Aoi awoke the first morning of summer with a fervent desire to cancel her plans with Damian.
The air was hot, and thick with cricket-song. Every breath she took was heavier than the last. The seasons had passed; her parents were still fighting, though.
She rose to her feet and found that her legs felt like lead.
Aoi could not wait for the day to be over, even though it had only just begun.
The young woman blinked. She took her pills. Took a piss. Took another one of those drinks that kept her alive, which the people around her kept on calling fake food, and this annoyed her very much. If it is enough to feed me, she thought, then, what right do you have to say on whether or not it is real? Would you prefer I swallow nothing and starve instead?—despite her anger, she would stay silent on the matter. A world in which they could not eat was unimaginable to the regular citizen of this town. The young woman had understood this very well from day one. After all, she had once been one of them, too.
Her doctors had mentioned they would attempt to add more doses and different pills next week; this strange testing period, as the young woman would come to consider it, had been going on for quite some time now—at least, her entourage seemed to think so.
Aoi does not find six months to be long, however, when she has already gone through the experience of waiting for more than ten years to be diagnosed. That isn’t to say she has any hopes of getting better—the medicine is merely a temporary fix to a problem her local hospital still cannot solve.
Someone turns the TV on in the living room. Aoi goes back into the bathroom again to brush her teeth with water, and only that. The shirt she wore today gave her pins and needles, itches she could not scratch, across her arms. Her parents have changed their laundry detergent; the one they’d been using is out of stock in their local convenience store, it will only be back next week, and Aoi does not know how to break it to them, that they will have to buy another one, and maybe another after that with the little money they have, to keep Aoi’s reactions at bay.
Aoi decides she will hide the redness of her skin for the day; she keeps her fingers crossed, and hopes, that the itches will not get worse.
Soon, her home’s front door is slammed shut. The television does not emit another sound. Aoi thinks this is a joke—a mean spirited farce from the universe, who woke up one day and suddenly decided to taunt her. Until this day, she still finds this theory to be a plausible cause—after all, she had just turned eight: she was perfectly healthy, and was stuffing her face with a massive rainbow cake. Then, she took a nap, and her life took a detour it never recovered from when she awoke with stomach cramps that she could only describe as the worst of the worst.
Her parents dragged her to the hospital. She was in tears. They did not know what was wrong with her. A doctor sent her back when it stopped and called it a stomach bug.
But of course, that would have been much too simple. The young woman wishes it could have been a microbe.
She pushes the thought away. She grabs her backpack, and doesn’t bother saying goodbye to an empty house that reminds her of how much her parents must work in order to merely keep her alive.
Barely anyone recognizes her condition; the ones who do certainly aren’t the people responsible for whether she will have permission to obtain a disability pension. Aoi hates this. She wishes she could disappear, and then, she wishes she had the guts to wish on her demise for real.
In truth, the young woman does not want to leave in the slightest. She definitely wants to stay alive. Here. Breathing, and able to hear the sounds of water running down her rooftop when it rains. The laughter of her peers. The postman that curses every morning when he messes up and puts the mail in the wrong, little steel box.
And yes, here she is again, observing her current dilemma—wanting to go on that trip with Damian, when she had managed to finally talk herself out of it this morning.
Perhaps, Aoi wonders, if she will be able to, once she gets her new set of pills? It would be nothing short of a miracle for a case as severe as hers—still, she wants to believe.
*
Aoi makes it to her high school twenty minutes before the bell rings.
Her heart is pounding. She spots a bicycle that’s rested up against the building’s brick wall. Its front basket holds a batch of various, blooming potted flowers. The sight is a lovely one in her eyes—that is, until she gets a whiff of their scent, and her throat tightens, and her gaze fills with tears.
To think that her situation would be worse without her current medication, makes Aoi want to stop thinking overall. She turns away from the bicycle, ignores her anxious nerves, then heads straight for the staircase that leads to the rooftop, with a quiet sigh.
