To Show a Blind Person the Sight of the World Without Using Your Voice

Chapter 13: It's Okay to be Scared; You're About to do Something Brave

Makoto Tachibana

A foot slamming into my bed wakes me up just after midnight.

I'm startled, but not as much as I get when Haruka starts breathing heavily. So heavy that I can hear him wheezing and his breath is squeaking in his windpipe.

I wonder if he woke up, finally, after thrashing around in his bed for almost five whole minutes.

"Haruka, are you awake?" I whisper when I decide he's probably just as awake as I am.

There's no reply, just more heavy breathing, followed by thuds moving across my room. At first they're slow and calm, but soon they start moving in circles at a rapid pace.

Taking that Haruka's probably pacing up and down my room because he's restless, I get out of my bed to see if he's doing okay; which he obviously isn't.

I wrap my arms around him and pull him against my chest when he starts crying. There's barely any sound, just some jolting breathes and whimpering, but I can feel his tears being absorbed by my shirt. I can't hold him any closer, but I wish I could.

"It's okay," I whisper, nuzzling his hair. "It was just a bad dream."

I take it was a nightmare scaring him this much, but it could be anything after how he acted after the talk with his foster parents. I'm actually convinced he's so badly affected by yesterday's talk that it's giving him nightmares, but I know nothing for sure.

Haruka presses his face into my shoulder, hiding in the fabric of my shirt.

"I'm here, it's okay." I rub his back and feel his breath jolt over and over again. But it stops for a second when I ask, "Does it have to do with yesterday evening?"

Haruka nods into my shoulder before he starts sobbing again.

He's shaking so much, draped against me like a limp blanket; he just seems terrified.

"Do you need to talk about it?" I ask him, hoping I don't get the same reply as I got yesterday.

It takes a while, but eventually Haruka nods. He sniffles a little before releasing himself from my tight embrace, when he leans away from me I know what he's doing; he's actually going to explain what's bothering him, and therefore he needs the slate.

I sit there, hearing Haruka sniffle and breathe irregularly for almost ten minutes before he hands me a piece of paper. It's filled with Braille till halfway the paper and I know it's not just saying "yeah, I had a nightmare. Sorry for waking you up" like I thought it would.

Instead his message starts with "They asked me to move in with my biological mother."

I stop, take a deep breath and mumble, "Your birth mother, huh?" before continuing to read over everything he told me. He talks about how it scares him so much, the thought of having to go back to her. He tells me his past wasn't amazing and he hasn't seen her since he was nine years old.

"I'm so afraid... I don't want to go back," he admits, and even though I have no clue what happened between Haruka and his parents, I know he's serious about not wanting to go back. The last sentence, to my surprise, says, "What must I do, Makoto?" which means he trusts me with helping him again. He wants me to be besides him again.

"I don't know," I whisper in reply. I reach out to Haruka, taking a deep breath when my hand touches his shoulder just so gently. I'm scared to ask him what I need to know, but I still manage to gather the courage to ask him about his past; he starts trembling in terror straight away.

"You don't have to," I immediately reply, but then his hand wraps around mine. His touch says enough, even when it's weak and shaky, it's full of determination and I know he wants me to know.

"Honestly, it all started with my parents being way too young to have children," Haruka tells me after a while. "I don't remember much, and I want to spare you the details, but let's just say they didn't know how to raise a child."

Haruka tells me, in a short letter, how for the first part of his childhood Haruka's parents really neglected him; leaving him at daycare most of the time when he was a baby and when he reached elementary school he was alone outside of school.

"They started acting different when they found out I didn't actually go to school. I just didn't have the strength to go, because everyone bullied me for being shy and not so well mannered."

I pause and feel my heart skip a beat in pain; Haruka was being bullied by people because he wasn't loud or neat. He wasn't either of those things because his parents did an awful job of raising him.

"They started doing things no parent should do to their child."

Haruka says he'd rather not talk about that too much, because it still scares him. All he tells me is that he'd receive "punishments" from his father, and his mother never did anything to stop him.

Haruka swallow's audibly, as if he knows where in his letter I'm reading.

I reach out to him after I read the sentence, "Their way of raising me left me with both mental and physical scars." I embrace him, because I know how hard it must be to tell this to me; a stranger.

I hug him and whisper, "I didn't know..." but then again, how could I have known?

Haruka takes my hand in his and squeezes it lightly. It's like he wants to tell me something, and through his mere touch I understand exactly what he means.

"You want to show me something," I ask him. "Don't you?"

Next thing I feel is ragged skin under my fingertips. It causes my breath to come to a sudden stop; I know exactly what these are, and I didn't expect Haruka to show me this.

"Oh, Haruka," I whisper, my hands starting to shake. "I—"

Tears start streaming down my face as I feel the large scar that stretches all along Haruka's arm. I can't do else than embrace him; I need to hug him, now.

Haruka's body jolts when it lays down against me, careful and weak he hugs me back.

We sit like that for god-knows-how-long and we just take our time to let all out. And once we've both gotten our act back together Haruka returns to writing again; he tells me he got this scar around the time he went mute, his mother wasn't there to help him and he never saw either of his parents after that night. All he wants is to stay far, very far, away from them if he possibly can.

On the bottom of the piece of paper there's a sentence saying, "Oh, and please call me Haru."

The last sentence seems completely unrelated, but I know deep inside it has everything to do with what he just told me. So I smile lightly, weakly, before whispering, "Haru, huh? It suits you better."

His hand rests on my knee and I can feel that that's his way of telling me "thank you".

I lay my hand on top of his and find myself smiling wide through my tears; I feel so glad, like we should've had this conversation earlier, and at the same time I feel defeated, useless.

"You really don't want to see her, don't you?" I ask.

Haru's hand tenses up, which I take as a no, so I add, "But still. I think you should talk to her, see if she has changed; you don't have to become best friends afterwards, but maybe you can at least close that awful chapter of your life." I pause to swallow. "You know? So you can start a new one."

Haru's hand starts shaking, his fingers digging into my skin in fear.

I reach out and pat his head like mom always does when I'm worried. And after that I suggest the following; I'll go with Haru, stay by his side for the entire time he's there, and if it's not going right I'll be there to stand by him and protect him with all I've got. He seems to like the sound of that. He flies at me, his arms wrapping around my neck; that clearly means yes.