Obscure

third.

To Cas:

While Kiyoko and Miyako were still in school, Hikari and I had the house to ourselves for the most part. I’d mostly stay in our room, while Hikari spent her days outside in the backyard or rummaging through the kitchen looking for snacks and stuff.

Sometimes we would walk around the neighborhood and talk about stuff that was more or less interesting. She’d put down her phone sometimes and actually pay attention to me, which was like the most amazing thing in the world. But for the most part, she’d either watch TV or text her friends back in Atlanta to complain about our new home. She didn’t like spending time with me as much as our sisters did.

Some of my sisters friends would come over, but since it was close to final exams and stuff, they mostly stayed out at coffee shops doing a “study” group thing or they would just come home and get to working on whatever final project they had due the next day.

So, I had no friends for a while. Which, you know I was fine with. Not that I was a loner or anything. I mean, technically and literally, I was alone, but it wasn’t the kind of loneliness that ate away at my poor, poor soul. It was just that I was happy being alone, and I was satisfied with being alone in the house for the better part of the day.

It gave me time to think, and trust me, I thought a lot.

I used to compare my mom and my dad a lot when I first moved to Mercury. I even created this list of things that they had in common and that made them different, and of course the differences outweighed the similarities by a landslide. One of the more major differences was that my dad made me feel good about myself, and like I said before, my mom made me feel like shit.

I think that in eighth grade and in tenth grade, when I had someone, I became immensely critical of myself. I had this journal, you know, that I would write in whenever my self-inflicted depression got too much for my mind to handle.

 And (I just read over it) there’s some really terrible things that I wrote about myself in there. I mean, things like how I wasn’t good enough for Alex, or my mom, and how I felt like an emotionless void of nothingness that simply took up space and that how I felt like my “friends” hated me, and that everyone hated me because I wasn’t anything. I was just nothing and I mean that was real, and I felt that. I felt like nothing and I felt like other people thought that I was nothing, and when people started treating me like I was nothing, I just lost it. I completely fucking lost it, and I lost myself so much so that I almost decided to make a god-awful decision because of it.

Wow I had a story I was going to tell with this. I got side tracked (sorry), but here’s the story I was originally going to tell.

One night early that summer, the four of us were sitting down in the backyard. Dad was at work, and there was nobody there to tell us it was time to go to sleep.

I remembered that there wasn’t a moon out, but there were lots of stars which was really nice to look at cause we didn’t get to see the sky like that in Atlanta.

My sisters kept trying to pry Hikari and I open. You know to find the reason why Mom acted the way she did towards us. Hikari and I’d planned for something like this to happen, you know when they just charged us with questions.

They mostly asked Hikari cause they thought she’d be more forthcoming with truthful answers than I would because she was younger. Lies. Hikari is a bitch. I mean I love her but my little sis is a bitch. She told them everything that we’d agreed on. She told them stuff like it was because I’d came out, or Hikari had made bad grades or something like that.

Miyako and Kiyoko knew it wasn’t true, or that we weren’t telling the whole truth, but they just gave up and started talking about how excited they were to become seniors next year.

When we finally went to bed that night, Hikari and I curled up together in one of our beds. She kept her back pressed against mine and held my hand with her bony fingers. We didn’t go to sleep when our sisters did either. We stayed up for a while, not talking, but not tired enough to close our eyes.

I asked her why she didn’t just tell them the truth after a while. She didn’t answer for a bit, and I just hugged her a little more tightly than I’d been doing.

“They wouldn’t understand,” she whispered. “Mom isn’t a bad person.”

“She isn’t,” I agreed.

“They think she’s evil. She’s not. She’s just got her issues, Akira. That’s all.”

“I know.”

She turned around to face me. It was too dark for me to see her face, but she steadily inched closer to me, and her heart was beating so fast I was scared it would burst out her little chest and run away. It felt like all those times she would run into my arms when Mom was chasing her around the house. How she trembled and buried her face in my shirts like that would help her. When she talked about Mom, even then when we were away from her, she was still scared.

Yet she kept talking. “Do you think they’ll realize that she's a good person,” she whispered. I shook my head. She huffed softly and nuzzled her head against me. “I want to know if Mom is okay.”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know how. I wanted to know if my mother was okay; I hadn’t talked to her in weeks. But something inside me didn’t want to admit it. Not yet, anyway.

By the time I’d thought of something to say, Hikari was lightly snoring with her hands loosely holding onto mine. I just kissed her forehead and told her that things would turn out well. Though I was probably saying it more for myself than anything.

 ✌ Akira Waters ✌