My life?
At that time, everything was normal.
I had no issues, I was just a typical boy like everyone else, and I regularly attended one of the schools in Kyoto, my old city.
My days were peacefully passing one after another. Back then, my only worry was about passing the math test, which I was terribly bad at. Everything changed in that final year of middle school. One day, after finishing physical education class, I was in the locker room with my classmates, changing for the next period, when I started feeling strange.
That discomfort continued for most of the day until my sight began to give me trouble. I started to struggle to focus on the landscape and the people around me. Shortly after, my head began to spin and I collapsed to the ground, losing consciousness. When I woke up, I found myself in a hospital room, and next to the bed, I saw my parents.
They told me that I had fainted at school and did not regain consciousness, so they had called an ambulance to take me straight to the hospital.
The doctors said that there was nothing wrong with me.
I underwent some examinations there, but the tests did not reveal any issues. They reduced everything to a simple case of accumulated stress and told me I needed to rest a bit. So I did.
Obviously, this whole story worried me a lot. When it came to my health, I always tended to magnify the issue, thinking the worst and proving to be quite a scaredy-cat. I think this irrational fear could be traced back to my childhood. I remember when I was little, my uncle, my father's brother, died young. He was about to get married soon and his death came suddenly. He had nothing wrong with him health-wise, yet he died suddenly from an ailment.
From that moment on, I started to have these thoughts more and more. Every time I felt unwell, even if it was just a slight headache, I started thinking about more "serious" things. It sounds stupid when I put it like this, but it's stronger than me. I was, and still am, constantly afraid of death. But I'm not talking about the death of an old man, who has already given his all in his life and can now leave this world without regrets. I'm afraid of leaving this world before I can feel fulfilled... leaving before I can see what I want to see or do what I want to do.
These were, and still are, the problems and worries that torment me.
After being told by the doctor that I just needed to relax, I felt better, even though it didn't take long for my fears to become a reality.
One of those rest days, however, while I was descending the stairs connecting the upstairs bedrooms to the ground floor, I had that feeling of loss of balance again and fell down the stairs.
My head started to hurt terribly, and I began to vomit all the food I had eaten up to that point. I was writhing in pain and my parents rushed me back to the hospital. They ran several tests on me and finally, the truth was revealed.
After conducting a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of my head and examining the prints, the doctor saw it.
My cancer.
A small black spot on my brain that would lead me to agony.
The check-ups increased, becoming almost a daily routine. Sometimes the doctors wouldn't even let me return home because they had to keep me under observation and to prevent seizures they administered medications that I still take today.
I started attending school less and less. Sometimes I would return after a few weeks and my classmates, driven by curiosity, would ask me why I had been absent. I didn't tell anyone what was happening to me, and even if I had, the reality wouldn't have changed, so I preferred to keep to myself.
In this way, I slowly began to distance myself from what could be a normal life. My normality had become the hospital; in fact, I spent most of my final year of middle school there. I hardly ever returned to school. I savored the thrill of being trapped, enclosed within the four white walls of my room. Since my family couldn't always be in the hospital with me, I thought that those days would all be the same, but as it happened, I met a girl my age who, like me, was admitted there. Unlike me, she lived each day with a smile on her face. Her company didn't last long... but from her, I learned something that I still try to use to move forward.
I studied on my own. My parents would go to the teachers, who had been informed of the situation, to get the study material.
My parents told me not to strain myself too much, even though for me it wasn't a burden at all. Doing homework and studying were the only things I had managed to bring with me from the normal life that had been taken away from me. At the end of middle school, I couldn't even say goodbye to my classmates.
When high school started, I began therapy to contain the cancer and started taking medications, which over time increased more and more. It was not a lasting solution, but it helped me until not long ago. Those medications allowed me not to be twenty-four hours a day in a hospital room. I'm not sure about their exact effects, but in some way, they helped.
All this affected not only me, but also my family.
My mother was panicked about my uncertain future. In my presence, she seemed like an indestructible rock, but as soon as she found a moment alone with my father, she would vent her sorrow by crying. I know because I heard them once.
My sister, when she found out everything, struggled to look me in the eye, otherwise she would involuntarily start crying. When she came to visit me at the hospital, she would only say, "I'm sorry" or "Forgive me". She must have felt really helpless.
My father was, among the three of us, the most emotionally devastated. He constantly had to try not to break down in order to support me, my mother, and my sister.
Now, I find myself, once again, in a hospital room, telling my story to a girl who has nothing to do with all this. A girl with whom I managed to establish a relationship, and who now, like my family, feels useless and sad about my situation.
For this reason, when I moved to this new city, I enrolled in school to feel like a normal person, but at the same time, I made the decision to stay alone. Ironically, I met a girl who wanted to throw her life away by committing suicide. That's why I started to argue with her. It bothered me. She had the chance to move forward, while for me, everything remained a big question mark.
The fact that we live side by side, going to school together, are all coincidences. I didn't want to get close to her, my intention was just to help her. I wanted her to understand how fortunate she was, unlike me. When I heard her story, I was stunned. If I had held on until then, it was only thanks to the warmth of my family and what I had learned from that friend in the hospital. She, unlike me, was truly strong, so it came naturally to get even closer to her, until she became, in my chaotic and uncertain life, the glimpse of normality that I needed.
Seeing her look as I told her about my story and how I ended up, felt like a stab. Her eyes went out and opened in disbelief, as if she were watching a dramatic movie. Those big honey-brown eyes penetrated mine and read into me, never once looking away until the end of the story. I didn't want her to feel pity, I just wanted us to remain as we had always been. If she had changed her behavior towards me or if she had treated me in a strange way, it would have forcefully reminded me of my reality.