Archive of Our Own

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*  *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

He was born from a star.

That's what the picture book in the closet always said.

Children are born from the stars in the sky. When a mama and papa fall in love, and dream of having a little one, they make a special wish to God, who hides up above behind the clouds.

If he sees their hearts are kind and their love true, and they can grant their child a bright future too, he will smile and bless them with new life by putting up a new star in the sky.

And when home is ready and the time has arrived, the star will fall down to Earth into the hands of the mother; as she holds it close it will sparkle and glow, and out comes a baby with the blessings of God.

Out comes their son. 

Out, came Michael.

…He closed the book.

His eyes scanned the room, his ears picking for sounds outside—but only silence. Clenching the pages, he climbed onto the bed, pulling his knees closer and curling himself up like a tiny cocoon. He turned again to the book in his hands.

The story was fake, of course.

It was hocus-pocus, made-up, a barefaced lie, and only stupid children would believe something as nonsensical as this, anyone with the right mind would see through that flimflam immediately. There were no stars that fell down onto Earth, there was no sparkling and no glowing, there was no God, and there was no mother who could hold onto a falling star and not die from the impact.

Instead, children were born on Earth, they were born from inside the womb of their mother. And as for him… he was born from the womb of a stranger.

He was born from a star.

The boy embraced it, pressed the book into his arms. It was blocky and square, and the hard rugged edges dug into his flesh. But he still hugged it tight, and he felt this faint, indescribable fluttering in his chest again, the same feeling that would always appear whenever he did this.

This book was one of the last few things left from that stranger.

This book was likely the last thing left for him.

And it was trash.

Just like everything in this flat was. These little square meters of space, consisting of a run-down living room and a dirty kitchen filled with trash, an unsightly tiny bath that was also filled with trash, a big and a small bedroom that only had the purpose of accommodating trash, and his trash closet with this trash book and his dirty, little, ragged self.

The book was trash, but to him it was treasure. It was the only thing he could redeem when that rancid father of his had discarded everything in their house in yet another fit of rage. From the moment that stranger had left, his father had wanted all traces of her gone, ruined, killed into oblivion. The boy had still been too young to remember at that point, but it essentially meant that everything would have to be scrapped – and even someone as imbecilic and short-sighted as his father was able to see the impossibility of that option. So instead, over the years, he'd just slowly replaced the things, or rather than replaced it was better to say he'd thrown them out and brought in other new trash, most of it financed by the efforts and plunders of the boy.

The only thing he wouldn’t discard was a single blue rose, carefully placed inside a crystal clear glass dome. It looked so delicate and pristine, so sacred and untouchable, so unlike everything around, and it represented all the things that were not and would never be in this house.

But sometimes, the sometimes stopped at some point, but there were some times the boy could still find traces of that stranger. Traces of something that once used to be, could have been; of a family, of a home.

One day – he was still five – his father had kicked the door to his room open and come in drunkenly, he’d thrown a tantrum, made a mess of the the place again that hardly had anything in it to begin with. And then, he’d stopped and looked up – staring at a dusty moving box stacked near the ceiling on top of the closet. He’d asked, huh, what the fuck’s that, and he’d climbed up the nightstand to get it off, and in his clumsy state, fumbled and carelessly let it slip from his hands. The box crashed to the ground, nearly hitting the boy — who’d been fast enough to dodge just in time, throwing himself onto the bed as it slammed down beside him.

The boy, he would’ve almost cried out in shock, if not for the fact that he’d barely spoken a word for the past months. It just stopped at some point – when your body and throat hurt all the time, you just stop at some point.

His rancid father, for once, had stopped though as well. He was staring at the contents spilling out of the box, just like the boy. They were both silent and staring, doing the same thing — a rare occurrence in this house, if not the first.

The boy had no words. There were things flowing out he’d never seen before. No, he'd seen them, he just never understood what they were good for. Stuffed animals with limp head and legs, made of faded fabric and empty beady eyes, garish toys of plastic he couldn’t recognize, with their sharp and hard edges and jarring neon bright colors, little pieces of clothes that looked like a doll's, and square books with thickly pages, different from the few ones left in the living room. Not just because they were still so clean and untouched, but they also looked blockier, colorful — more childish somehow.

“What is this...?” he was almost about to ask. But before he could move, his father had exploded in another fit of rage, snatched the box with both his arms and stormed out of the room, out of the flat, his heavy steps echoing down the stairwell, still audible even from the boy's far away room.

The boy, stunned by what just happened, climbed down from his bed, looked at everything. The fall from the box had scattered his things across the floor like broken pieces of glass, and there was a new dent in the wall, next to the dozen other ones.

Dusting off his shorts, he knelt down to pick up the debris from the ground again. Just like after any other tantrum from that rancid father of his, he was used to it by now. And even though he knew it would happen again very soon, he wanted his own room to feel at least a little bit clean. He didn’t care about the clean in itself, he just wanted it to be different from the rest of this place.

As he bent on the floor to retrieve the last scattered things, he spotted something unfamiliar wedged beneath the bed – a flat object with thickly pages.

He pulled it out... it was a book. His eyes widened. It must’ve fallen off from that box and slipped away from his father's sight.

He inspected it closely.

The book wasn’t clean and untouched anymore. There was a dent on the edge that must've come from the fall, the dust from under the bed was clinging onto its cover, and the hands of that boy had smudged and sullied it all over. The book wasn’t clean and untouched anymore, not like when it had been those four, five years lying dormant on top of his closet. It was one of them now — it was trash.

He studied the cover; it showed the drawing of a flying star and a child. A fantasy story?

He opened the first page. There was a small sketch of a star in the corner, and something written in ink above it. He turned to the next page. It was another colored picture, this time bigger, depicting a nightsky full of twinkling stars, and above it were now even more written lines. He flipped again, again, and again, it was a book made of drawings and words above them. The boy couldn’t read, but he didn’t care for the words anyway, he was engrossed in the pictures, the lines, the soft and warm colors, not like those ugly bright colors of those plastic toys he’d seen minutes ago, no – these drawings had something soothing and gentle in them, they looked like the crayon paintings that sometimes appeared on the streets, just so, so much better and closer and real.

He liked the feeling the drawings gave him, but he wasn't sure if he liked what was inside them. Was it because he couldn't tell what the story was about? Flipping through it, there was this yellow star from the cover, an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud, a laughing man in a blue shirt and a smiling woman in a red dress; and towards the end of the pages, there was a child. He didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, but he stared at the child for a long while and he wondered: why are you only there towards the end of the story, even though you’re the one on the front of the book?

And although he found this book strange, he wanted to keep it. He thought, if I'm going to like this book, then it has to earn it my like first. Because he needed to be frugal with what he cared for after all, he didn’t have all the room in the world.

He was still so caught up in it when he suddenly heard sounds, heavy footsteps, coming up the stairway again. He panicked and glanced around quick, then stashed the book under a blanket in his closet.

That book must have been from the stranger after all — He couldn’t let that rancid father of his find it, under no circumstances. This was a trace: a remnant, a footprint. A memory. It was proof that there was once a life that could've been.

