My name is Yuroi Haryoko. I'm nineteen, still in high school, and I live alone—though for a long time, I didn't have a choice.
Most kids my age are surrounded by noise: friends shouting across playgrounds, the buzz of cafés, arcades echoing with laughter and blaring screens. Not me. Silence has been my companion for years, a constant hum in the background of my life. Books are my closest friends, though even they cannot fully fill the hollowness that lingers in my chest. I wander the streets at dusk, letting the fading sunlight stretch long shadows across the cracked sidewalks, hoping that the motion—my legs moving, my thoughts flowing—keeps the emptiness from swallowing me whole.
But some nights, even that quiet turns heavy. The silence presses against my ears, crawling into my chest, making each heartbeat drum like a warning. It isn't peaceful—it's waiting.
I wasn't always alone.
I used to have a family… or at least fragments of one. My mother died first, her illness creeping slowly, a quiet thief no doctor could name. She had been the calm in the storm, the warmth in the cold corners of our home. When she left, my father shattered. His grief twisted into rage. He drank, he shouted, he locked himself away in rooms full of darkness, and sometimes, he looked at me with eyes that promised pain. I learned early to shrink myself, to blend into walls and shadows, to survive in the ruins of a house that had once felt like home.
My mother, in her last moments of care, had left me a lifeline—a savings fund for college, a chance to escape the chaos. My father found it. And in his grief and selfishness, he burned it all. Bottles, bars, fleeting women—he consumed the future I had been promised. Watching him waste what she had sacrificed cracked something inside me, a mixture of fury, disbelief, and helplessness I couldn't name.
One night, I asked him why.
His eyes were red, bloodshot, wild. Words cut through the air like knives. He shouted that I had no right to interfere in his life, that the money wasn't mine, that the house wasn't large enough for both of us. By the end of the week, he declared I had to leave—or pay rent for every flickering light, every morsel I ate, every breath I drew in that suffocating home.
I begged. I pleaded. My voice trembled, cracking under the weight of fear and heartbreak. My father only cursed me, slammed the door, leaving the echo of his boots fading into the night like a final verdict.
By sunrise, I had made my choice. I packed the little I owned—books, clothes, memories—and left a note on the kitchen table, silent and simple. I stepped out into the world I barely knew, unsure where I would go, only certain that I had to leave.
Every step away from that house felt like shedding a skin I had never wanted to cast off. The streets smelled of asphalt and morning dew, sharp and new. Every passerby seemed a potential threat; each car that roared past a predator. Freedom tasted bitter and terrifying at the same time.
I wandered until the sun climbed high, pressing against my back and brow, until exhaustion pressed into my bones like a weight I couldn't shake. Hunger clawed at my stomach. Thirst burned my throat raw. Shadows seemed to slither in the corners of my vision, moving just beyond what I could see. Memories replayed in fragments: my mother's soft voice calling me for supper, my father's furious shouts echoing through the halls, the empty rooms of a home that had transformed into a prison.
Yet despite it all, a single thought persisted: I had survived. And as long as I moved forward, I could survive again.
That morning, walking past streets I had once known but now felt alien, I made a silent promise to myself: whatever came next, I would not be trapped. I would find a place free of anger, grief, and loss. Even if such a place didn't exist yet, I would keep searching, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat.
And as I disappeared into the city's noise, the quiet inside me felt heavier—but somehow, resolutely alive.
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