A/N: Story has been recently updated - major edits include the first 5 chapters, C11, and C17-C18. I hope you enjoy the newer version. :)
I'm not sure whether to be surprised or resigned at the length of time it takes for everything I know to change again. It's not the first time I've had to lose everything - well, not quite everything, I'll admit. But something pretty close to it.
That's what Yamaku High School is to me; another loss.
Apparently though, compared to the other students attending, I'm lucky. There's a lot of blind people there, a few mutes. The occasional missing limb. Compared to them, I should breathe a sigh of relief, if all I have to show for my own experience is a few scars that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life.
But people don't always seem to understand that loss is not measured in what is visibly abnormal, but rather what is not there.
And that makes all the difference to someone like me, who has been gradually losing the ability to feel. Pain and temperature are all gone. It's easy to look at me and look at someone more obviously disabled and think that I'm perfectly fine, if a little clumsy and stupid, but I'm neither.
I may not feel physical pain, but I do feel emotion, and I can't help but admit that I feel just a little bit of hate for those kinds of people who don't think I've suffered.
Because those are the kinds of thoughts that took everything I knew away from me.
But these people in front of me aren't the people I hate. They're victims, too. Victims of those people that don't understand.
I'm not normal. I'm disabled. Crippled. Only most of a person. To pretend otherwise is a denial of reality.
All these thoughts flit through my head before being banished as I bow.
...
"My name is Hisao Nakai. Please take good care of me."