And he’d keep it under that musty green blanket in the closet. He’d hug it whenever he couldn’t fall asleep. And sometimes, as he lay there in the quiet darkness, he wished he could remember the first year or two of his life, even though he’d been nothing but an infant back then. But then maybe he would've remembered the face of that stranger, the traces of those objects telling the story of a warmth that once used to be.

He was born from a star.

He was eight and a half now, he wasn’t a boy any longer. Summer break was over, and he’d been going to school for two years now. Or rather, he was supposed to – he never went of course. Every child in this country was supposed to go to school; it was law, and even that rancid father of his couldn’t be bothered to evade law.

It was law, but it wasn’t law how people worked.

It wasn’t law when he’d shown up late to class on the very first day, all alone. Apparently they had another sort of event going on before that, but instead of carrying a jarringly colorful spiky bag covered with glitter and dinosaurs, he’d carried the old patched up backpack that had collected dust in the living room, and the kid next to him had made fun of it — and the boy, as a response, had just punched him in the face and ran out of school. He’d come home, the first day, and that rancid father of his had sat on the coach and stopped to look at him. And then he'd laughed. “That’s right, little runt, you see it now?” he'd said, laughing like a maniac, “You’re better off doing errands and work, you’re better off this way because you don’t belong there — No, you don’t belong anywhere!!”

That wasn’t part of the law, and it also wasn’t law if he never showed up again afterwards. It wasn’t law if all the adults never paid any attention, and at some point all stopped bothering to care.

So instead of sitting obediently at a table, writing the same wonky letters again and again, wrapping his head around imaginary numbers, he’d gone out into the world instead, the real world; taking things, stealing, selling them off, a boy his age. No one ever questioned it because first: it wasn’t law, and second: the boy never questioned it himself.

He didn’t question it because for him, that was his life; and for him, that was all there would ever be to it. Except—he still wanted to know what the book was about.

So he learned how to read.

On his way to his errands, he’d sometimes pass a dusty side street few people ever bothered to visit. There was an old geezer—a suspicious, rough-looking old gramps—who ran the second-hand bookshop next to the gaudy jeweler's. And he'd often give the boy funny faces. Or at least, they were supposed to be funny. The boy wasn't really sure what to make of the weird scrunchy eyebrows or curled up noses or stuck out tongues always appearing on that wrinkled old face. One day, after his usual haul from the supermarket, the boy had passed the shop, and the geezer had asked, “Boy, why aren’t ya in school?”

And the boy, who felt like he hadn’t spoken to a real person in ages, could only stay silent.

But inside, he was seething.

That old gramps—was he stupid?? It was afternoon already, of course he wouldn’t be at school at this time!!

“I always see ya loitering around here,” the old geezer sneered, “don’t think I haven’t noticed! You’re always around in the morning too, skulking, always on the look-out for somethin’. What's going on, huh? Scared you’ll get caught for something bad?”

At the mention, the boy’s heart almost jumped out of his chest. The surprise must’ve shown on his face—the geezer just cackled out loud, all amused. He grabbed something from his vest and held out his hand in a suspicious gesture. “Here, have some candy!”

And he opened it to reveal a few pieces of candy. The boy's eyes widened. It was wrapped chocolate candy—he'd seen those before, in the supermarket.

But he didn’t move, kept his hands in his pockets.

“You don’t want it?” the old man asked.

The boy didn't answer.

“Fine!” The old man shrugged and threw one into his mouth. “Mmmh, it’s so good! I love me some candy~!”

The boy curled his fingers at the sight. The gramps was munching on it like some kind of gorilla, moving and chewing way more than you'd ever need for something so small.

But the look on his face, it was so incredibly blissful delighted. He kept mmmming and aaaaing, and the boy couldn’t help but stare at him with big, wide, open eyes for the entire time. Finally, his craving curiosity betrayed him.

“...One,” he mumbled, keeping his face under his hoodie.

“Oh?” The old geezer stopped to look at him. “Ya already rejected my offer before though.”

The boy stared at the ground, muttering under his breath, “Just… one.”

The old geezer blinked in surprise, then laughed out loud. “Just one, huh? Fine! But be careful not to get hooked on these!” And he dropped one piece of candy into the boy’s hand.

The boy warily peeled off the wrapping paper, revealing a single ball of chocolate. He recognized it from the picture on the larger packages he'd seen—it wasn’t just chocolate, but the kind with a nutty filling hidden inside.

The boy faltered. He knew what sweets tasted like. He’d stolen one or two from supermarkets and restaurant entrances and cashier desks before. But it was complicated. How to say... He loved the way sugar melted on his tongue. It was bliss, pure and simple – but he also loathed it so much. Because every time he got a taste of that sweetness, he'd be left with that wicked, lingering craving, he wanted more, but oftentimes there just wasn’t more – that was it, all that's left, just a single piece.

Stealing larger amounts had never been an option. If anything, they were on the very end of his priority list. His bag would be filled with bread, eggs and milk first, before any useless candy or treats. Especially this brand he’d never even considered before. The big, crinkly plastic packaging it always came in made too much noise and would draw too much attention.

But... maybe, just maybe, he should've still tried it out at some point.

Because when he put that ball of chocolate in his mouth, his whole body and face suddenly lit up. A burst of chocolate and nuts flooding his senses—it was so scrumptious, like heaven, deliciously sweet! But not the sickly kind of sweetness he had with other candy before, no, this was warm and gentle and just the right amount. The filling inside had a funny texture, crumbly yet soft, and it was so satisfying to chew on. He closed his eyes, savoring the taste, soaking it all in. And although the ball was small, he kept it in his mouth, licking and chewing for as long as he could, when eventually he realized there was nothing left and all that remained was the empty aftertaste of that pure, rich chocolate.

As he finished licking the last remnants from his teeth, he glanced down at the empty wrapper in his hand and tucked it into his pocket. Then, he turned to the old man.

The old man was silent. He’d been watching the boy for the entire time, and now he was just staring back at him blankly—an indescribable look on his face. The boy blinked. What was wrong with the old geezer this time? He’d never seen someone do that kind of face before. But… but it felt familiar somehow. It almost reminded him of himself. The face he’d sometimes see in the reflection of his mirror.

Then, suddenly, the old geezer shook his head, grumbling low. His wrinkly face broke into an obnoxious wide grin. It stretched from one ear all the way to the other, and he laughed, “Ha, it’s good, right? Told ya so!” Scoffing, be added, “They got that price tag for a reason!”

He knocked on his pocket, and the sound of wrapping paper crinkling against each other could be heard from miles away.

“I’m not the richest man myself, ya see. I already gave you one – If ya want more, ya gonna have to earn it!”

The boy looked up surprised. “...earn it...?”

“Come with me!” The old geezer opened the door to the shop, gesturing him to follow inside. The boy narrowed his eyes. “Don’t worry,” the old man only grinned at him, “I don't bite! I’m an upright citizen of this country, I tell ya!”

Following an awkward silence, he shook his head and added, “If yer worried about other people, no one's here. Not a soul shopping out here at this time of the day anyway!” And he went inside the shop, leaving the door open.

The boy clenched his fists.

He didn’t what had pushed him that moment. It definitely wasn't the candy. But that uneasy feeling he'd usually have with strangers... it wasn't there, he couldn't feel it for once. Probably because that geezer wasn't a stranger — he was just some old lunatic.

