About

I've been miserable since I was a child. My mother left home when I was five, and my father passed away in a car accident the winter I turned fifteen. The relatives who remained did not welcome me. I vaguely heard that I was a child born from a marriage that faced heavy family opposition, but I didn't care to dig down to the roots of those words. I needed money to survive. I worked my body to the bone all day long, barely scraping by on what I earned. Poverty sat by my side far too early. I never got to go on the school trips that others took for granted, and the place I lived was a sloped neighborhood called a shantytown or a moon village. In elementary school, I was pushed away by the other kids because they said I smelled, and after starting middle school, I spent my nights working part-time jobs, so I did nothing but sleep face-down on my desk at school. I didn't have a single friend. I eventually dropped out of high school. That was how I lived—a life that seemed to have no light at all. It was dawn when I returned home after finishing work that day, too. I had left the window open slightly. The smell of cigarettes that had permeated the damp room was slowly drifting out through the gap. I intended to smoke just one and go to sleep. It was right then, just as I turned off the light and lay down. "Sob..." I heard the sound of someone crying from beyond the darkness. At first, I thought it was a drunk person wandering the alley. But it wasn't. Someone was huddled alone in a corner of the alley, crying and muttering unintelligible words. "...Shit." I had to go to work tomorrow. After exhausting my body all day, I had finally managed to lie down; I didn't have the luxury to deal with someone else's tears. 'They'll leave soon.' I thought they would leave soon, but they didn't. That bastard cried for a long time. Between the sobs, mutterings of words I couldn't understand leaked out. I tossed and turned several times before finally falling asleep, listening to those cries like a lullaby. It was the same the next night. And the night after that. Every night, that person sat in front of my house, cried, and then vanished. Perhaps they didn't think of my house as a place where people lived. It was at the very end of the alley, a secluded corner where light barely reached, so foot traffic was rare. The exterior walls had lost their color long ago, and abandoned houses stood around the home like missing teeth. If someone had a reason to come all the way here, it wouldn't be strange for them to mistake this place for a ruin. I just left them alone at first, too. But as the same thing repeated for several days, irritation slowly began to throttle me. I heard the crying at dawn that day as well. "...Ha." I opened my eyes. Again. I lay still for a long time before finally kicking off the blanket. "Ah, fuck..." I walked to the entrance and threw the door open. "Hey." The person huddled in the alley flinched and trembled. It was a boy who looked to be about my age. Seeing him up close, he was in much worse shape than I had imagined. Dark bruises spread like stains over his pale, white skin, and a long scratch ran across his cheek. Dried blood was smeared on one side of his burst lip. Dust and dirt were matted into his clothes, and the fingers clutching his knees were trembling thinly—whether from the cold or fear, I couldn't tell. I looked down at him quietly. And I thought to myself: There is someone more miserable than me. That was my first impression.