At first I felt like I was dreaming, falling in and out of hazy consciousness. I could barely move or keep my eyes open. I felt so very tired and sometimes hungry too. At some point I was being gently fed by a nurse when I wondered to myself, "Am I in a hospital?"

I tried to think back, trying to recall something about yesterday or the day before, anything before this haze. I could remember flashes of things. My bedroom, a few manga and anime I was trying to catch up on, and images of the town I lived in. "Shouldn't I have a name?" I thought to myself, unable to remember anything. Not my name, not my age, not what I was doing with my life. Just a lot of facts and notions that seemed out of place without context. "Do I have amnesia? Does this have to do with why I can't move?"

I gave up trying to plow through the mess of my memories and thought about what was occupying my mouth. It was sweet, reminiscent of milk. "Formula? Why is she bottle-feeding me? ... Why am I so small? Oh, my god."

I was a baby. I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be a baby. I was at least not a teenager before ... this ... I think. I could only assume so from a couple decades of television shows titles flickering through my mind. "What is this? Why is this happening?"

Before I could get over the shock, a man's voice spoke from outside my vision. "Is that Japanese?" And then the female nurse stopped feeding me and put me down. The two spoke, the woman becoming more and more upset as they continued. I tried to turn my head. There were other shallow beds. A nursery? I could barely see the two grownups talking. The argument had turned into yelling by the time more men arrived, all dressed the same as the first man. One of them lifted me and another baby and carried us out of the room, bundled in blankets. After some kind of unintelligible murmuring to us, the next thing I knew was that we were traveling across rooftops, the wind biting my face.

Only when we reached the edge of town did the man carrying us turn back. I could see a cliff carved with giant faces and, far beyond that, a massive creature rampaging in the distance. Before I could even think "That mountain looks familiar," the man carrying the two of us continued on, not stopping until we'd reached some kind of concentration camp. A throng of people waited around while more people in that green uniform stood guard.

I was taken to a makeshift nursery in the woods. It was little more than stumps with padding but it wasn't like I could complain. More people trickled into the area until probably the whole town was here. We were probably one of the last groups who made it here. The green army men seemed to be taking a headcount. "This is boring," I thought to myself. Sure we were probably being evacuated because of a giant monster attacking the city but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I missed that bottle of formula.

I laid back and stared at the sky. It was so dark, like all the stars had been eaten and only blackness remained. I imagined I could feel the presence of the towering, burning monster. I imagined something poisonous and deadly and terrifying was just beyond the treeline of the clearing. It was like I could feel it in my bones and in my breathing and every cell in my body, sparking and flaring. My head hurt so badly, a migraine exploding in my brain. I instinctively cried, finally joining the other crying babies and screaming people.

The sky flashed as if glass suddenly came into existence above us and it didn't feel quite so scary anymore. And that was the last thing I remembered as I passed out, exhausted in a tiny, frail body.

Much later, I opened my eyes slowly. Barely able to tilt my head, I could see a few stragglers in the mostly deserted clearing. "I guess it's over. Man, I must be pretty young if I have this much trouble moving." Tables that once held other babes were being folded away. Idly wondering where the other children had gone without me, I then started to wonder why I was here in the first place. Had I died? Is this a dream? It couldn't be a dream. It was too real.

Soon, a woman came by and looked down at me. She spoke, sounding vaguely Japanese. If I had to guess, it probably meant something along the lines of 'What a poor thing, all alone. I wonder where its parents are.' The best I could do was gurgle to her. And then she picked me up.

The only thing I would ever remember about her was the metal headband she wore, emblazoned with the Konoha leaf. I couldn't look away from it, as if I could disintegrate it by staring hard enough with my baby eyes. I stayed silent for the rest of our short trip as the kunoichi took me to the orphanage.