In the end, the boy followed the man into the bookshop — and to say it was chaos inside would be a lie. It was chaos, and everything else: left and right, above and under, front and back, wherever you looked. It wasn’t dirty or ragged, or rotten like his home, it was a surprisingly orderly kind of chaos, but it was filled to the brim with things he thought waste of space—papers, books, magazines, records and countless other items strewn around the ground, spilling over the shelves and tables, with not a centimeter left untouched. There was a faint rusty smell in the air, mingling with the scent of old wood and paper. It was an odd smell, unlike anything the boy ever smelled before. It felt so strange to his nose, like it should've been mucky and off-putting, but he actually liked it; there was something warm and comforting underneath.

“As you can see,” the old man turned to him, “this place’s quite a mess. My customers tell me they find that part of the charm, but eh.” He sighed. “When ya get old like me, ya start to forget about where you’ve put certain things.”

He gestured towards an empty chair – or maybe not quite so empty, this place was chaos after all. There were scarfs and hats hung up on the chair's rails and arms, and it looked like some sort of makeshift clothes rack. And there was a weird red cushion on top of the seat with something written on it.

The boy stopped and looked at the old man with a questioning glance. The old man only waved again, “Whatcha doing? Just sit already, I've got stuff to tell ya.”

So without second thought, the boy sat down on the chair. But then—

Ppfofffffpffpfph!!

“AaH!” The boy jolted up in surprise. What in the world was that?! He spun around to look at the chair – or no, the red cushion on top!! Was that the thing that made the awful sound just now??

“Hahaha!!” The old man next to him suddenly burst into laughter.

The boy snapped toward him, breath hitching. “What– what… what did I just do?”

“Pfffft, hahaha!!” The old man just kept on laughing, pounding on the table like a damn lunatic! The boy frowned, growing irritated—he didn’t understand what in the world just happened. When he looked at the cushion and gave it a push, it made that pfofffffpffpfp sound again!

“What-what is this?!” he yelped, voice high.

“I’m sorry–sorry,” the old man screeched, still giggling under his breath, “I didn’t expect ya to actually sit on there!!”

“What is this?” the boy asked again, tone harder now. He still didn’t quite get what was happening, but was that old man making fun him? He scowled, unsure, but if he was then the boy didn’t like it one bit.

“It’s–” the old man wheezed, trying to compose himself, “it’s a cushion that lets out a fart sound when you sit on it!”

…What?

The boy’s eyes widened. “A fart sound..? Why would you want something like that..?”

“To make people laugh, of course!!” And the old geezer burst out laughing again, and he hit on the table and then on his knee, and upon hitting his knee he yowled a bit and flapped his hand while he spat out a few improper curses, something the boy was much more familiar with.

After a while, the gramps had finally calmed down, and he leaned back in his chair and heaved out a heavy loud breath. “Save to say, it worked, boy... yer a strange fellow, but you've got promise. You could make a real good comedian with that deadpan face of yours!”

The boy didn’t get what he was saying, and in that moment also really didn't want to.

“Anyway kid,” the old man huffed again, crouching forward on his seat, “back to the topic. Like I said, I’m getting pretty old, and this place’s a mess.” He pointed towards the different bookcases, tables, shelves and boxes inside the shop. “I need some young flesh to help me carry all this stuff around. And since ya don’t go to school anyway, might as well give an old man a hand and earn yourself a few treats on the way, eh?”

The boy looked at the gramps and shook his head.

“I go,” he said. “I go to school.”

“Liar,” the old man snorted. “You look like you should be in second or third grade already. But you couldn’t even read what was on the cushion just now!”

The boy’s eyes widened, glancing to the chair again. “What..?”

“It says Fuuuurz, boy,” the old man said as he spread his arms wide, “FUUUUURZ. Let that be ingrained in your head!!”

What..! Faaaaart? The boy's face flushed bright red, realizing how easily his mishap just now could’ve been prevented.

At the rare sight of the boy's embarrassment, the old geezer couldn't help but chuckle again. “Don’t worry, kid — your dignity's staying with me!” He winked, then gestured towards the messy shelves again.

“It’s a lotta work, but you’ll get some good rewards. So what’dya say?”

...Good rewards? What was the old geezer talking about? It was just candy. He wouldn’t give out free labor just for some fleeting moments of unsatisfactory gratification.

Besides, when he let his gaze wander over the shop... this looked like an impossible task after all. Cleaning, he already wasn’t the best at it. And he didn’t know if it was their flat's fault or his own, but he couldn’t remember that place he called home ever looking clean even once his whole life. He already needed so long to clean his own little room. And ‘clean’, in this case, just meant picking up the things that'd been thrown on the ground again. Compared to that, this place was too different after all. The chaos wasn't on the floor, it was all on the tables and cases and shelves, it was filled with so many, too many things. There was no chance they'd ever be able to clean this all up in a lifetime.

The boy clenched his fists.

But… still. There was something in here. Something that dizzied and blurried his brain, made it mushy and weird and cloud his judgement. The candy, the old gramps, and the nice, woody smell… if he was going to loiter round the streets during day anyway, he’d rather spend his hours in here instead, maybe even do something seen as ‘good’ for once – and he could get rewarded on top of that.

He threw another piece of candy into his mouth. “I’ll help.”

Before the geezer could even register what happened, the boy was already chewing nonchalant on the reward he was supposed to get after work.

The gramps gasped. “Wha–how—?” He spun around himself, patting his pockets in surprise, then stared wide-eyed at the boy.

“How’d ya do that?” he asked in astonishment, then with an irritatingly delighted smile on his face.

“I’ll help,” the boy just said again, “But I want a different reward instead.”

“Oh..?” The old man blinked, curious.

The boy mustered up all the weight in his chest and said – as threateningly as he could – “I want you to teach me how to read.”

…The old man blinked again.

He blinked a few times, and the boy wondered if he might’ve demanded too much after all – when he suddenly burst into big laughter, again!

“Wha...?” The boy’s eyes widened.

“Dear, oh dear,” the old man wheezed out loud, “I was going to do that either way!!” He grinned at the boy, “—You’re in a bookshop! Ya won’t be of any help around here if ya can’t even read!!”

And the boy’s face flushed bright red again, while the annoying old geezer kept laughing like a loony, which he found annoying, so very annoyingly annoying. But the boy didn’t know why, there was also something else inside him. This sound of laughter filling the air, this old rusty smell of wood and books seeping through the shop, the lingering taste of chocolate and nuts and sweetness in his mouth, this place with this clutter and this atmosphere—he really didn’t know why it all felt so soft and warm in his chest. Like a light or a candle had been lit inside him, a small and faint and feeble one. But he didn’t know why it also all felt so wrong, like he wasn't supposed to feel this way. And he couldn’t even really tell if he liked this feeling or not, he really couldn’t. There were good and bad things conflicting in his heart, an almost primal instinct inside him that needed this gone, needed him to get rid of it. But he thought, even if he tried, he didn’t know if he could – he could try to put out the flame, but the warmth would still remain.

If… if this feeling did indeed stay. If it stayed, for just a little while longer... then he wouldn’t mind it.

