The Tale of Raskaya: reincarnated into an unknown world

1. Dying by Drowning

Yumi was sinking deeper and deeper as she was thinking about what had gone wrong. How did it end up this way?

...

She lived a peaceful life, all alone though. Yumi moved away from her parents many years ago already and was a working woman for quite a while. Despite that being what she was, she always tried to escape reality, telling herself that she was still just the girl she once was.
The reason for this was that she hated to be a woman. The problem wasn't that she felt like being a man, she didn't want to be that either...
It was the body that just couldn't cooperate to simply grow in only the height but also had to develop in the areas that defined the female body.

She hated it.

She hated how history viewed women, she hated how she felt to be underestimated because she was a woman, she hated the feeling that a man was bound to be superior in strength, she hated how she couldn't do what she wanted and never even in her dreams be able to catch a bit of her fantasies and wishes for herself.
And Yumi traced all those things she had to miss out on in life back to the fact that she was a woman.
Most of the reason for that was probably the way she grew up. Her parents raised her to keep her distance from boys and not to make friends with them. Although she later had truly good female friends it was probably already to late for that. In her mind girls were hateful, gossiping and groundlessly mean creatures, fighting for no reason at all as well as hating each other and in general being way too complicated to ge along with.
The boys just seemed so simple. (They still acted like total idiots as kids of course) It wasn't that they seemed stupid but while the girls were always split in groups seemingly despising everyone outside of the own fraction (just exaggerating), the boys on the other hand were always one large group. Sure they had their own fights and beat the crap out of each other but afterwards they were always friends again.
So many times had she thought that everything could be so much easier if she could simply be a part of them.

But she was a girl.

The puberty in Yumi's teenage years only made things worse. The body started to change and the period was a pain. She felt the pressure from how her parents raised her and felt that never to much could be visible through her clothes whether it was the shape or anything beneath the outer layer of clothes. Especially PE was torture for her as all the games they played required quick and other movements that in general led to violations of the previously named criteria. She loved to move her body freely and exercise despite a lazy period between late childhood and being a teen.
Feeling as if unable to move for the rest of her life made her extremely frustrated.

The picture of the woman in society that for some reason developed in her mind did not help either. They were always shown to be weak, seemingly in the constant danger of being raped, they at some point fell either foolishly in love with some man who hated and abused them, verbally as well as physically, or some other strong man came and took a liking to them. This of course meant that the woman no longer had a say in it and had to either fall madly in love with him as well and be constantly protected by him from the oh so dangerous world or be taken by him forcefully.
No matter the process, a woman had to unconditionally get married, at best give birth to a son, cook & etc. raise the child and turn it into a respectable human being and now in modern times even go back to work seemingly immediately after giving birth.
In the worst case she would be dumped in the end because the man wasn't interested in her anymore (because she wasn't attractive enough anymore or whatever reason) and no matter what actually happened in her life,

It would always be the woman's fault and no one else's.

Yumi would be able to list more and more complaints about being a woman until the end of eternity, but it would be best to stop before it gets too much.

In short: it seemed to Yumi as if the only advantages to being female were that she thought women to be generally more beautiful than men, and the fact that if she already was a woman she could not be a man as well.

As you can guess she did not really have a much better opinion of men either...

But all of that aside this doesn't connect to the story at this point.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Three hours earlier:

Yumi was finished with her work for the day and shut down the computer. She packed her bag and gave a last goddbye to her other late working colleagues. She left with a yawn thinking about what to eat at home. She took the tram for her way home which was rather empty and could be explained with the time she got off of work. After a few stops Yumi walked the rest of the way home. She ate her leftovers from the prior day and went to bed, tired because of her lack of sleep. She changed and lied down on her cold but comfortable bed and expected to fall asleep immediately. Instead she rolled around for an hour before deciding that she needed to distract her mind from work before actually being able to sleep.

Even though it was in the middle of the night Yumi drove to the coast. She walked for a bit and eventually sat down at a high cliff. She sat there for a long time, getting sleepier and sleepier by the minute. As she sat there she started to think about how empty her life was.

Mostly concerned with her life-consuming work, she slowly drifted apart from her school friends. All of her friends had been very important to her and every time Yumi became sad, she had to think of her childhood friends. Losing contact with them had left a deep scar of grief in her heart which always had to kick her further down into the abyss of depression at times like this.

Small tears tickled down her cheeks as she slowly faded away into slumber.

Yumi was forcefully woken up by the strong wind that started blowing when she was asleep. She wanted to get up noticing the scourging waves in the sea below her. The wind started to blow more aggressively and she realised with horror that the weather forecast had predicted a heavy storm for this cost region as she was blown off her feet, and standing too close to the edge of the cliff

Yumi fell into the cold and furious sea.

Why?! How could I be so stupid? I knew that there was supposed to be a heavy storm here tonight! How could I forget about this and even fall asleep directly at the edge of the sea? Well there wasn't really anything left of my so called life anymore other than work anyway...,
Yumi thought as she fell down the scarily high cliff.

She hit the water back first and the paralyzing pain spread through her body as she started sinking, while the waves were playing with her violently, not letting her have even the slightest chance of escaping to save her life.

But still, that I couldn't even tell my friends and family goodbye...
When will they even notice that I'm gone?
I have so little contact to anyone apart from my colleagues, and in that case only for work related purposes...
Will anyone attend my funeral?
Will there even be one for me?
Will they even find my corpse? Will it already have started to rot when they find it?
Probably...

Yumi was struggling to breathe but was only able to gulp down more water as she drifted further and further away from the water surface...

Her body grew colder by the second due to the surrounding cold water and the life which slowly but surely stared to leave her body.

Drowning was terrifying.
It made you feel as if you were all alone in the world and no one would ever come to save you.
The feeling as the water started to infiltrate her lungs felt torturing and indescribably painful.
It was an experience only known to those who suffered and died from it.

Yumi's soul left her body and reappeared in an endless darkness. In this place she couldn't feel and couldn't sense as the memories from her life slowly started to fade into nothingness.