My life?

Back then, everything was normal. I had nothing wrong with me; I was a simple kid like everyone else, regularly attending one of the schools in Kyoto, my old city.

The days passed serenely, one after another. Back then, my only concern was passing the math test, which I was terrible at.

Everything changed in that last 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 feeling of discomfort continued for most of the day until my vision started giving me problems. I began to not be able to focus on the scenery and the people around me. Shortly after, my head started spinning, and I fell to the ground, losing consciousness. When I woke up, I found myself in a hospital room, and next to the bed, I found my parents. They told me I had fainted at school and wasn't regaining consciousness, so they had called an ambulance to take me to the hospital immediately.

The doctors said I had nothing wrong.

I had some tests done there, but no problems showed up in the analyses. They reduced it all to a simple case of accumulated stress and told me I should rest a bit. So I did.

Of course, this whole story worried me a lot. When it came to my health, I always tended to blow things out of proportion, thinking the worst and proving to be a big scaredy-cat. I think this irrational fear stemmed from my childhood. I remember that when I was little, my uncle—my father's brother—died young. He was about to get married, and his death happened suddenly. He had nothing wrong with his health, but he died anyway from a sudden illness.

From that moment on, I started having these thoughts more and more. Every time I felt unwell, even if I only had a slight headache, I started thinking about "heavier" things. It sounds stupid when put like that, but it's something stronger than me. I had and still have a constant fear of death. But I'm not talking about the death of an old man who has already given everything in his life and can now leave this world without regrets; I'm afraid of leaving this world before I can feel fulfilled... of leaving it before I can see what I want to see or do what I want to do.

These were the problems and worries that gripped me and still grip me today.

Having heard from the doctor that I just needed to relax, I felt better, even though it wasn't long before my fears became reality.

During one of those days of rest, however, while I was going down the stairs connecting the upstairs bedrooms to the ground floor, I had that feeling of losing my balance again and fell down the stairs.

My head started hurting terribly, and I started vomiting all the food I had eaten up to that point. I writhed in pain, and my parents rushed me back to the hospital. They ran various tests, and in the end, the truth came out.

After having an MRI of my head and printing the scans, 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 go home because they had to keep me under observation, and to prevent me from having crises, they administered medications that I still take today.

I started attending school less and less. Sometimes I would go back 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 of things wouldn't have changed, so I preferred to withdraw into myself.

In this way, I slowly began to distance myself from what could have been a normal life. By now, my normalcy had become the hospital; in fact, I spent my last year of middle school mainly there. I hardly ever went back to school. I tasted the thrill of being locked in a cage, between the four white walls of my room. Since my family couldn't always stay in the hospital with me, I thought those days would all be the same, but fate would have it that I met a girl my age who, like me, was hospitalized there. Unlike me, she lived every 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 keep going.

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 overexert myself, 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 from me. At the end of middle school, I couldn't even say goodbye to my classmates.

When I started high school, I began therapy to contain the cancer and started taking medication, which increased over time. It wasn't a long-term solution, but it helped me until not too long ago. Those medicines allowed me not to stay in a hospital room twenty-four hours a day. I don't know their exact effects, but somehow they helped.

All this affected not only me but also my family.

My mother 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 eyes, otherwise she would involuntarily start crying. When she came to visit me in the hospital, she did nothing but say, "I'm sorry" or "Forgive me." She must have felt truly powerless.

My father was, among the three, the most emotionally destroyed. He constantly had to try not to break down to support me, my mother, and my sister.

Now I find myself, for the umpteenth time, 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 build a relationship and who now, like my family, feels useless and sad about my situation.

For this reason, when I came to live in this new city, I enrolled in school to feel like a normal person, but at the same time, I made the decision to remain alone. Ironically, I met a girl who wanted to throw away her life by committing suicide. That's why I started bickering with her. It bothered me. She had the chance to move forward, while for me, everything remained a big question mark.

The fact of living next to each other, going to school together—these are all coincidences. I didn't want to get close to her; my intention was only to help her. I wanted to make her understand how lucky she was, unlike me. When I heard her story, I was petrified. If I had held up 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 me to get even closer, until she became, in my chaotic and uncertain life, the glimpse of normalcy I needed.

Looking at her expression as I told her about my story and how I ended up was like a stab. Her eyes dimmed and opened in an incredulous expression, as if she were watching a dramatic movie. Those big honey-brown eyes penetrated mine and read inside me, not looking away even once 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 changed her behavior toward me or treated me strangely, it would forcefully remind me of what my reality was.