If that happened, then he also really wouldn’t mind that at all...

Over the next few weeks, the old geezer slowly guided the boy through the basics of reading. Starting from the alphabet, to numbers and signs, to simple words, sentences and eventually entire paragraphs and texts.

It was almost astonishing really, how fast that boy could learn — or rather how eager he was to pick it all up. The old geezer didn’t quite understand how. Was it because all the boy's attention was focused solely on words, whereas other children learned numbers, arts and science alongside? Or was it simply because that boy, more than many other kids his age, poured all his free time of the day into learning rather than playing outside? Or was it a mix of all these things?

It’s a shame, the old geezer had thought quietly, that he won’t go to school. Alas, he has to teach himself the knowledge of the world through books and silly old me instead, than how it would've been through ordinary classes and teachers.

Meanwhile, the boy had long passed the skill level required to read that book filled with children's drawings. A few weeks after he started going to that geezer, he decided to read the story he’d been wondering about for three whole years – And it turned out to be dogshit.

The story was about the birth of a child. How the parents made some sort of wish towards an omniscient old man, and the child was created as a star in the sky, then dropped down towards Earth and came out of its shell. It was as nonsensical as tales like these could get, it was selling a lie, and the boy asked himself – what even was the point of this story? Every story was supposed to have a point or message, no? That’s what the old geezer told him. But he couldn’t see it in this one. There was no protagonist, no conflict, no flaws, no resolution, it was presented like a matter of fact without actual basis. It was dumb and absolutely pointless, just like all the other blocky picture books he’d found stashed in the shelves of that old bookshop. He’d rather read the books about science and real life instead, the ones he’d seen the old gramps lost in sometimes. He’d tried one before, but at this point of time his skills still weren't good enough to just read any book he liked.

Why, then, was he left with this single piece of nonsense? He felt betrayed. He wanted to throw it away, even though the pictures had given him comfort for three whole years, even though this was one of the last remnants of a life that could have been. He wanted to throw it away, but… but he could never do that. Because there was one other thing in it that was priceless to him — the first page.

If you opened the first page, there’d be a small, sketchy drawing of a star in the corner. And above it, written in cursive and dark blue ink was:

für Michael

…to Michael.

He'd read it in silence, and for the first time in forever this name, which was supposed to be his, had echoed through his mind again.

Für Michael.

Für Michael.

He didn’t know what to make of it. To him, he was I, and to his father he was piece of trash, and then except for that, there'd never been anyone else in his life that had needed to call him by his name.

Für Michael.

Für Michael.

He didn’t know if he even liked it or not. It was just like all the other things in his life – at some point, everything just started to feel so wrong — no matter how, no matter what, why and where, it just felt wrong; and this name, which was given to him, which was supposed to be his, he wanted to refuse it, wanted it to leave him alone. Yet, at the same time... he wanted to accept and embrace it too. Wanted to claim it for himself, so, so badly.

Für Michael.

Für Michael.

Michael was his name. He found it again and it found him again, and whether he liked it or not, the fact this was his name he couldn't change. It felt wrong, and he didn’t know if he'd ever be capable of truly embracing it – but just like that warm feeling in his chest from the bookshop, he thought... he wouldn't mind. If this was his name after all, then he really wouldn't mind.

Michael… Michael was his name.

Micha smiled.

Micha frowned.

Micha sulked.

Micha grumbled.

Micha looked towards the door.

Micha looked at the closet.

Micha looked out the window.

…Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all. He would have to get used to it again, this piece of treasure he found and that found him. But if he could slowly regain his identity, if he could build and make something out of it once more—then it was maybe a good thing after all.

Micha looked back at the book.

Für Michael.

Für Michael.

Für Michael – he continued staring at the words for a long while. He thanked the words, and he thought about where they came from.

Except for the drawing, there was nothing else on the page. There was no signer, no other words indicating who could’ve written that name. But he knew… he knew there was only one person who could’ve done it.

The stranger whose womb he'd come from.

She wasn’t a mystery to him. She was a real star, ironically.

Although his father had tried to erase all traces of her existence except for the rose, it wasn’t like he could erase the traces of her that lived in the present. She was a star, and apparently she was an actress, because that one evening a few years ago, when his father had watched TV after dinner and Micha, as a sort of punishment, had to stand and observe silently from the corner – the TV had been glowing bright blue in the dim room, illuminating only the couch and the face and heavy body of his father – he’d seen, in that moment, his eyes go blank wide, as on the screen a woman appeared with the face of an angel: luscious blond hair, striking blue eyes, and a charming confident smile that made even Micha’s heart flutter... and just a split second later his father had almost bashed the TV in in a fit of rage. And looking back, he wished his father would’ve gone through with it, he really wished that because then he might’ve not turned towards Micha instead, might not have stormed over and pushed him to the ground instead, beating, cursing, choking him almost unconscious, and he might’ve been able to hold the image of that beautiful woman in his mind, wallow on it for just a little while longer. But instead, he’d been hit with the face of reality;

“Why, why,” his father had panted under his ragged breaths, “why do you look just like her, why? Why can't she stop haunting me, even so many years after, why did she decide to leave me with the garbage that's you?!”

That stranger was the reason his life was like this right now.

She was the reason why his father was like this, why their home was like this, why his own little ragged self was like this.

Yet, whenever he saw her pictures on the streets, her photos and ads and posters and face plastered on columns and walls and tall towering billboards, with that poise, that smile, that confident smile – he’d reach out his hand just ever so slightly. He didn’t know why, but he thought; she was so close yet so far away, and if he could, he wouldn’t mind falling down again... he wouldn't mind falling down onto Earth into her hands again. If he could do that, if it was possible, then he really wouldn’t mind. 

So despite the story he couldn’t believe, he chose to keep the book, chose to treasure it. And he’d hug it once in a while whenever he went to sleep, even though books were really not meant to be hugged. This rough feeling of hard edges and corners digging into his skin – it just became another part of his life.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*  *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Even in hard times, there was comfort in things. Even when winter arrived and the cold air barged in, and the flat became freezing and blank white grey, there was comfort in things. The streets outside, with their flashing bright lights, draped like a jeweled net over the barren trees, the graining sound of Christmas music booming over hidden speakers into every little corner, the bustling crowds of people with their heavy winter coats and ridiculously big scarves and hats, staggering under the weight of overflowing bags full of gifts and luxuries whose names you could only guess – and meanwhile there was Micha, walking through the streets with the same things he’d been wearing spring, summer, autumn.

Except, he was wearing a scarf right now – a reward, or ‘gift’ from the old geezer. “Boy! You can’t walk around like this, it’s damn freezing outside!” the old man had said, “Here, take my scarf and the hat and these gloves–“ “I don’t want them!” “You have to!!” and they’d gotten into a fight; but Micha didn’t want anything, he’d already received enough from the old man. Yet that geezer had been so maddeningly persistent, holding him captive in the shop, almost making him late for his errands! And in the end, he had no choice but to accept the scarf at least.

