Lost child, dare

A l o n e are five letters beaten into your flesh, tear-soaked onto your cheeks, ground into your skin.

The year your mother disappeared, you became father mother grandfather grandmother uncle and aunt to yourself.
A veritable village.
Is it not funny how one child can turn into so many people?
That was the year you lived through by crying,
in the toilet between classes,
in the darkness before sleep,
in between every mouthful of the meal you burnt for yourself.

Before your mother left you,
she held your hand and whispered love with every word and smile and touch –
and she taught you baseball.
Her laughter rang through the air when you threw your first ball.
Her smile sparkled brighter than the sun when you caught the ball in your mitt.
Her words landed soft in your ears when you got a pitch just right.
She was the center of your world.

In school, baseball draws you like a moth to flame.
You feel your mother’s phantom hand gentle on yours as you hold out the catcher’s mitt.
Powerlessness disappears when you outwit opponents.
For the first time, you are someone no one can leave behind.

But you made a mistake.
You are too talented.
They pound and hit and jump on you
and you wonder if unlikeability hides between the very cells in your body,
flows through you like blood,
and resides in the air in your lungs.

So you remake yourself.
Indispensable on the field, indifferent off of it.
You turn your unlikeability into a weapon that you wield like your life depends on it.
You do not need anyone.
(If you do not need anyone, no one can abandon you ever again.)
You leave behind the lost, abandoned, terrified, loveless child.
You become Miyuki Kazuya, genius catcher.
Untouchable, unbeatable, invaluable.

Baseball becomes the event around which you organize your very self.
It is all that matters.
It is all that gives you joy.
It is all that sustains you.
You are nothing without it.
You push people away, uncaring and indifferent,
and you climb higher and higher.
You have baseball now.

The years pass and you are an expert now at wielding the distance between you and others.
Until him.
He is the sun, blinding and lion-hearted and ferocious.
He annoys you, or you annoy him, who can tell?
But you cannot help but admire his drive to improve.
You cannot help but admire his dogged persistence that fears nothing – not rejection, not failure, not heartbreak.
You cannot help but admire the invulnerable way he wears his heart on his sleeve.

Somehow, without your realizing,
his noisy shouting becomes endearing,
his idiot optimism becomes hopeful,
his blundering determination becomes touching.
Since when have his indignant faces become so cute?

He holds his heart out with both hands,
and he trusts you to cradle it,
and he knows you would hurt it,
but he loves you,
and so he holds it out anyway.
He wears his vulnerability like armor.
(How does he do it?)

Being loved by him is like standing in the sun
after a long, starving, bone-aching winter.
You unfurl.
You bloom.
You grow.
(Is this what it is like, to receive unconditional love – or to give unconditional love?)
He pours into the cracked parts of you like molten honey and holds-heals you.

You love him, so much.

So you lose him.

Because you cannot have him and baseball at the same time.
And you cannot lose baseball.

You are plunged into the icy shadows again.
The sun is gone.
Of course it is.
You knew you could never have kept it.
Happiness is not for people like you.
A lifetime of closing up, fearing the consequences, and choosing what you cannot live without cannot be undone so easily.
You cannot live without baseball.
(But can you live without Sawamura?)

You go through life like an automaton now.
Grief is like a ten-tonne weight making you move, slow as molasses, as though underwater.
Heartbreak splits your chest open and leaves your heart raw.
(You ache and ache and you miss and miss but you refuse to cry. You cried enough when you were younger to last you a lifetime.)
Fear steals your breath with every small whisper and you struggle just to breathe.
Love hides in every one of your thoughts,
and your heart keeps trying to leave your chest to go home to him,
where it belongs.

It is funny.
On the field, you are bold, strategic, risk-taking.
You fear nothing.
You are in your element.
Off of the field?
You are terrified,
broken,
and worthless.

In the quiet before sleep, when there is only the dark of your eyelids, you can admit to yourself:
I cannot live without Sawamura.

—–
You have a best friend
and he loves you in his gruff, rough way.
He follows pro baseball players who have come out –
For you, he says, because of you, he says.
He wants you to live unafraid,
like the bold challenger that you are on the field.
But bitterness pours off of you like laughter.
Look at me, you say. I am broken.
Give up on me, are the unsaid words. I am not worth it.
You try to push him away, just like you pushed Sawamura away.

But like Sawamura, he only moves closer.
When did you pick up idiots like that? you wonder despairingly.
(What is this feeling like love in your chest and tears in your throat?)
He glares at you and how strange that his anger looks so much like worry.
He gives you the gift of yourself:
Miyuki Kazuya, genius catcher.
Unbeatable, untouchable, invaluable.
Challenger.
You have never been someone who wants to be a part of the well-loved, well-known champions of old.
You have always been the underdog challenging the champion,
stealing the trophy from under their nose
because
you
dare.

Will you not dare, for the biggest and most insurmountable match of your life?
Will you not dare, now that there is a crack in the door?
Will you not dare, now that you have tasted the sun?

Oh, Miyuki, you have been lost and afraid and alone for so long.
Dare.
And come home.