" a few years back, and promptly squashed the entire concept into some far-off portion of my mind. Pondering my mortality gave me a headache.

Living in a version of feudal Japan was weird. Sometimes I'd recall things like a "television" or a "smartphone" through a hazy memory, and then I'd walk outside to see a funerary shrine being crafted for the blacksmith's son, bless his soul, who died from a rusty nail. The disconnect between worlds was jarring, and for a few awkward months, I was gripped with the irrational fear that I'd pass away from an undetected tetanus infection.

Still, I considered my memory situation to be a lucky one. There was no saying how fucked up I would get if I didn't have handfuls of happy experiences to vicariously live through when the going got tough. Being a kid who survived off of scraps of food and was worked to nigh-exhaustion weekly, I would've probably become the type of guy who drowned mice for amusement if I didn't recall my previous life.

I'll gloss over the bits where I learned how to walk, talk, and use the "big boy toilet". Those events weren't particularly important milestones in my life, and to be perfectly honest, it's an incredibly frustrating experience to be able to comprehend movement while simultaneously having underdeveloped infantile limbs. Doubly so when all heights are bad heights to fall from.

The process went something like this: I took my first step. I said a word. I took some more steps. I fell. I said some curse words.

Understandably, the people around me didn't pay enough attention to realize that I was developing faster than the average child, (which was good for me, as I had no idea how the physical progression of normal babies worked.) If they noticed me muttering in a completely different language, they must've chalked it up to toddler babble, and ignored me. Granted, I didn't really say any English phrases beyond repeating "fuck" whenever my too-large head was acquainted the ground, but I wasn't sure what I'd do if my aptitude at a completely foreign language was noticed.

Actually, I'd probably scream if somebody pointed that out. But that's beside the point.

By the time I was old enough to become a nuisance to the laundry women, I was unceremoniously handed off to some of the older children for a quasi-training regimen that mostly involved my tiny body being crammed into some of the harder-to-reach spaces for a heavy duty cleaning job. It was hard, tedious work, and gods-know what kind of grime coated my body. It almost looked like a second skin by the time I was done.

I recall seeing my reflection during this period and thinking "The Walking Dead wishes they could hire me."

I wasn't the most sociable child, but I wasn't completely alone either. Of course, the eldest apprentices would outright ignore me, and the youngest were too young to hold proper conversations, but I found companionship within the two other kids who ran the same floor-scrubbing routes I did.

Takumi and Sayu (my self-proclaimed mentors and friends) were nice children. Nice-ish. Sayu delighted in making me cringe, and had no qualms about forcing me to capture and bring her various insects, while Takumi had all the tact of a drunk elephant. Once they realized that I wasn't a loud version of the snot-nosed brat archetype that seemed to plague the district, they informed me that I was their little brother, which I later found translated to "please do our chores because we're older." For all their teasing though, they really did care for me.

Whether it was pity or a misplaced sense of duty, they did their best to answer most of my questions, and attempted to show me affection by offering me dust balls (Sayu) or demonstrating how to run through the halls without getting caught (Takumi). I returned their actions by foisting my green peppers onto them during mealtime. They probably knew that it was because I hated the taste of those horrid green vegetables, but they never retaliated, instead choosing to ruffle my hair like a disobedient puppy.

Between completing menial tasks, scrubbing down floors, and my weekly vent sessions with Tsubaki, life wasn't the most stimulating. However, as much as I internally complained, I was usually exhausted by the end of the day, and I couldn't exactly find it in me to devise an "escape the dreary monotony of life!" type of plan. I would be the first to admit I hated living within the perfumed walls of the brothel, but the alternative situations kept my mouth firmly shut. There was enough brutality in the area to know first-hand how cruel people were.

This routine continued until I turned six, and my life was once again interrupted by the same damn guy that almost booted me into a flaming hot garbage disposal.

It was a normal morning, when I overheard him muttering and cursing the ongoing war (which I had little to no information on beyond the fact there was a war) and I almost passed by until he began to bemoan the state of the "Land of Fire". He then completed his colorful monologue by cursing shinobi to hell and back for his financial problems.

I put two and two together, and connected the occasional glimpses of people in flak jackets and headbands to his words. I'm surprised it took me as long as it did, but the revelation was enough to make me, a fairly reticent and shy child, drop the basket of towels I had been carrying and burst into a screaming meltdown of tears and flailing limbs.

Surprise! I hadn't just been born into a different timeline, oh no. I was reborn into a goddamn Shonen Jump manga I had read in my previous life.

Naruto. I was living in the world of Naruto.

The thought of Kishimoto possibly being an all-seeing god lording over the denizens (me) of the land was terrifying enough to send me into another round of ear-splitting wails. You thought the moon aliens were scary? Try imagining your entire life is being dictated by a middle-aged Japanese man.

I was so, so fucked.