Now, he was trudging through the cold, down the dreary shopping streets again. The neighborhood they lived in was teeming with shadows: the critters, the bad people, the homeless, alcoholics, and drug addicts. They rarely showed themselves in the daylight, but if you paid attention, you’d catch glimpses of them—lurking at the edges of alleys, huddled beneath bridges, waiting for the night to claim them like wolves emerging from their dens. But in festive seasons like these, where shiny and vibrant frills dangled left and right, the upbeat tunes of music twirled through the air and people bustled around in a jolly mood, all that darkness and muck of the city faded away, overlit by the dazzle of Christmas.

Yet again, this was a thing Micha didn't know if he liked or not. He couldn’t care less about all of these festivities, nor could he care any less about his birthday, which was just around the corner. They didn’t mean anything to him, and they never had all this time before.

But, this year… this year might prove to be different for once.

As with any festive holiday, people were enticed to spend and indulge. Shops lining the street flaunting their big display windows, with the latest fashion collections draped over slender mannequins, flashy gadgets promising cutting-edge technology at a so-called “special price”, and shelves brimming with colorful, quirky toys of every kind–from small miniatures to large kitchen replicas, to soft fabric animals to hard building blocks. Even the jeweler next to the bookshop had joined in on the fun, dressing their windows with tinsel and twinkling lights, though their exorbitant prices remained eye-watering even after all the supposed discounts.

Micha could only scoff at the sight that was offered to him left and right. This was a completely different world to his own. He had no place here, and he didn’t want one. Where he belonged was the cold, shuttering flat he grew up in. The dirty, cramped back alleys, where the overlooked and forgotten roamed. And also this old, cluttered bookshop he was entering now – with only a string of modest fairy lights framing the windows, and a handmade Christmas wreath from one of the regulars, hanging crookedly on the door. There was simply no space for anything else, once the carts with all the books were put up outside in front of the windows.

Although Micha had been coming here nearly every other day for almost three months now, they’d barely cleaned up anything. Most of the time initially had been spent teaching him how to read, and after that, whenever the old gramps had suggested kicking off his grand clean-up plan, the effort would resolve and the gramps would reclude himself into a corner as soon as he'd gotten his hands on a book that caught his interest – which was usually the very first one he picked up.

Learning from his example, Micha often did the same, and he’d found a plethora of books that he’d been meaning to start but never found enough time to. He would only ever read when he was here, one to two hours a day inside the shop, because this was the place where all the books belonged to after all.

Sometimes, the geezer would say, “Just take them with you! No one’s gonna buy these obscure books you like anyway—!!” But Micha had refused each time. First of all – the books he was interested were not obscure. They talked about scientific discoveries and human history, about perception of space, and unassuming knowledge that might prove useful later, like the hidden body language of domesticated wild cats.

Second of all – just like with the scarf, he disliked taking so many things from the geezer. He’d taught him reading and that was enough, he didn't want any more; he wanted this whole thing to stay purely transactional.

And third… he didn’t know how he would've explained bringing all these new books home to his father. Although he could've had of course said that he stole them – but it would’ve felt wrong somehow, to say that something this valuable was stolen.

“Fine then,” the old geezer had only said, “it just means that you’ll come here more often to read, eh? More company for me!”

And today — it was already the Second Advent — they were sitting in the back of the shop clean... no, reading again. And just like any other day, the geezer asked him to take a book home, and Micha refused.

As they sat in silence, the old man kept drumming his fingers against the table, mind seemingly somewhere else. Micha found the constant tapping mildly irritating, but said nothing. At last, the geezer finally broke the silence, voicing what had likely been weighing on him for weeks.

“Say, kid… isn’t it boring hanging around old me all the time?” he asked, shaking his head. “Truly, I’ve never seen a boy read as much as you!”

“…”

“Don’t you wanna go outside, hang out with the other kids sometimes? My grandchildren, they're about yer age, and they always want to go out. Always ask me to play tag or frisbee or soccer with 'em.” He snorted, throwing up his hands. “But look at me – I’m an old man already! My knee would give out before I could even make the first kick!!”

“…”

“Don’t turn out like me, boy! Move your body and stay fit while you still can!!”

And as the old man rambled on, Micha just kept his nose buried in the pages. He didn’t want to talk about any of this, but he listened anyway. He didn't feel like playing with the other kids. Never had. He wasn't like them, and he didn't want to be. Instead, he wanted to grow up—fast. He wanted to grow up so that he could leave this place, become an independent adult, get his own clean flat and make real adult transactions with real adult people. But, he also thought, he didn’t wanna grow up too fast, otherwise he’d end up like this old geezer right here.

“By the way,” the old geezer went on, “I never asked yer age. How old are you?”

“...eight.”

“Aha! That's when I had my first crush!”

“...”

“And when’s your birthday?”

“…25th of December.”

“Ah—that's just around the corner!!?” the old man yelped in surprise. “But also Mighty God — what an unlucky day!!”

Micha blinked confused. “Why...?”

“Well don’tcha only get half the presents every year then? Knew a guy once, his big day was on the 24th. And he always complained about it – how his parents cut corners, and all of his friends were away with their families, y’know. But I said to him, you’re lucky to even get gifts at all!! ‘Twas a hard time back then, I still clearly remember. Christmas, it was completely different… couldn’t imagine the streets looking even half as decent as today. We weren't even really allowed to call it Christmas, hear...!”

And he rambled on again, about traditions and the break of those traditions and the past, and Micha saw that it made him really passionate, but he really couldn’t care less about any of that. The old geezer was talking about a time from half a century ago, and Micha lived here, in the present. He didn’t need to know about any of that.

“…Anyway,” the gramps eventually sighed, “sadly, just like that guy’s friends, I won’t be around during holidays. Gotta see my daughter and her kids in the countryside, eat that awful goose she always makes. She's always complainin' that I shouldn't live by myself, but look at her – she can't even cook without me there to help! I have to go all the way to her just for the goose!!” He grunted, dramatic. “And how come a gramps like me's still living in the city, while the whole rest of the family’s now stuck outside? The world’s gone crazy, I tell ya!”

Micha chuckled faintly, despite himself.

“So I won’t be here on your birthday,” the old man went on, rubbing his chin, “but I’ll still think of something for ya.”

After that, Micha had hung around the shop for another hour or so, not doing any of the cleaning he was supposed to. When it was time to head out for his work, the old geezer had stopped him at the entrance.

“Boy,” he’d said, “make sure to come back next week.” He'd smiled, like the loony that he was. “There’s gonna be a surprise for ya!”

And those words had lingered in Micha’s mind when he’d returned home. They had lingered when he’d sunken into his bed, falling asleep with his book next to him. And they'd lingered over the next few days, over Sunday and Monday when the shop was closed, and they lingered when he was out in the day doing his errands and his work and his misdeeds again.

Up until now, that's all there had been – just simply trying to get by, his days filled up with the sole efforts of staying alive. But now somehow, this new thing that would always float at the back of his mind and distract him had appeared — when he'd passed the sweets shelf on his errand on Monday, he'd unwittingly let the eggs slip out his bag. By the time the staff noticed he'd long disappeared, but he was thinking to himself, a distraction, a distraction, it must be a bad thing after all.

Yet, whenever night fell and he was left all alone with his thoughts, instead of blaming these thoughts, he let them linger in his mind.

