You don't need the sharp end of a razor blade to feel pain. Pain is present in every situation and environment. You can accidentally bump your shin on the corner of a desk. Someone can run into you while you're passing through the hallways. You can torture yourself mentally; bend your mind towards pain so that it no longer affects you. Every living thing in this universe experiences pain; even the moth turns into ashes when it flies too close to fire. So why should pain be any different for you?
You think this when the tingle of your mother's slap still lingers upon the red of your cheek. You think this when you breakdown in your room and throw your sheets and clothes around in frenzy, imperfections spilling out from the shell you have always kept it in. You feel numb all the time, because unlike the sharp sting of pain, pain has become a dull-edged intangible feeling that douses you in undulations of cold.
It was around that time when the silver-haired boy that had left the snowman near her window so many seasons ago, begins to show up in places where she needed it the most. Signs of his former presence varied from the white cherry blossom petals arranged in patterns on the plane of ground below her window, to messages written on pieces of paper wedged into the smallest cracks. For a while, this made her hope and believe in something that was the variable and the unseen. The feeling came gradually and slowly as if it was tentative to enter into someone as plain and untrusting as herself, but with the gifts bestowed by the stranger, it grew stronger.
It was something that she always hid from her mother in an irrational fear that this newfound hope might be taken away with her, just like how her mother had taken away any obstacles that included friends away from the path to academic success that she had laid in front of her. In secret, she responded to the messages hidden in a crack near her window where the stranger eventually came to wedge it in. She never attempted to seek him out, scared that the stranger would never return if she found out his identity. Instead, she waited for the two thumps that signaled his entry and exit in the backyard, before she felt for the piece of paper wedged into the crack. She would write in it with a few spare words, and return it to the hiding spot. The next morning, it would be gone, and by the end of the evening, the paper would reappear in its spot.
"You and I, are not so much different from each other," he wrote before. "We both come from similar family backgrounds, and our situations are alike. It makes me feel - -
- - A little less lonely in this world."