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2013 was by no means a good year for me. It was horrible, actually. But suddenly, I miss it.
In 2013, I was ten. That sounds so weird typing it out now. 2013 doesn't feel far away at all. And I'm almost twenty now. That's crazy.
In 2013, I moved back to Japan with my family over the summer. I was told it would be a vacation, but little did I know that I would actually be staying there for longer than I had expected-- nearly a year.
We were staying with my mother's family. Within our first week of staying there, my mother ran away without a trace. She left everything in her room, so we thought she would come back. She didn't. On the day we were flying back to the U.S., she magically reappeared. My siblings and I were so happy to see her again. She seemed a little distraught though. I think my father knew exactly what was happening the entire time, because he wasn't fazed at all by her seemingly miraculous return.
I shared a room with my older cousin, Hana, who was 5 years older than me. I thought she was so old and womanly because I was ten. She was like my best friend. She introduced me to the best music; I still listen to it now. She spoke the best English of all my relatives, who only really spoke Japanese, a language I was losing touch with. She always said that one day she and I would go to Paris together. She loved all things French. She studied French, and took a keen interest in French poetry, food, and art. When she told me about these things, she seemed so happy. She only had brothers, who thought of her as weak and hardly listened to her, so she treated me like her little sister. She was very pretty, and I hoped that I would grow up and look just like her.
Hana and her siblings were considered "the hot cousins" by their aunts, uncles, and cousins because they were all unusually attractive within our family. She had two older brothers-- Ichiro and Rei. They were nice to me but I always felt shy around men, even family, because of the bad things my mother had always told me about men.
I never really got to know Ichiro that well, but at the age of 20, he had already married twice. After his third marriage, he and his wife moved to Italy and I never saw him again.
Rei had a good sense of humor and was considered "the hottest of the hot cousins." He really was, though I can't think of any specific thing about him that would make him so.
When he was younger, he was adventurous, and he would drag me into his gimmicks. Once, he broke his arm when he fell off a mountain getting grapes (he really liked grapes.) He told me we were going to go get grapes from the mountain together and in return, he would give me a cat (I really liked cats.) He said the grapes were for my mother, and that if I went with him, she would come back. In reality, he was only using me to get him grapes, which he ate himself. When we came back to the house, it was really late. It seemed much brighter on the mountain. My dad and my aunt scolded Rei for staying out so late, for letting me, a sickly child, climb such a dangerous mountain, and for lying to me. I did not get a cat. My mother did not come home.
From this description, 2013 doesn't seem like such a bad year. But, shockingly the trouble started with "a good girl like Hana."
After running around and playing with my siblings one day, Hana said she was going to go to a bakery in the city (we lived in a poor country home.) She asked if I wanted to come. I said I wanted to nap instead, but asked her to get me a melon pan and a chocolate croissant.
Hana was 15, so her family trusted her to go to the city alone, even though it was pretty far away. I think she was originally going to ask Rei to come with her, because she, too, had heard the scary stories of bad men, but an aunt told her to just go alone. So she did.
When she came home, it was the scariest thing I'd ever heard. Hana was in the kitchen, crying. I woke up from my nap and peeked out the door, which was barely open.
Her mother was sitting on a chair by the window in the sun. I didn't know most of the words she was saying, but she said something about being touched by a man. Her mother got up. It was the most horrifying thing, my aunt getting up. She grabbed a pan and hit Hana over the head with it multiple times, hard. Hana was still crying. At this point, I think she regretted telling her mother, who was now yelling so loud Germany could hear it. For some reason, her mom was crying too, but she didn't feel any sympathy for Hana. Then, she grabbed Hana's hair and repeatedly bashed her head against the counter until there was a stream of blood trickling onto the floor. I wanted to scream, but I knew I shouldn't. I didn't know what to do, or if I should even do anything. Her mother only stopped when Rei came back from doing whatever reckless thing, and dragged her away from Hana. He locked her in her room like a misbehaving puppy. She was screaming. It was so scary to see adults scream. Our nicest aunt, who everyone considered a cousin, tried to treat Hana's gashing wound on her forehead. I finally closed the door. I climbed up the dresser, where there was a little window, and threw up out of it. I don't remember if I went to sleep that night. I do remember wondering if this still would have happened if I went with Hana. Perhaps things would have turned out even worse?