The night, it had grown bitterly cold, and his run-down, paper-thin blanket just wasn’t cutting it anymore. But each time the memory of those words resurfaced inside, they would warm him up in the chest, just a little bit.

And slowly... he was realizing. He didn’t want to admit, but he couldn't help it — he realized he was actually looking forward to something now... He was looking forward to what the geezer had said. He was looking, towards the future, just ever so slightly, not because he wanted the present gone, but because for once, he wanted the future to come.

He wanted to know what the geezer would give him.

And he was going to accept it. He didn't know what it was but he wanted to accept it too. Even if it meant he wouldn't give anything in return, even if it meant he would make this something more than transactional. But he thought to himself, maybe it already was. Maybe it already had been, long ago.

On the morning, after three days passed, he'd woken up in his bed. And for the first time in forever, he’d woken up and thought at the same time: maybe it wasn’t so bad to wake up in the cold after all. Even in times like these, there was still comfort in things. 

So he was walking down the now so familiar side street again, where even during Christmas time, only a few souls could ever be seen. This stretch of road was quieter than most after all, the usual hum of the season muffled in the tucked-away corner. He turned round the crossing and passed the jewelers again, stopping at the entrance of the second-hand bookshop. When he reached for the door, he tried to push it open, but it didn’t budge.

It didn't budge. It was locked.

He peered through the glass. The shop… it was dark inside.

The old geezer hadn’t opened yet? But it was afternoon already. The carts that were usually put up front weren’t out yet either... that was strange.

Micha stepped back again, glancing around. The people on the streets were just passing by – they didn’t look at the shop, didn’t notice him or the closed door, they just strolled past as if this was normal — as if there was nothing off about this.

He shook his head to himself. Of course they wouldn’t know... the few customers that came here were all regulars. Why would strangers find any of this odd?

He looked around again. He decided to ask in the jewelry shop next door. He knew that he didn’t look the part to step inside, with his age and that ragged get-up of his, but he had no choice.

The small bell above the door jingled as he went in.

“...A child?” the cashier muttered, surprised. “Where are your parents, kid..?” His voice drifted off when he noticed the scruffy clothes on the kid.

Micha ignored his question. “Where’s the old geezer from the bookshop next here?”

The cashier blinked. “Oh, him? I was wondering about that as well. He’s usually already open by the time I get here.” Then he shrugged, smiling hesitantly. “Maybe he just had an appointment today or something?”

No, that couldn’t be right. The geezer did have an appointment, but it had been an appointment with him.

Micha clenched his fists. Without a word, he turned out the shop again, leaving the cashier only looking after him puzzled.

Micha returned to the bookshop door and decided to just wait in front of it. He had no way to contact the geezer, so all he could do was wait and hope. He still had a few errands to run later, but he came here today earlier than usual – he could wait two or three hours depending on the weather.

Some forty minutes or so must’ve passed. Micha was still just sitting next to the entrance, when a middle-aged woman in a long coat appeared around the corner. When her gaze landed on him, she stopped in her tracks, eyes narrowing slightly.

“You…!” she suddenly gasped, striding toward him.

Micha startled, scrambling to his feet. He turned to run, but the woman was quick and blocked his path.

“Hey, don’t leave!” she huffed, flustered. “You’re the boy who’s been hanging around Hr. Heinrich, aren’t you?”

Micha halted. “Herr… Herr Heinrich?” he repeated, confused.

The woman only stared at him for a moment, stunned. “The shop owner!” she then clarified, voice a little high. “You… you didn’t know his name?”

Micha blinked. “...He never told me.” I never told him mine either.

The woman, still a bit taken aback, just sighed eventually. “Anyway, boy... it’s probably better if you go home now...” She flashed him a faint smile. Almost rueful. “Mr. Heinrich won’t be back... not for a while at least.”

Micha froze.

...What? Why?

There was something in the way she said those words, like an irrefutable fact of truth, that made his chest tighten.

“What..?” he croaked, this time out loud.

The woman's features suddenly softened. Her tone was somber. “Mr. Heinrich, he... as you might know, he's always had a bad knee. And yesterday night…” She looked to her feet, pausing in her words. Sighing quietly.

“...He had an accident. Slipped on the ice, landed very badly. He’s in the hospital right now, it’s not life-threatening, but… the doctors. They don’t know if he’ll be able to walk properly again in the future.”

Micha’s heart dropped to the ground.

“N-no…” He clenched his jaw, trying to say something, something coherent—but his throat was getting so tight, all he could do was shake his head in denial.

The woman raised her hands. “Don’t-don't worry! His daughter’s with him, she’s taking care of everything right now. I helped with Mr. Heinrich’s accounting sometimes, so she called me this morning to explain.”

Micha swallowed hard. “Wh-What about the shop?”

“I… I don’t know. Mr. Heinrich... he’s always been more of a collector than a shopkeeper, really. He loved... ah, I mean—loves gathering all sorts of things. Things most people would've just thrown away.”

She shook her head, her face filling with a quiet wistfulness. “But with his injury… I don’t know if he’ll be able to keep running this shop. He’s getting older, you know. He mainly opened this place to pass the time, make a few bucks here and there, maybe get rid of some of the stuff he’s collected over the years.”

Her eyes drifted to the cluttered display visible through the glass door, and Micha’s gaze followed. The shop, usually so alive with books and odd trinkets, felt empty now, almost mournful in its stillness.

“And I'm not sure his family—his daughter will want to deal with all this,” she added with uncertainty. “It’s a lot to sort through. If he can’t manage it himself…” She trailed off, glancing at the ground again.

Micha’s throat tightened. He couldn't say anything, couldn't really think clearly right now. And he couldn’t believe the words that woman was saying. She was a regular, he remembered now, he'd seen her before, but he still couldn’t just simply believe her. It couldn't be—that old geezer was supposed to be here today. He was supposed to be here, today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day from Tuesday to Saturday until the Fourth Advent, and then he said he’d go to his family and be back after New Years again; he’d be here again, every day from Tuesday to Saturday. He was not supposed to just… disappear like that. This place, the one place that felt like he belonged to, couldn't just simply disappear like that.

There was a clot in his throat, heavy like lead and thick like tar, and he didn’t know what to do with it. He wanted to get rid of it, cough it up, swallow it down, but it felt impossible.

“Hey... you alright?” The woman looked at him in worry. She saw how tightly Micha was gripping his scarf, knuckles almost white. She’d seen him before, and she’d always found it strange, his unkempt hair and the worn-out clothes he was wearing. She found it strange why Mr. Heinrich had never said a word about it to him or anyone else before, why he’d just always laughed, always treated him like any other kid. And then she realized—maybe that’s why the boy had always come back here in the first place. Maybe that's exactly what he'd wanted, more than anything else.

She tightened the grip on her coat. “...I don't want to give you false hope, Mr. Heinrich wouldn't want that. But he's a tough old man, and nothing's ever set in stone. If he still manages to pull through—and I really want to believe in him—then he'll return. It would take a while before that would happen, but... you should check in here again. Just in case, after New Years or so.” And she bent down to him a little.

