小さな影
かける
とびこむ
small shadow / running / diving in
The smell of a brand new eraser is strange. It smells like ozone. It smells like a mistake that hasn’t happened yet.
I remember my first day of school. It was a Tuesday in September. The light was sharp, cutting long, dark shadows across the gravel of the schoolyard. I stood by the iron gate clutching a backpack that was absurdly large for my shoulders. It felt less like a bag and more like a parachute.
Years later, I walked into a glass tower for my first real job. The air conditioning was humming at a frequency that vibrated in my teeth. The carpet smelled exactly like that eraser.
The feeling in my stomach was identical. A mix of electricity and vertigo.
I was the youngest person in the room. Again.
The Shortcut
It wasn’t a clever plan. It was just a stubborn desire not to be left behind.
Back in the village, time didn’t move in hours; it moved in friendships. All the kids I played with were born a year before me. When September came, they were crossing the river to the “big school,” and I was scheduled to stay in the nursery.
I didn’t care about the curriculum. I just wanted to be where the noise was. So, through some loophole or parental exhaustion, I slipped through the gate a year early.
I didn’t realize it then, but I had voluntarily walked into a room where I was the weakest link.
Running Uphill
On that first day, the physics of the situation settled on me.
I was the shortest. The wooden desk felt like a cliff I had to climb. The blackboard seemed like it belonged to a different time zone.
When you are the smallest, you cannot take up space. You don’t have the luxury of weight. So you have to trade mass for speed.
To keep up with the older kids, I had to run faster. To get the joke, I had to listen harder. While the tall kids could just stand there and be seen, I had to vibrate. I had to be denser.
I felt like I belonged—these were my friends—but I also felt the gap. A quiet, burning engine started in my chest. I wasn’t trying to win; I was just trying to justify my presence.
The Glass Tower
Cut to the office, fifteen years later.
I sat at a conference table that looked like a frozen lake. Everyone else was older. They wore suits that fit. They spoke with the slow, heavy confidence of people who had been doing this for a decade.
I felt that old vertigo. The “kid.”
But I wasn’t afraid. I knew this feeling. I knew the rules of this specific gravity.
When you are young, you have no status. You have no territory to defend. The older colleagues were heavy with experience, moving slowly, protecting what they knew. They were static.
I was light. I was empty.
I knew that if I wanted to stay in the room, I had to do what I did in the schoolyard. I had to run. I treated the gap in experience not as a hole, but as a space to fill with sheer, raw curiosity.
The Eternal Chase
I sat there, listening to the hum of the computers, and felt a strange affection for my six-year-old self.
He just wanted to play. He didn’t know he was setting up a lifetime of chasing. He didn’t know that by surrounding himself with people who were ahead of him, he was forcing his own evolution to speed up.
It’s funny how a small thing—just wanting to hang out with your friends—can bend the shape of your life.
If you are always the youngest, you never get comfortable. You never get to sit back and be the expert. You are always watching. You are always becoming.
I adjusted my chair. It was too big. I took a breath of the recycled air.
I was small. I was new. And I had a lot of running to do.
life 
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