Chapter 2: Florence Nightingale (Part 2)

I barely got the door shut before I dropped the bag of discount rice on the table. As usual, the apartment greeted me with silence, a fact that I've been experiencing for the last six years.

"I'm home," I greeted the empty apartment.

My legs were already shaking, and I needed to hobble over the door frames just to fumble out of my shoes. I stripped off the damp school uniform and draped it over the single rusted hook in the wall and changed into my loungewear. I hope that the night breeze will dry it by morning.

Leaning on the bathroom sink, I splashed water onto my face. The broken mirror in front was brutally honest. It showed my crimson hair drooping like damp string; my hazel eyes dull and tired; and skin a shade paler than it should be.

"All because you had to play the hero," I muttered to myself.

When I walked out the bathroom, the room tilted, but I could see it: Everything in the apartment was gray or empty.

I had no television, no extra chairs and no exemplary furniture, just the things I need to keep being functional and the requirements to make this day a yesterday.

On the doorway, there is only one pair of rubber shoes. Look at the 'living room' and there's a bare kotatsu. Beside it, a broken fan. At the 'bedroom', a rotting futon. In the 'kitchen', a rusting fridge humming like it was trying to apologize for being almost empty.

All of it mercilessly cramped into a 6 tatami mat room.

Mustering up the last ounces of strength I had, I heated lukewarm water, washed my cooking utensils, rinsed the sink and sorted the laundry I'll be dropping on a laundromat.

Throughout the chores I did, my body was burning with an upcoming cold, or worse yet, a high fever.

But this needs to be done. I kept moving like a guy on autopilot, because this routine ensured my survival.

“I've been in so much worse before, it will pass.” I muttered before taking in the sleeping pills I bought earlier.

I brought the bowl of lukewarm water beside my futon and started wiping the cold—which didn’t help.

That prompted me to get a thorough check so I fumbled for the thermometer in the dusty medicine cabinet—a relic from when my parents still lived here, its contents mostly expired. The mercury climbed slowly, stubbornly, to an alarming number.

39.6 degrees.

I'm a walking fireball.

I sighed, and threw it back where it came from.

It's my fault though—I relied heavily on ready to eat meals and canned goods because they're cheap, and now my immune system came out short on budget.

As if I have a choice. It's not like healthy foods like fruits and vegetables come with a low price tag. The situation goes like this—eat a set of healthy meals, then get hungry the rest of the day.

Now, I’ll ask the question society is uncomfortable with:

Is being healthy economical?

I guess not.

Life in the upper class is defined by choices, below it, only sacrifices. It’s safe to say that only rich people can afford to be healthy, and the poor will only end up in the struggle pit.

Time is money and health is time, they said. A lower-income worker for example, often holds multiple jobs or works long hours with no sick leave. Being healthy requires time—time to cook, time to exercise, time to sleep, time for preventative check-ups. I kind of follow the way they are thinking, where every hour spent on health is an hour not spent earning money. Sickness is, ironically, the only break we can sometimes afford, though its cost is devastating.

And there's no escaping that unfair cycle.

Fifteen minutes passed and the heat on my forehead was only growing worse. I decided to sink to my futon to cool down. I curled in it, pulled the ragged blanket over my shoulders, and shut my eyes against the dead grey ceiling above.

But the comfort I'm searching for didn’t come.

When I closed my eyes, the pictures already long hidden stood clear. There came the memories.

A tender mother's hand caressing my youthful face, her warm fingertips tracing the shape of my cheek. She also hummed a lullaby about the cold mountains at Aomori, and the snow woman residing in it.

“If a lady of pale silk asks you to follow, if she looks at you with eyes of endless winter, you must run,” she would sing, smoothing my hair. I was also told not to stare at her beauty, or she will breathe into you and make you one of her frozen flowers.

By the time I had calmed down, there would be the scent of miso drifting in the kitchen, and the shitty taste of liquid paracetamol that urged me to throw up rather than heal.

A reassuring glance from a father after a fever dream. ‘Breathe slowly,’ he always said in that cold voice, to take control and stop crying, because everything will be alright after I sleep.

Did it, though? I wouldn’t be in this situation where I’m halfway to rotting to death if everything went according to my expectations.

Expectations of a life that belonged to someone smaller, someone softer, someone who expected the world to hold him without letting go.

The memories played out like a broken cassette. Half formed, out of focus, voices nearly taken by oblivion.

I knew the meaning of this. Seeing and remembering them meant I am vulnerable. I'm letting myself fall into the transgression of withered emotions.

I'm not putting the mask on well, to put it simply.

So maybe, releasing everything would click it back to place.

“You left.”

It was just a whisper, but might as well be a declaration of war against my own thoughts. My hand clenched the edge of the futon.

“Why?”

Was I a burden?

Was I too much?

Not enough?