“Let's keep our fingers crossed for him, okay?” She made an encouraging fist with her hand, trying to lighten the mood. And although Micha barely looked at it, he nodded, with the clot still in his throat. The woman smiled back, bittersweet. She really did hope for the best. And she said goodbye to the boy and left, and when she boarded the bus, taking her seat, she thought to herself, Oh... I could've given him Mr. Heinrich’s contact info. Not that that old man ever uses his phone...

But what she didn’t know was that that boy never had a real link to the outside world. He couldn't use the landline, and he would never hold a phone until he’d steal his first one at the age of twelve. And what she also didn’t know was that the boy had never allowed many things into his life. He never had much to begin with, and he didn’t want to lose his footing in reality by holding onto too many things. Things he'd never be able to keep anyway, things that would just slip away through his fingers like sand again, just like this, just like what happened today, he knew it, he’d always known, he knew it would've happened eventually.

As he was running back the cold empty streets, he couldn’t get rid of this damn clot in his throat, and he thought, that’s right, I should’ve never allowed this into my life; if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have had all these stupid hopes, all these stupid wishes and cravings and dreams — I wouldn’t have this damn clot in my throat right now.

He was holding onto the scarf, grabbing it tight while the cold wind of the West blew into his face, and he regretted everything, he regretted so much ever stepping foot into that rusty old shop. Yet at the same time, there was a tiny speck in him that wished. It wished he would’ve accepted all those things from the old geezer. It wished he would’ve brought those books home with him, the candy and that ugly thick hat and the oversized gloves, he really wished he would’ve accepted and taken them; he regretted that too.

When he came home and opened the door, his father stood before him.

“What’s this?” his father asked as he held a tattered, blocky picture book in his hand.

The boy froze.

“What’s this?” his rancid father asked. And then again, “What’s this, what’s this, what’s this–” and then he threw the book across the room onto the wall, and it plopped down with a heavy thud as his father snapped towards him, “you had this? You had this, the whole damn time? In your room, hidden from me? You think you could hide her from me, huh—?!” “No–”

“How’d get your hands on that? How’d you get your hands on that thing, huh? You sneaky little bastard, why do you keep this shit when I am fucking trying to clean this goddamn place of all the trash—!”

And when he raised his fist, ready to grab the boy, something caught his eye — the grey scarf wrapped around his neck. He pulled it off while the boy could only stare frozen, and he stared at it with big wide eyes as if he’d stumbled upon his next shiny treasure. Whatever rage had fueled him seconds ago seemed momentarily forgotten. Then came the snarl. “What’s this? You stole this from somewhere? You steal a scarf for yourself, but not for your damn father?” And he hurled the scarf against the wall with a sharp, violent fling, spit flying out of his mouth, “Fucking thief.”

No–no, the boy could only shake his head, that scarf wasn’t stolen—it was given to him, he had received it from someone, it was a gift, a gift, a gift gift gift, not something he’d stolen—

“Where’s the food? Your bag’s fucking empty,” his father spat. He grabbed the backpack, looked inside, clicking his tongue in disgust. And with another sudden, vicious thrust, he flung the bag against the wall too, watching as it plopped to the ground alongside all the other trash. “What’s wrong with you these days, you little runt?” he snapped. “Running around all day, going places, doing everything but your fucking errands—you plan on leaving your father, huh? Plan on leaving me all alone here??”

He grabbed ingo the boy and threw him to the ground, towering over him as his thick, calloused hands slowly closed around his neck—

“Well I won’t let you— You have nowhere to go anyway!! You’ll always be something she and I created—always be a piece of trash!!” And as his clutch tightened and tightened like shackles forged from flesh, the boy gasped for air in desperation, but he couldn’t. He couldn't—the eyes looming over him in that dark silhouette, they started glowing like that of a monster’s, and from the nightmare above him escaped a sickening howl, “Doomed by fate, I tell ya!! You and I are doomed by fate—and there’s only one person to blame!!!” His voice was a mockery of joy, an insanity borne from years of bitterness and rage, and he kept laughing like a lunatic, like something that was never human as he squeezed tighter and tighter around his throat; and the boy’s vision was a blur, he saw stars and dots and flashes of black and white, but from the corner of his eyes, he could spot something else – a green blanket crumpled on the coach, musty, old, useless against the cold, but still there. And he realized. And then he realized, delirious, laughing in his head. Ah... I really do hate winter after all. God has played a joke on me yet again. And as his vision faded and his mind slowly edged into unconsciousness, there he felt the clot in his throat disappear as well... and he thought at last. I guess this is where I'm supposed to be. This is me, this is my life. This is where I belong after all.

It was Christmas. The 25th of December.

The blocky book was long gone—tossed into the communal trash outside, whisked to somewhere far away by the garbage men. Even if the boy had sneaked out at night and tried to retrieve it before dawn, he could’ve done nothing about the torn pages and smell of alcohol on them anyway. He'd lost the need in him to hold onto that book at all.

The scarf had been snatched away by his father. He’d worn that thing that was meant for the boy, and he’d worn it ragged in just a matter of weeks. He’d complained about the itchy feeling, then thrown it out in the garbage too. When the boy had gone to retrieve it, it’d been taken away already – by someone who likely needed it more than him.

A few days after his father had strangled him unconscious, there was an incident down the road at the jewelers. It’d been robbed, it seemed—or there'd been an attempt at robbery. In any case, that shop deserved it anyway with those exorbitant high prices. But when the robbers had made a run for it and gotten cornered by the police, the three teens—clumsy and panicked, looking for somewhere to hide—had smashed the window of the bookshop next to it. A bad choice. They had such difficulty navigating inside, knocking over nearly everything in their path, that they'd gotten caught by the police immediately. It was over before it had even begun.

As the boy walked past the crime scene, he stopped at the sagging strip of yellow tape half-heartedly cordoning off the area—flimsy, unlikely to stop anyone. He leaned in, peering through the dusty glass. It was too dark, and too cramped, to make out any clear details, but he didn’t need to see much anyway. He knew what it looked like inside well enough. He’d been in there so many times already, his memory was sharp enough to recall every cluttered corner.

He remembered his past transaction with the owner of that place. He was supposed to help clean it up in exchange for something. But they hadn’t gotten very far with it, and now, it seemed like their inaction had unwittingly helped the police in this case.

The shop, however, now looked more disorderly than ever – no one had bothered to clean it up after the crime. Who would even? The owner was here no longer, and these were all things people considered trash anyway, useless things no one needed or wanted.

There was no one in the world who would ever want to rob this place.

…

The boy glanced around, cautious. After he made sure that no one was watching, he slipped under the tape and climbed through the gap in the broken window.

The rusty, woody old smell was gone. It was silent, no sound anywhere, save for the faint whoosh of wind drifting in through the broken window. His mouth felt dry and bitter, and his body shivered a bit. His hands froze from the cold. And this place, this whole place also just felt cold now.

He wandered around, stepping over piles of scattered books, magazines, and records. The clutter seemed even more chaotic than before, like a graveyard of forgotten things. He walked towards the back of the shop, where he spotted an old chair, still piled high with scarves and hats like some kind of makeshift clothes rack.

He glanced around again. Something was stashed in the shelf next to the desk.

He came closer and saw a red cushion, with words he could read now written on it.

...

