Lost In Kishimoto

As I held the three little pills in my hand, my mind ached with pain. Pouring some water into a clear translucent glass, I quickly threw the pills into my mouth and swallowed three gulps of water to wash them down. Although the pain didn’t go away instantly, as soon as those pills were gone from sight I felt instantly soothed. As if just by swallowing them they had already done their job.

My mother stood in the other room, staring at a long list of unreadable forms and contracts. One about a patient who had several brain tumours and no way of survival, another was about a recently born baby who had a problem with the right side of its brain. I wasn’t sure what, but from what my mother had told the number of people who had called to confirm surgery times, it was serious.

My father was at work, like usual. Either he was actually doing work, or at the many different cheap motels where he would sleep with his clients. I wasn’t sure what he did for a living. I didn’t really care. The fact that he had absolutely no interest in my life made me even less interested in his life and what he did with it. What he did instead of work was completely up to him, and frankly having to explain to my mother who was practically never home anyway, that her husband was cheating on her, wasn’t exactly something I wanted to deal with when I was only 12 years old.

My only escape, the only way to break free of the lies and deceit that my family constantly committed, was my room. My room was home to the different books that were the loves of my life. Friends weren’t something I had an unlimited supply of. In fact I had no supply whatsoever, and the fact that I could go up to my room, do my homework, and then read my novels or manga that I had collected, made life worthwhile.

Walking into my plain looking room I watched as our housekeeper Jenny fixed up my bed. As she smiled and walked out, I stepped into my room and closed the heavy wooden door that was the only way in or out. The large window on the left side wall was my only portal to the outside world from here, and even so I usually had the curtains drawn and the world blocked out.

My bed, a large queen sized mattress filled with a soft spongy material, was like lying in a mountain of feathers. The instant that your body touched the white bed sheets, you felt relaxed, like nothing could make you move again.

Grabbing the new volume of Naruto that I had picked up on my way to school that day, my mind stopped and started to focus. No more invisible mother, no more cheating father, Naruto. Only Naruto.

That was what I thought was going to happen. I thought that the only thing that I needed to focus on was the fact that I would get to know what was happening in the story. Was Sasuke going to get the Rinnegan like Madara suggested? Or was Masashi Kishimoto going to draw that out to the point where you just want it to happen. Frankly I couldn’t wait to find out. But as I opened my book to the first page, it wasn’t a picture of Naruto that I saw. It wasn’t Kakashi, or Sakura or Shikamaru, it wasn’t Sasuke or Madara or Itachi.

What I saw was a blinding white light. As the light forced me to cover my eyes I at first thought I was insane. A bright light in a manga book? Unlikely. But as I re-opened my book the exact same thing happened. Once again there was no face of a familiar character, all there was, was a blinding white light that this time grew bigger. Bigger and bigger it grew until my entire room was nothing but a bright white light. So beautiful, so pure. And yet the light made me afraid, scared for some unknown reason. As my body felt weightless and my book disappeared in the light, I looked down to see my body floating in an endless sea nothingness.

Death was certainly not what was going on. However the fact that I may have fallen asleep from my stressful day; crossed my mind. Year seven was a stressful time. New school, new friends. Everything was different to what it was before and it was something that I hadn’t been prepared for.

But as I closed my eyes and felt a slight chill run up my spine I felt gravity suddenly come back into play. My body started to fall, down, down, down I fell until my body made contact with the ground.

The only difference was that this ground wasn’t the hard wooden floorboards of my bedroom, or the soft bed sheets that completed my décor. This was a type of dirt. I was outside.