The Stars are so Cliché

Tadashi

He smiled, snuggled up in his bed. Along his ceiling was the projection of hundreds of stars and one crescent moon. He spent every night before going to bed tracing the stars with his eyes and making up his own constellations. Tadashi was 6 and he was happy. Everything was as it should be. He was a happy kid wrapped up in fluffy blankets with his night lamp lighting up the ceiling in stars from his nightstand.

By the time Tadashi had turned ten, nothing was as it used to be. He stared up at the ceiling of the small motel room, the same stars and moon dancing among the cracks and stains as they used to when he was younger. The blanket wrapped around him was as thin as the ones they draped over his mom in the hospital. She wasn't in the hospital anymore, she frequented there, but at this time she was not hospital bed bound. Tadashi was alone in the motel room. His mom left every night to work and it was a crapshoot if she'd make it home or if Tadashi would get a call from a hospital that Tadashi would then have to hop on a train to get to. The stars and moon remained though, helping his fear throughout the lonely nights.

When Tadashi was twelve, his mother got a long term boyfriend. Tadashi never asked his name and he never asked Tadashi his. Tadashi's mom never formally introduced them. He was around a lot though. They lived in his apartment where at least he saw his mom more but she had stopped acknowledging him after a while. Tadashi missed his mom. He whispered that to the stars and moon projected on the living room ceiling where he slept on the pullout sofa every night. Even after his mom and her boyfriend broke up and they were kicked out of his apartment, his mom said nothing to Tadashi. She just grabbed her own things and moved out. Tadashi had quickly and sloppily packed all of his things and ran after her. She didn't slow down much for him.

On Tadashi's fourteenth birthday, he realized something. Sitting by himself in front of a can of soda he had bought himself from the corner store for his birthday he realized his mom got a lot of attention and he got none. Tadashi decided the only way he would be deserving of attention is if he did what his mom did. He began dressing like her, acting out at people who pissed him off like her, talking to men the way she talks to men, anything to get eyes on him. Anything to make him feel whole.

With his new look of mostly black and fishnets and brand new attitude his first compliments came in the form of yells and pushes from kids in the neighborhood. They laughed at him, threw slurs at him, they pushed him to the ground and threw his bag full of nothing but his mom's makeup at him. Tadashi looked up at the four boys towering over him laughing and pointing. All Tadashi could do was blush.

Tadashi just wanted to be stared at like the stars and moon from his nightlight that decorated his empty ceiling.

The nightlight he had forgotten at his mom's ex boyfriend's apartment when he was thirteen.

Tadashi was a Yamaguchi, his mother's boy till the very end.