Silence | Book 1

4-10: Sleep

I am sorry that I have brought shame on you,

I know you are trying really hard, but I don't think I can do this anymore. As much as I try, it won't stop, I find myself back there, even when I know I'm not. Although you took me home, I don't think my mind will ever truly be again.

I feel like a monster. I feel like they tore out parts of me and now I can't find myself. I don't know where I have gone, and all that is left is a stranger Someone weird, someone insane. Someone that brings shame on you even if you try to love him every day.

Others aren't so kind to me. Nobody wants to talk to me at school. They call me a ghost, because I'm quiet. I think it is because part of me has already died, and they know. Part of me wishes I really died there, instead of him, just so I won't have to feel guilty that I was the one that lived. I know you want me to be happy, but how can I ever be when I'm like this? When at night I am tortured by my own memories and during the day I'm insane?

You tell me that the nightmares will go away, when I get older. But you don't understand that they're not nightmares. It already happened, so how will it ever go away? You tell me to get good grades, to work hard and everything will be alright. I have worked so hard to speak. Every day I try, but I can't. You praise me for how good my memory is – but I wish I could forget.

You try to smile for me, but I can see the pain I cause you every time you have to watch me go back there. Every time I scream I hurt you. Every time I cry, I know you too are crying even if you don't show it. Every time I go crazy, I know you wish that I was your son again.

It hurts to live like this. It hurts so much and I can't bear it any longer.

Please understand that it wasn't you. That I never meant to shame you like this, and that you didn't fail me. But I'm so tired, and I can't sleep. My mind is so loud, and I can't even speak to silence it. I only want it to be quiet. I want it to be finally over.

If you can forgive me, please let me rest next to him? I think that is where I belong.

I love you, you have been very good to me, and you tried so hard.

Thank you mom and dad.

I really love you.

Hibiki Yukimura

He took out several wrapped up paper tissues that he had hidden behind his nightstand drawer. Each of them opened to reveal several white capsules. Fifty in total, which he had gathered over the course of a year. On most of them the black writing had faded from when he hid the capsules only to spit them out again once he was supposed to be asleep. But a few of them still had 'Temazepam 30mg' written on them. He pulled closer an unopened bottle of water, and screwed the cap off.

The first pill was difficult, as if his body knew what he was about to do and rejected it through the instinctive desire to live. The second went a bit easier, and by the fifth he had found the rhythm of swallowing one after another. He knew he had to keep going, that he had to take them all before sleep set in – before someone would check on him and find him.

Ten

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