Being blind had never been an inconvience exactly. I had lost my sight at age three when I had to have a surgery to remove cancer from my brain that other wise would've killed me or rendered me a vegetable for life. Even at the age of three I understood this, and as my parents said, "was a little trooper" about it. Because of this experience, my motto was to live life to the fullest. At first, it wasn't easy. I had to walk slowly, barely moving, memorizing where each little detail of furniture was. My older brother, David, always helped me out, even though he was 6 years older and could be hanging with his friends instead. The next step was to be able to listen for people when they got close, or hear a car coming by so I wouldn't get hit.
At first, I gave up a lot. I would get easily frustrated and stumble up the stairs to my room, then I would begin to cry when I could barely find the door knob, and sob on my bed once the door was shut and I had managed to knock everything over on my way to it. After about five minutes, my parents would come and try to console me, but I never let them in. After half an hour, David worked his magic to unlock the door and get in. He always consoled me the best. David was my life line for the first two years after being blind. He was my eyes for me.
Then the days came when I started to learn on my own. Yes, David helped me out a lot, but I got the hang of it on my own. By my 6th birthday, at the beginning of kindergarten, I had quite a bit of friends. That was my first birthday party with my friends at it, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Being blind was no longer a handicap for me. All my teachers expected me to be dumber, I guess, because of my 'handicap'. It turns out, I was one of the smartest students in the class, listening really close and tape recording the lessons. What amazed them more was the fact that I was bilingual, my second language was Japanese, my father's first language, from his home country. I wasn't required to take gym, but I did my best, even if I fell over during running. Or if I was the first person to get out of dodge ball. It was always worth it when I could say I completed a trip-free lap, or got one person out before being hit by the ball. I couldn't play basket ball or many other sports, but I tried my hardest on the ones that I could do. It was enough to make my parents proud.
Those were the good days when being blind wasn't so hard. Then my mother suddenly died when I was 13 the summer before I started 8th grade and only 3 months before my 14th birthday. The cause was a heart attack. Her side of the family had a history with early heart problems. We were all devistated. I won't go into the messy details, but my brother and I came closer to my dad than ever. We needed him--I needed him a lot more than you can imagine. About two weeks before school started, my dad told us we were going to be moving. In a week we'd be flying out of our cosy home in Denver, Colorado. We'd be heading west over California, out over the ocean and into a country my brother and I had never set foot in, my fathers homeland of Japan. Apparently his grandparents, deceased for about three years, had a big house that they had left him in his will. It was fully paid off and we could all live there. It was located on the outskirts of Namimori, where he had once gone to school. My dad even said one of his old friends might still live there, and a few days later found out that he had a son about my age. He promised I'd be fine at school once the teachers understood I needed to adjust, and he was happier than we'd seen him since my mother's death, so we couldn't say no. This was a life changing decision that would ultimately change my brothers future, and mine, for what my father thought was the better. He couldn't have been more right, and more wrong.
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A/N: Yes, kind of cheesy, but it gets better I swear. I already have the next few chapters planned out and written on paper, I just need to type them up. I wanted to write more for the prolouge, but I figured if I went into what I wanted it would be over dramaticised and highly uninteresting. And I didn't want to have some huge prolouge to over complicate things. The only two aspect's important in Kim's background is her mothers death and her being blind.
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-AM-C