toshizou

What is true love?

I pondered the question on my phone’s screen as I flopped down onto my couch. I was looking at the official website for a TV drama that had started airing this past April. May had arrived, Golden Week had come and gone, and I still hadn’t seen so much as a single episode of the show.

It was supposed to be a bittersweet high school romance sort of deal, I guess. Honestly, the only reason why I’d looked it up in the first place was thanks to an article I’d found that gushed about how it was “the best show on TV,” supposedly. It was also apparently “beyond real and romantic to a tee,” and watching it was like “taking a step back into my own youth.”

Anyway, between that review and the tagline plastered at the top of the show’s website—“What is true love?”—I found my mind wandering to another question.

What does “real” mean, anyway...

I, Yotsuba Hazama, was a very real sixteen-year-old girl who had just started the second year of her equally real high school experience. That said, there was one big point of inconsistency between my real and the so-called real in that show.

“Forget true love—I haven’t even had a brush with fake love,” I idly mumbled to myself. I wasn’t exaggerating either. So far, my time in high school had been as ordinary and mundane as could be.

But then again, let’s look at this from another perspective: If that TV show’s world of romance counted as “real,” then wouldn’t that make my life anything but ordinary? I’d been in high school for a year and change, and I hadn’t experienced so much as the slightest spark of romance. I didn’t have any guy friends, much less a boyfriend! Heck, I wasn’t even on an exchanging-casual-greetings-in-the-morning basis with any boys!

The protagonist of that supposedly beyond-real romance drama was a second-year, just like me, but according to a plot outline I’d read, she

apparently had three hotties fighting for her affection. One of them was even supposed to be an ex she’d dated during her first year! Let me tell you: Cannot relate! At all!

“Not that there are any guys out there who’d want to date a girl like me, anyway,” I muttered, punctuating my self-deprecation with a heavy sigh. That particular reality went back to long before high school. It didn’t matter if I thought back all the way to middle or elementary school either. I’d never had so much as the slightest taste of that bittersweet youthful whatever with a boy. Seriously, not even once.

It’s not like I’m ugly or anything, right? I had two little sisters, and both of them were as cute as could be. I might have been a little biased since they were family and all, sure, but that wasn’t just conjecture on my part; I also knew for a fact that they’d been hit on and asked out plenty of times. I had the same DNA as them, so in theory I shouldn’t have been playing with an appearance-based handicap, right? I’d have liked to believe that, anyway