The question of how long someone believed in Santa Claus is a worthless topic that would never come up in idle conversation. Having said that, if you’re going to ask me how much of my childhood I spent believing in an old man in a red suit, I can confidently say that I never believed in him to begin with.
I knew that the Santa at the preschool Christmas pageant was just a fake. Digging into my memories, I’m pretty sure that the other kids watching our principal dressed up as Santa didn’t think he was real either.
I was a precocious child who didn’t need to see Mommy kissing Santa Claus to question the existence of an old man who only worked on Christmas. However, I wouldn’t realize that aliens, time travelers, ghosts, demons, espers, and evil organizations and the heroes that battle them in cartoons, monster movies, and comics were made up until some time later.
No, I had probably already realized the truth. I just didn’t want to admit it.
Deep in my heart, I wished that aliens, time travelers, ghosts, demons, evil organizations, or espers might just pop up in front of me one day.
Compared to the ordinary world I wake up in every morning, the worlds depicted in cartoons, monster movies, and comics have a certain charm to them.
I wished I could have been born into one of those worlds!
Saving a girl who’s been kidnapped by aliens and imprisoned within a huge, transparent pea shell. Repelling a laser-wielding time traveler trying to change history armed only with my courage and wits. Taking out evil spirits and demons with a single incantation. Engaging in psychic battles with espers from a secret organization. Those were the kinds of things I wanted to do!
Wait a minute. Assuming that aliens, etc. were actually to attack, without having any particular special powers, I would have no way to do battle with them. So I did some brainstorming.
A mysterious transfer student suddenly arrives in my class one day. That student turns out to actually be an alien or time traveler or something along those lines with unknown powers. Then, the student happens to be fighting against some evil gang and I just happen to get caught up in that fight. The other student is the main one doing the fighting. I’m just a sidekick. Hey, that sounds cool. Damn, I’m smart.
Or how about this? I’ll just go with suddenly waking up one day with special powers—telepathy or psychokinesis or the like. It turns out there are a bunch of other people with special powers. Naturally, there are organizations recruiting such people. Members of a heroic organization come for me and I end up joining them in their battle against evil espers seeking world domination.
However, reality is rather cruel.
Fact is, no one had ever transferred into my class. I’d never seen a UFO. Going to all the local haunted spots yielded nothing in terms of ghosts and demons. Staring intently at the pencil on my desk for two hours didn’t even move it a micron. And I’d be more likely to burn a hole in the head of the guy sitting in front of me than to read his mind.
You have to admire how well the laws of physics were written while fighting the urge to laugh at yourself. At some point, I stopped being glued to the TV watching specials on UFOs and stories about psychics. They couldn’t possibly exist, though I kind of wished they did. I figured my ability to hold on to my convictions while accepting reality was a sign that I’d matured.
When I graduated from middle school, I also graduated from those childish dreams and became used to the normalcy of the world. Nineteen ninety-nine was my last hope and it wasn’t like anything was going to happen that year anyway. We reached the twenty-first century without humankind making it beyond the moon. It looked unlikely that travel to Alpha Centauri and back within a day would happen in my lifetime.
Having pushed such thoughts to the corner of my mind, I entered high school without a care in the world—
And met Haruhi Suzumiya.