ROADSIDE FLOWERS ( t. kageyama )

i. falling stars

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roadside flowers
chapter 1: falling stars

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ever since i was a child, i have always liked the softness that came with the plush throw pillows, the meandering vanilla white clouds, and the tufts of fluffy feathers that adorned twittering birds. this softness flew with the tiny puffs of dandelion fluffs and wistful wishes that accompanied shooting stars, looped in every drop of ink in a handwritten letter and sung in the comforting melodies of polished instruments. i've always had a penchant for them: the ephemeral reprieve they brought from the harsh realities of life.

the reprieve from the overwhelming expectations, the venomous words, the banshee like screaming of my family embellished with their callous words. it was fitting, just letting these thoughts float freely in my mind as i view the framed photograph hung carefully in the concrete walls. the familiar family portrait is the same as usual (not that i expect it to change, change is wrong in this household, it is rebellion and i am not rebellious), golden borders with intricate carvings of leaves and flowers, the beautiful glossy paper behind the glass, the presence of ten people: a mother, a father and their smiling children.

they say pictures paint a thousand words and i wonder what story those words tell. drama? romance? action? or my favorite light-hearted contemporary romance?

i look at the photograph again. i see my face, five years younger, ruddy cheeks unlike my older siblings with their jawlines. i was the fifth child among eighth children, it seems as if the genetic front skipped out on me. my mother's jaw. she was a professional badminton player, fierce and competent, more alive in a court than in a kitchen while my father was a drifting poet who was often so lost in the words that flowed from his pen that he often couldn't recall that yes, he had eight children. we live in a decent house in the miyagi prefecture, we live in a home that sometimes i forget is home.

i keep my thoughts to myself as i stray from the living room and into the doorway.

"you're here..." i murmur and he looks at me. "how did the winter cup go?"

"fine," he answers succinctly.

"what place were you in?" i ask as my brother put on his rubber shoes in the porch.

"second."

"that's cool," i say. the porch smells like grass today and i inhale its scent. the sun still hasn't risen and a part of me wishes that it doesn't because it's the first day of school tomorrow and there's dread weighing in on my system. maybe i should have attended aoba johsai like the majority of my friends. it was the expected path for us kitagawa daichi kids. "are you nervous? pressured?"

he shakes his head. "i just have to win."

his reply is curt, unfeeling. a part of me thinks that he hates me. for denying something that he would have crawled across the desert for. brother wasn't favored by my parents. mother wanted him to be a doctor, but he still wanted to pursue fine arts so they vowed to stop sponsoring his high school education. he would have gone to shiratorizawa like my sister did, but he couldn't. he was not smart enough to get a scholarship in private high schools. he dreamt of shiratorizawa and aoba johsai, but he settled for karasuno which was the nearest to our home.

i could have gone to aoba johsai, but i chose karasuno. and i think my brother hates how i made that choice so casually. i wonder if he'll hate me more if he knows that i chose karasuno for a boy.

"teru," he calls me and he's almost finished with stretching. my brother is an athlete. he plays basketball. i'm not familiar with the positions, but i think he's the point guard or something reminiscent to that. was it shooting guard? i'm not allowed to watch his games or any of us kirishima siblings for that matter. mother forbade it when my brother was in second year of middle school, when he decided he wasn't going to be a doctor. "are any of your friends going to karasuno?"