The Faceless Visitor

He was the only man, boy, brother, son -whatever you want to call it- who could do it. The only one left who could make them all proud. “It’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid,” he’d heard her say once. He didn’t really remember that day because he was sobbing rather uglily. Crying with snot all over his face, hiccupping and trying to take deep breaths to calm his rapidly beating heart.

No one really knows how the war started. How it all went to hell. No one knows why we are fighting or who we are fighting. It had been established long ago that only the higher ups such as high ranking officers and government types would gain that knowledge. Kaia was not a high ranking officer, nor was he in the government. Just one more citizen forced to fight in a war they did not believe in. Every child from age 15 had to enlist. He did not want his life filled with violence.

Through the pain and the confusion that filled his mind at that moment, he had heard his sister’s voice whispering sweet nothing to him, insisting that he had to breathe so as not to suffocate himself with his own tears. He was panicking. She was seated on the floor, brown eyes looking up at him-the color of her eyes so similar to his- a darker shade of brown because of the worry that filled them. He’s sure he heard her comforting him but all he could hear were the voices that, merely a few minutes ago, were shouting at him, yelling at him words that felt like someone was stabbing him repeatedly.

He had tried to fight back. Make sure he was heard, tell his side of the story but not once did they stop and ask about how he felt. He had tried to make them understand but no one seemed to hear him, to care about what he had to say.

The more he thought about it, the more tears fell down his dark chocolate skin and the harder it got to breathe. The voice of his sister telling him to breathe, essentially begging him to do so in the background finally reached his ears. Hiccupping and trying to clean the snot from his face with the sleeves of his sweater, he heard her crying, brokenly sobbing telling him how unfair it was. That she understood what he was feeling but he couldn’t see how she could. He felt so alone, so broken, so misunderstood and despite her efforts to make him feel less alone, she was not succeeding.

He didn’t like to see her cry. But she was there, she was trying to help when the others had turned on him. She was trying to understand. She stuck around.

For a while they sat there: Him in a foetal position on his bed as he tried to hold the tears back and her seated on the floor, holding his hand. Silently. She wasn’t openly sobbing anymore but he could see the silent tears falling down her cheeks, her eyes puffy and red like his own, probably.

It was as if she could feel his pain.

It was in that silence, as they sat there and she held his hand that the loneliness started to fade. It wasn't gone, he knew that but it wasn’t as heavy in his chest. And as his hiccups stopped, his eyelids became heavier by the second, a memory came to him: It was distant and he felt as though he would lose it if he so much as moved a finger. A memory came to him unbidden; He recalled how a few years ago, right after she received the letter letting her know she would be leaving. She was the one getting yelled at, the one shouting to be heard, the one hurting but that she, unlike him, had had no one, she had been alone. Tearing and tugging at her own long hair in frustration. No one had responded to her cry for help.

As the memory flashed behind his closed eyelids, he fell asleep and the memory was gone.

The next morning when he woke up, he stayed in his room. He wasn’t ready to come out. He had vague memories of someone comforting him. A vague memory of not feeling so alone, misunderstood, of feeling safe but he believed it to be a dream. Or someone he had conjured in his time of need, an illusion created by a lonely child. A good thing he supposed for the weight that had been on his shoulders, that had settled in his heart felt more bearable. A little less heavy. He smiled.

He saw his sister later that day who smiled at him while the others ignored him. She was wearing the heart shaped locket she had been wearing ever since she came back from the war. She never took that thing off and she had never told anyone where she got it. She was sitting on Fay’s lap, smiling wide as Fay kept her hands around her waist whispering in her ear. He smiled back, feeling something lurking at the back of his mind, tugging, begging to get out in the open. But he shrugged it off, scratched his scalp and swore that he would be a better man, a better brother and a better son. He looked up and saw her winking at him.