دانلود رمان انگلیسی “آداچی و شیمامورا” – جلد 06

“WHENEVER YOU CHALLENGE yourself, you must always try your hardest. Otherwise you’ll never discover what you’re truly capable of.”  Wise words from a junior high school teacher whose name I couldn’t quite remember. I just wish someone would have told me a little sooner. By junior high, all traces of the old me had vanished. I was a carefully polished stone flowing through the river of time. Put nicely, you could say I was free from all restraint. Alternatively, from a less-than-generous perspective, there was nothing keeping me grounded.  That was the kind of girl I had become.  There wasn’t any sort of major event that caused it either. After I transitioned from elementary school to junior high, a lot of the people around me simply started being very specific about the way they treated others. If you ask me, I merely adapted to that change.  Kindness approached the heart by knocking on the front door, whereas malice crept in through the windows. And when you were innocent and trusting, you generally left your windows wide open. But when it was your own naivete that made everything worse, no one felt sorry for you and no one came to your rescue.  Thankfully, I managed to realize these things before anyone ever hurt me. So I got out my hammer and nails and boarded up every last one of those openings. That way no malice could ever get in…and I could never get out.  Admittedly, when I closed off the door, I seemed to lose my ability to express interest in anything, but at the same time, I never had to expend any energy caring about anything either. It was easier to simply exist in the background. I didn’t think of it as good or bad—it was just the way of the world, like the warmth of summer and the chill of winter.  In that sense, I was still the same naive little girl who took everything at face value. Hence I never questioned myself. Instead, I believed that this was how I would always be…and so far, I was still waiting to be proven wrong.