I earned stars in my kindergarten.

I graduated primary school with honors.

I entered middle school with high notes.

I did everything right. I did everything that a child could do to be worthy of being stood and cared for.

Then the ones who were supposed to stay, left. As if I was the one who broke the promise of secrecy and they were the snow woman that melted into a white mist, vanishing through the chimney, never to be seen again.

Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they look back? Why didn’t they decide I was worth the trouble of loving?

I was too young to understand comfort back then. And now, I'm too old to pretend it never mattered.

Heck, I didn't even ask to be born. I have suffered enough to crush an average teenager’s spirit, but I never thought of ending it all.

Because I'm not like them. I'm not a coward who escapes when something becomes too inconvenient. I’m not someone who slips away in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. I’m not someone who leaves a child behind and calls it salvation.

I braved through it all, even though I'm stretched thin and my world could tear apart at any moment.

"..."

I felt a bead of sweat falling.

No. In a room this cold, it was impossible.

It was tears.

Then came another.

Until it flooded way out of my control. I let them, I was too tired to wipe them away.

My frame buckled from the shivers of the cold and the shudder of my quiet sobs.

Kindness...what a stupid thing to have. What a useless, flimsy little instinct that had done nothing but carve me hollow.

“I help people...my first instinct was to always…help.”

I helped the grandmother at the pharmacy today, paid for her dropped medicine in exchange for mine, thanked the cashier who didn’t even look at me and apologized for an inconvenience I didn't even do.

I offered an umbrella to someone who wouldn’t even remember my name, smiled at classmates and customers who talk about me like I’m invisible, pretended I’m fine so no one has to feel uncomfortable about the truth.

And what do I get in return? Soaked in the rain? Hunger? Hearing the fading footsteps of the people I needed leaving?

People speak of kindness like it’s a virtue, a ray of light in darkness and a mark of goodness. But when you strip away the pretty language, what is kindness really?

I can't define, and I don't understand at all. Why am I still being kind? Is it because I'm a good person? Or is it because I’m scared?

Scared that if I stop being one, I’ll turn into the same people who abandoned me? Scared that if I show anger, I’ll be misunderstood? Scared that if I stop giving, there’ll be nothing left of me worth keeping?

It's so easy to be a bad person, but why can't I?

I never wanted to be like them so I keep giving, and giving and giving because I thought someone would notice how it's hard it is to give when you have nothing, and how it's easy to return it and truly mean it.

My parents left in silence. And the world…the world didn’t care that a child kept waiting by the door with shoes too small and hope inside him too big.

I curled in tighter, pulling the futon over my head as the tears refused to stop.

“I didn’t ask to be good,” I whispered. “I didn’t ask to be selfless. I didn’t ask to be strong. I just didn’t want to be left again.”

The futon muffled my sobs—small, pathetic sounds that I would deny to the grave if anyone ever heard them.

Of course I am hurt. I only thought that I wasn't because I was supposed to be strong. Survival demanded strength, even if the strength was counterfeit and the mask barely held together with trembling threads.

And when met with silence, the mask melts in the form of merciless rain from my eyes.

I wasn’t crying because I was weak. I wasn’t crying because of the fever. I wasn’t crying because the room was cold.

I was crying because kindness wasn’t something I chose. It was something I clung to desperately…because it was the only thing my parents didn’t take with them when they walked out into the rain.

“I hate this,” I breathed out. “I hate feeling like this. I hate being like this.”

And yet…even knowing all that…even hurting like this…I still wish for something.

“I wish…”

The word caught in my throat.

“I wish someone would be kind to me…even once.”

And the dam walls were split open, spilling all the things buried inside of me, all the feelings locked up deep within, the regret, the fear, the loneliness.

Everything.

All of it.

There wasn’t enough space for it all to fit inside, nor energy to contain it.

For the first time, I mourned not just from the sadness of their abandonment, but the darkest days I endured after they left. The lonely meals eaten beside a humming refrigerator. The birthdays with no candles, with no voices singing my name.

At that age, I was supposed to be solving elementary math problems, and not the finances of adults. I was supposed to swim in the sea with my family, not in deep waters with loan sharks.

I lamented the toys I should've bought, the places I could've gone to, the family bondings I could've relished, and the boy I could've been if I was raised by two loving parents.

Nietzsche said that in every real man, a child is hidden that wants to play. But neither I had both. I had no permission—and I had to sign adulthood’s contract before understanding what freedom meant.

My youth was stolen away, leaving me in a limbo of my inner childish desires and the forced fulfillment of a role in society I was never ready for.

“Sleeping…would fix it up,” I whispered, to no one.

It was a small, fragile yearning, left floating in the quiet of my worn-out apartment, with only the rain to hear it.

And as if it was a cue, the exhaustion kicked in, dragging me to a darkness that seemed like a place of comfort rather than a place of agony.