The holidays begin in less than four days. Not seeing this place for weeks will undoubtedly make the young woman anxious, for Aoi has truly started to believe coming up here creates a difference in her life.
Still, she is very much aware that this is likely her condition talking; it is not, after all, what one could consider a silent syndrome.
As Aoi turns the handle that separates her from the rooftop, she huffs with relief, upon noticing that it is unlocked.
The young woman pauses before fully opening the door, however.
She almost expects to see Damian waiting on the other side. Yet, when she finally steps through the entrance, there isn’t a soul to be found, standing atop the hard concrete ground. It is quiet. Only the clouds are here to keep her company.
Aoi takes a seat on the roof’s ledge, as she has done every other time of the week, for the past two years. She grabs her food. Drinks it. Puts it back inside her water bottle. Pretends it isn’t there when she opens her bag in class, two periods later, to grab a notebook and her voice recorder.
The girls seated next to Aoi throw irritated looks her way. Aoi has told everyone she has a learning disability to explain her need for these special tools. It is not true, and the young woman considers her lies to be of the problematic, bad, kind, and not a fib that a good person would tell.
But, Aoi is not trying to be a good person.
She merely seeks to be a less-sick-person. And why tell people who already hate her as it is, she thinks, that they could mess her up simply by putting a hint of orange juice in her water bottle? It sounded like a dangerous idea. Especially after they shredded her dictated notes, threw them in Aoi’s face, called her a cheater for getting first place in an exam, then told her she could print them out again anyway. “You have them saved on your computer, right? It’s no big deal for you. You can handle it.”
Thankfully, they’d walked out without laying a hand on her that time.
It was definitely quite complicated for them to get away with hitting her. Aoi bruised easily. She had hated this aspect of herself, right up until the day she understood it could be an asset in the right situations. Then, it was her bullies who took over the task of despising Aoi’s skin in her stead.
To Aoi’s relief, they did not doubt one second, why it was that barely a pinch could leave marks on her for extended periods of time.
Hours filled with lectures, and whispered inside jokes about the cafeteria’s latest dessert that Aoi does not understand, pass.
The young woman is excused before her last class ends.
In front of the school await her parents in the second-hand car they bought three years ago. They usher Aoi into the vehicle, and tell her everything is going to be okay.
The three of them know that is a lie.
Their drive to the hospital is a silent one. The hematologist Aoi has been seeing seems just about ready to give up on her case as he hands her yet another prescription. “Give them a try and tell me how it goes as always, yes?” he says.
She nods.
She thanks him, even though she is saddened that he does not tell her, Good news, we found a way to fix you.
The waiting room is filled with people in wheelchairs and crutches. Sickly skin and bruises. She can tell that some of them are staring, and likely wondering what is wrong with her. Aside from being underweight, Aoi does not appear any less different than a single one of her peers. This makes her feel awkward. Like she does not belong in this ward, even though the pain in her bones tells her otherwise.
Her parents get up and join her quickly. “That’s it?” her father asks.
To which Aoi merely shrugs, then says, “What else can they do?” And thinks, They have tried every test, every diet, the only task left to do is to make me swallow things and pray that it works. Aoi admits, that through this experience, she has come to realize modern medicine does wonders, but it is still very far off from being flawless in certain aspects. Especially when one suffers from uncommon afflictions. Then, it becomes a guessing game. And what a scary game that is, she does her best to ignore this thought.
It still manages to affect her, however.
As the three of them stop by the hospital’s pharmacy to fetch her new medication, Aoi tries to take her mind off of this whole ordeal by thinking of how she will break the news to Damian that he will be travelling alone this summer.
It’s a bad call though. Her musings stress her out. Because she does still want to go. But she cannot. At least, she does not think she can, or should. And every worry, every consideration, for this potential event stirs quite the bit of noise in her mind.
Her parents pay for her new pills. When they turn around to check on Aoi, the young woman is bent over and crippled in pain, with both her hands placed over her lower abdomen. “Sorry,” she wheezes the word, before she excuses herself, then runs off to the bathroom.
Once again, she regrets thinking.
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