You Complete Me

The colour that bled into my World [1]

For as long as I can remember, I've always felt... Empty. Incomplete. Like part of me is missing, like I was the exterior of a hollow shell. This feeling has dominated my entire life.

Even in my earliest memories... All I could vividly remember where hospitals. Doctors. Examinations.

I was broken, the doctors were trying to fix me but no pill could cure me. My parents tried explaining what was wrong with me, what made me stand out from other children.

I didn't understand.

I heard doctors saying they couldn't fix me... They said I would never be a normal person, or live a normal life.

As I grew older, I began to understand what was wrong with me, I had learnt to come to terms with it. I saw children become: happy, sad, angry but I never felt those things, I was only empty .

I slowly understood that, I had everything a normal child had, except emotions. Who knew, lacking key feelings you must have in order to be human, could make you stand out so much in a crowd.

I had never seen a more desperate man, my father, who wanted more than anything to cure me off this unheard off illness. He pleaded with the doctors, every single day after work, bringing me with him after school just for them to find something to help me.

We went to different hospitals, different regions in Japan and even the discussion off going abroad arose as well. This obsession consumed his mind, it was all he could think about, he paid his wife no attention and only focused on fixing this broken child.

He never wanted a normal son more.

My world has always been cold...Dark...And silent, it was a blank canvas yet to be filled with colours, that my grey world lacked. I was not alone in this feeling.

My mother was nothing like him, she wasn't worried in the slightest. She said she was just like me when she was a child, but once she met my father her world was filled with warm bright colours, everything had changed for her.

Life and light was brought into her bleak and blank world, he made her whole...He made her complete. She told me, one day, I'd meet someone special, just like she did. To make me feel complete, someone who would cure me, fix me and save me.

My father did not want to listen to my mother's words, he wanted a normal child more than anything else in the world. They had arguments over it all the time and home felt like a warzone with me at the center. My father's eyes were dull and full of sorrow, he felt like he was breaking apart piece by piece, believing he failed his son.

He tried everything to make me happy, toys, taking me to parks, giving me fountains worth of presents, anything.

Nothing worked.

I only felt pity

I felt pity for this sad man.

He didn't confide in his wife, he turned to alcohol and smoking to drown out his depressing life away. It made his mind a blank slate and he didn't have to think about anything till the morning. I often watched him slumped on the couch, with beer scattered across the living room, either empty or yet to be chugged down.

My mother didn't want me to see my father in such a state, she would always smile down at me without saying a word and bring me up to my room. Telling me stories about my family, how their names are like double edged swords, names that come from knives yet sound pretty as well. Or stories of how, his great-grandma and great-grandpa were the first to move to
Buraza Town.

On the occasions when he did see his father while drinking, the room would have a thick scent off alcohol and a pinch of smoke as he would smoke near the window since he didn't want his son inhaling it. He recalls, specifically, when he approached his father after school and his father simply cried.