Goodbye Hano

Prologue

   When I was young, I remember smiling and living happily alongside my family and friends, with no care in the world about anything at all. When I turned ten, that all came crumbling down when my best friend, Moriya Yori committed suicide alongside my other best friend, Nakano Minoru.

   I was as shocked as any ten year old boy who had just lost his two closest friends could possibly be. I remember that I had not completely understood the fact that they were gone, and gone in the worst possible way any two ten year old kids could go to death. My mother and father told me that they had went somewhere more pretty and full of wonder and spirit; I had wanted to go, too.

   But, as I grew to the age of thirteen, on one rainy, semi-cold day, I had finally realized how excruciating the pain of their deaths were. It had finally hit me that Moriya and Nakano had killed themselves without me, and were never coming back to get me. I bawled my eyes out at the gas station near my house for three hours that day.

   When I turned fifteen, I finally convinced my parents to move away from the small village we had been in all our lives. I told them I thought it was time for a change of scenery, and as I was getting older I needed better opportunities for college in the future. They easily agreed to my logic, and we packed and we moved far away from the whispers and laughs of Moriya and Nakano. I never told my parents that their presence still lingered in the rice fields, the bike store, the elementary school playground, and the woods and mountains that surrounded our village, and that was why I had to escape from that village.

   It made me sick to my stomach to finally know that they had both died on the banks of the Hano River, which was a five minute walk from my house and theirs. It made me shiver to think that their bodies were most likely still lingering in the pits of the river I was named after, decaying and cracking through the seasons. It made me sob when I saw Moriya and Nakano's mother and father holding each other and reading their poem books from first grade on the steps of their house, never putting their eyes on me, or anyone else for that matter.

   The only time they ever looked at me after their deaths was when I opened the door to the small, box-loaded car, got in, and slammed the door shut. I always regret looking at them. Their eyes held the deepest pools of sadness and despair I had ever seen in my life. My throat constricted and my hands clenched into fists as they waved to our car that sped past their home, never to return again. Or...so I thought.