"COPY BOY" My Clone is an Elementary Schooler (13) [I Love! Crafts]

<Summer, Episode 13>

"Little Me" is a mirror reflecting my life.
Watching him often makes me realize things about myself.

On a sweltering afternoon, the little guy was sweating slightly while silently making something inside our secret base.

Ah, summer vacation crafts, huh.

Using disposable chopsticks, rubber bands, and cotton string... I wonder what he's trying to make. He's making a small box out of cardboard and cutting a slit in it. It opens as if splitting a paper cracker in two. I've seen this somewhere before...

...Oh, I've made this too. A crane game.

When you pull the string, the box opens, and when you let go, the power of the rubber band returns it to its original state. It's the exact same shape.
He's doing the same thing spontaneously without me teaching him. Clones are scary.

I understand the concept, but he doesn't seem to be doing it well.
That's right, the string mechanism was difficult. He's struggling, trying this and that. Since I, who made it once, know the correct way, I said,
"Let me borrow it for a second, you just need to change the direction you pull the string. If you make a small loop out of cardboard and thread the string through like this..."
"No, I'll do it myself!"
Ah, that's not it... It's frustrating, but I can't interfere.

This little guy seems to like making things silently.

Not just the secret base, but sometimes a plastic bottle kaleidoscope, sometimes a giant elephant made from an inflated trash bag, a pencil case that opens automatically when you pull a string...

Professor Goat-Beard explained that the little guy has a tendency to lose track of everything else when he gets too absorbed in something.
"Yutaka-san was like that when he was a child, too. Perhaps that's why both of you have bottomless creative talent. Surely.", he commented casually.

Me, when I was a child... huh.

I certainly did like crafts.
Whenever I had time... no, even when I didn't have time, I had an irresistible urge to make things, and I would keep working with my hands without even eating, as if possessed by a spirit. I remember not being able to hear anything and getting scolded by my dad.
When I was making things, I encountered an excitement as if I were creating a world.

But now that I'm an adult, I don't even make paper airplanes anymore, even though I loved crafts so much. Why do we forget things that were so much fun once we become adults?

"Creative talent", huh...

I'm not even job hunting, so what will happen to my future?
What on earth should I do? What is it that I truly like? What kind of job would allow me to experience that soul-shaking excitement like the drawing and crafting I did back then?
Can't I choose what I love as my life's work? Anyway, I don't have any talent. Is it a privilege only for a select few, anyway?

No, who decided that? Am I not setting limits for myself from the start?
Why did I start looking away from what I wanted to do, from the interests that welled up from within me?
Adults live by telling lies. Many lies. But the greatest sin is the lie you tell yourself.

"What do you want to be in the future?"

I asked the little guy.
"Little Me" is a mirror reflecting my life.
Returning to the origin. There might be a hint.

"Hey, what do you want to be?"
"I don't know."

A very cold response, as if he had no interest.
I persist, trying to draw a hint for the future from my past self.

"Don't you have any dreams?"
"I see them when I'm sleeping."
"Not that kind of dream, but a dream like, 'When I grow up, I want to be this.'"
"I have one."
"What is it?"
"Me?"
"Yeah, yeah."

With a beaming smile that looked like it would burst,

"When I grow up, I'm going to have summer vacation forever and ever with Big Brother, the cat, and Grandma. That's my dream."

(To be continued)

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