"Why don't you study instead of drawing and drawing?! Those sketches won't feed you in the future! If you keep this up, you'll end up on the street, drawing strangers for two or five pennies!"
My mother's words stabbed through the air, loud and sharp. The echo still buzzed in my chest as I hurriedly shut my half-finished draft. It wasn't even lined yet...just the faint outline of a male figure with long hair, wearing a loose yukata and a crooked grin that looked almost alive under my pencil.
"Sometimes I wonder if I picked up the wrong baby at the hospital," my mother spat, her voice cracking from frustration. "How can my own child be this hopeless at math, when both of us were at least decent?"
Dad didn't shout, but his words cut colder. "When the Wi-Fi is gone, everything will be fine," he said, without even looking at me.
I opened my math books, pretending to study just to escape the suffocating weight of their scolds. Pages blurred together into meaningless numbers and symbols, all dancing away from my reach.
They expect me to score 80, maybe even 90 in math...enough to get into a diploma in architecture. A future they've carefully imagined for me, built on the foundation of their own pasts. And, on paper, it makes sense. After all, architecture does need drawing skills, which I do have. But there's another wall standing in my way: I don't have the kind of mind that can bend numbers to my will.
I never did. Even before I could choose math, it felt like math had already rejected me.
Both my parents were quiet legends in their own fields. My mother studied technology engineering at a government college. My father, civil engineering at another. He can fix anything, build anything, create something useful out of scraps lying around. Sometimes, I think he could rebuild the whole house with a few spare planks and stubborn willpower.
Being their eldest daughter, the weight of their expectations presses down on me like wet stone. And yet... I'm not like them. Or maybe, I wasn't born to be like them. But no one here seems willing to see that, let alone accept it.
I've always dreamed of making my own comic...breathing life into stories born from the quiet corners of my mind. But whenever I tried, the ideas felt messy, formless... more like air. Heavy enough to feel, impossible to hold. A story without a proper beginning or end...just moments and fragments.
I haven't watched hundreds of anime like others, but the few I have seen were... breathtaking. Complete worlds. Legends etched in color and ink. And then there's me: invisible, unshaped. A side character in my own life, wishing I could be the legend instead.
I wish, just once, I had the kind of sharp, calculating brain my parents wanted. Maybe then I'd be worth their pride. Instead, I'm here with an impossible dream clutched in my hand like a wilted flower. A joke no one laughs at.
Still... I draw. Even when I'm told it's pointless. Even when guilt gnaws at my chest. I draw him....the other half of what I can't be. Black silk hair falling like midnight curtains, a smile that cuts and heals, eyes darker yet cleaner than my own. He'll become the mirror of everything I fear and desire.
He'll speak the words I'm too quiet to say. He'll shine, even if I remain unseen.
Someday, he'll step out from my sketchbook, untamed, alive...a gift only I could summon. My secret, darker twin.
And maybe, just maybe, when he's finally here... I won't feel so incomplete.
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"The world says he's fiction. But to me, he's as real as the air I breathe... maybe even more real than I am."
And that drawing I closed so quickly? That isn't just any drawing. It's him... I call him kurama..kirihito kurama..it's his first real name only I call..but in his own world , hrs known as kirihito orohana... The other half I made in secret shadows and midnight sketches.
He's dark where I am quiet, strong where I am shaking, cruel yet honest in ways I could never dare.
Some might say he's only fantasy...just pencil and paper. But to me... he's real.
Maybe even more real than I'll ever be.maube that world won't see him..just yet..maybe the world sont see me..bur together.. we care sonething that can't die..we'll live into pages and memories..as song lyrics or unforgettable novels...
And maybe that's the story I was born to tell: not just about him, but about us...the real me, and the untamed half I brought into this world.
Maybe..I drew him to save myself
..or maybe..too set myself free...
[ End of Chapter 01 ]