After a scary, excruciating week, Hana finally started sleeping in our shared room again. One night she whispered to me, in tears, "I think I'm pregnant." I may have only been ten, but I knew nothing good could come from this.
She woke up very early in the morning and took me with her to the nice aunt. She told her she thought she was pregnant. The nice aunt was obviously horrified. Hana and the nice aunt told me they were going to go to the city to buy a pregnancy test. Hana was also asking the aunt to buy her abortion pills, just in case, but she said no. They were going to get Rei to come with them next time. If Hana's mother asked me where Hana was, I was supposed to say she was on the mountains with Rei. If I was asked where the nice aunt was, I was supposed to say her husband took her home, because she was planning on going home today for her sister-in-law's wedding.
The nice aunt actually went home, so I wouldn't look like a liar. When Rei and Hana came home, it was obvious that Hana was mad about something. She came into our room, and told me, "I am pregnant!" Typically I would clap when I heard this sort of news. Now I wanted to cry.
If this was not devastating enough, what happened after was incomparably worse.
My grandma, my aunts, and my father were going to take all us kids (including Hana and Rei) to a fireworks festival one summer night. Hana said she had some schoolwork to catch up on and passed. I knew something was wrong but I thought it might be better to leave her alone. For some reason Rei didn't stay home too.
The fireworks show was beautiful, but I couldn't enjoy it. I was all tangled up in a secret that was too big for my body. I felt so sad. I felt like crying out, "Mommy!" I missed my mother.
When we came home, the adults wouldn't allow me to come inside, but they let some of the other kids. I thought Hana was in trouble. I thought I was already found out. Then my dad got on one knee to speak to me eye to eye, which he only ever did once to tell me that my grandfather died. He told me that Hana hung herself in her room. She wasn't even alone, either. She was left with our one uncle with the glasses who always seemed like the uninterested type. I guessed that Hana saw this as "the perfect opportunity."
For once, I was so glad my father wasn't the type to sugarcoat things and instead told it as it was, even to a kid like me. I felt so sad, like a strung-out doleful feeling.
The next day we went back to the U.S, and I saw my mother at the airport. I told her about everything that happened while she was gone, except for the Hana story. While I was trying my best to filter out all the Hana parts, I accidentally slipped up. My mother asked, "Did you have fun with Hana?" I wanted to cry. Suddenly I remembered Hana in our tiny room, burgundy walls flaking and sun filtering onto our black mat. Her spindly bed pressed against mine. Next to the dresser, Hana was crouched in a blue yukata by her black bejeweled suitcase, filling it with various things, a parasol, a tiny handbag, a stuffed puppy. This is the most vivid memory I have of her, but I don't think this ever even really happened. Amidst my thoughts, I told my mother, "I will never get to see Paris with Hana."
I miss 2013. I want to go back.
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Thank you for this interesting post. What a shame that Hana hung herself. I guess that her being pregnant and unmarried would bring shame on the family.
Here is my story about the summer of 2013. In Australia where I live people were seeing red eyed black dwarfs. The part Aborigines knew about them already but us white people didn't. The man who lives in the house behind mine said he saw one a few times in the corner of his back yard. A woman on the bus told me that a woman had seen a group of these dwarfs under the trees near the railway station, and a man said that he saw one outside his house. Then one night I saw a bright red eye looking at me from underneath my outside table where the dwarf was crouching. I shut the front door and stayed inside. The next night the door wasn't shut properly and the wind blew it open and a red light flashed into the hallway. I had already found out from an Aborigine that these dwarfs are dirty, never wash themselves because they hate water, but if they have water thrown at them they run away. If they are startled they scream and they can hurt people with their eyes.
A few weeks after the dwarf flashed his/her red eyes into the hall way it was night and my dog was barking furiously at the bottom of the back yard so I went to see what he was barking at and there are holes in the back fence because of the way it has been built and I saw two bright red eyes looking into my yard from the corner where the man behind said he saw the dwarfs. I rushed inside. Two days later I told this man about seeing the dwarf and he said he came out to see why my dog was barking and saw the dwarf as well. He put up a light onto the side of his house that shines down to the corner and still has it lit up at night to this day. Eventually the dwarfs disappeared and haven't been seen since. No one know where they came from or where they went. But I am always wary of going outside after dark.
ReplyThat's so odd. How interesting. I wonder if they were really dwarves? Or maybe something else?
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