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[@Silvan Haven][@Crimmy][@Write][@Plank Sinatra][/center]

R-Right...

It's obvious in hindsight, but Gratia really did offer up tough love at best, if you could even call it any form of love. Honestly, it felt more like an order than any form of encouragement. We were supposed to be classmates! Peers! Equals!

Well, maybe not equals, but that was the goal, wasn't it? To become somebody who could call himself equal to her and everyone else?

I guess we weren't exactly peers if you looked at it from that perspective...

I'm in despair! My pursuit of my goal ending up suggesting I should let my classmates order me around has left me in despair!

...

Jokes aside, though...

[b]"I don't intend to. That means I'll have disappointed myself, and I do that bit enough already."[/b]

I'm pretty sure I was trying to sound cool when I said it, but looking back on it now, it probably sounded a little pathetic. If I wanted to shape up, shouldn't I have started with the impression I gave others? It would have been the logical and smart thing to do.

But as it happened, I was neither logical nor smart, and always rushed my way into things by being who I was.

Maybe I was just hopeless on that front, but if so, I'd just have to excel everywhere else.

[b]"My work is definitely cut out for me."[/b] I observed. There wasn't any sense, common sense that even a common guy like myself possessed, in ignoring the grade of climb I was faced with.

But I'd make it there, somehow.