...Everything in this place was trash.

Just like in his home, there was nothing of value to people in here, and the only ones who would ever care about trash like that were the humans who'd already lived their lives.

There was really nothing worth stealing in here.

But it was his birthday, and it was Christmas. So might as well take this one thing no one needed.

He was walking down one of the bigger avenues. The shops were all closed by now, but there were still a lot of people around. Christmas music was still blasting through the air, fairy lights were still hung up on barren trees and lanterns, illuminating the cold night streets.

Light snow had started flurrying from the sky.

Although it was already past Christmas Eve, the boy decided to play Santa for once. As he strolled along the sidewalk, turning into a larger plaza, his attention was caught by two kids playing tag around one of the wide trees. They looked like siblings – they had to be, otherwise they wouldn’t be wearing the same scarfs and same hats with the same identical hatch patterns. Two adults that appeared to be their parents were watching them from a bench on the side, and as one of the kids—a little, short girl—tripped and slipped on the snow, the woman shot up, rushing to her in panic.

As she lifted her up, the girl suddenly started crying. But not because she slipped—no, apparently she'd lost the game, as her brother had tagged her before her fall and was now triumphantly strutting round the tree like some self-proclaimed king.

The mother tried to coo the girl with sweet words, but she just kept snobbing, unable to be comforted—whilst her brother, full of smug pride, decided it was time for a rest. Already thinking of the next game, he plopped down on the bench next to his father, when—

Pfofffffpffpfpht!!

The unmistakable sound of an uncomely accident erupted, blasting over the Christmas jingles and echoing across the entire plaza.

A few onlookers turned and chuckled.

“Wha–how–!” The boy sprung up, spinning around in shock, “wha—, who put that there?!” He gasped and stared at the man next to him. “Papa–?!”

“Hey–don’t look at me!” the father yelped, throwing up his hands like a startled criminal. “That wasn’t me!”

The little girl, mind now entirely on the scene, burst into laughter. “Haha! You stink, Willi—you stink!” she teased between giggles. And she really tried to rein it in, but she couldn't help bubbling the whole time, adding, “A kid! There was a kid! Didn’t you see?”

And the father could only shake his head and admit to his lack of spatial awareness, while the boy and the girl already forgot about their game of tag, occupied with the new toy that had appeared as if out of nowhere. The girl, her cheeks rosy from laughter, glanced up and around the plaza once more, trying to spot the mysterious kid she thought she'd seen. But what she didn’t know was that by that point, he was already long gone.

The boy, the dirty and ragged one, dashed by a corner, ran through another snow-dusted road, and he felt like he was supposed to smile or laugh or rejoice at what happened—a good deed, if he could even call it that, for the first time in a long while, he’d given something away again without needing anything in return.

But instead of all that, he slowly came to a halt, and he felt his chest clench and his throat tighten and his vision blur. Something stung, a biting wetness at the corner of his eyes. He brushed it away quickly, as if the cold wind were to blame.

As he walked, his steps quieter now, past the rows of closed and towering shops and their large, dimly lit windows, his mind kept wandering. It kept wandering to things he didn’t want to think about. It kept wandering, to something that once used to be, to things that once could have been.

His treasure was gone, and so was the place he once could have belonged to.

He should've known from the beginning. He should’ve never wanted, never accepted these things in the first place. He should’ve never let them in, never let wishes, never let hope into his life – because then it hurt all the more when they were taken away from him.

The snow stopped falling, and he looked up. He looked at the sea of stars in the sky, and he stretched out his hand.

The stars, they represented the freedom he'd never have.

And they were looking down on him – mocking, taunting his measly existence.

No—they probably didn't even know of it.

If the stars up above, in their oh so high-and-mighty place, couldn’t be bothered to fall down and acknowledge even the average man’s life, then what made him think they would ever be able to see him, ever be capable of acknowledging his?

There was no one in this world who would ever acknowledge his existence. Neither among the stars up above, nor here on this cold, unforgiving Earth. 

Nothing would ever belong to him, and he would never belong to anything.

Nothing belonged to him, and he belonged to nothing.

He'd turned nine on that Christmas.

One or two months after that December, blue-collared men had appeared round the bookshop and started taking everything out; and the clean-up he once thought would take more than a lifetime had been finished in just a matter of days.

The posters he’d sometimes see of the stranger whose womb he came from, her face, her poise, and that smile of hers – they started to move him less and less. There was nothing connecting him to her anymore. There was only the rose, which wasn’t even really his, an object whose meaning he couldn’t comprehend yet. And as he watched himself grow taller and taller, his features sharpening and molding more and more into hers, he slowly started to get sick of her face – because it was now his as well.

Nothing belonged to him, and he belonged to nothing.

He would tell that to himself, again and again, the man, his father, those words would echo inside his mind and repeat like a mantra.

But deep down, he didn't know why; but this felt nothing like those things he didn't mind before. Something felt wrong. No — he knew something was wrong.

His life had been nothing but a collection of trash. Yet even inside that heap of garbage, there’d been moments he'd treasured like gifts.

The experiences that shaped him, the few things that had given him hope, they never completely left his mind. And although they would fade from his memory eventually, the thing that stayed was the ember in his heart, a tiny speck of the hope he resented so much.

Nothing belonged to him, and he belonged to nothing.

But to him, he wouldn't treat it like hope – he didn't want hope to be the thing that would drive him.

Instead, he treated it for what it truly was. A fire, a desire — a search for purpose.

Nothing belonged to him, and he belonged to nothing.

His existence was nothing. It was meaningless.

But that also meant he could give it any meaning he wanted to.

If the stars up above were looking down on him. If heaven couldn't be bothered with existences like his, if he was truly still born from a star, and carried the blessings of God alongside him — then he'd throw it all out the window. He'd drag himself on his own feet, rise, climb his way up, he'd climb the stairs and reach for the sky, reaching for the heavens and then putting them in their place. And when he did, he wouldn't just stop there. He'd go even higher, above them, arriving at the very top – he would become the highest star among them all.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*  *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Three years after that fateful Christmas day, he was walking down the same street again.

Hands buried in the pockets of an oversized black hoodie, and the tattered jeans he’d already worn in spring, summer, autumn. It was cold, but he was used to it by now, had been for as long as he could remember.

He hadn’t touched a book in years; there was simply no place for that in his life anymore. He’d started going for bigger loot now, stealing jewelry, watches, pick pocketing off the street. The naive daydreams of real transactions he’d once had as a kid long left — he was a thief, a criminal now, and he’d come to embrace it. There was simply no place for doubts in his life.

With the loot, he was able to save up money. As he strolled, the sound of it would come out his pockets, a few large bills and coins stashed inside. He’d been saving for more than one, maybe two years already... and today was Christmas. Today was his birthday.

He was walking, and he passed by a big display window. He barely glanced at the festive decorations: Christmas wreaths, gifts and twinkling lights adorned the inside, just like at all the other shops. But instead of displaying fashion, gadgets, or toys, it showed two mannequins, dressed in sports jerseys... Soccer jerseys. The store, purely dedicated to soccer, displayed the usual array of merchandise — cleats, shirts, scarves, all priced higher than they should just because they had special colors and symbols. And then his gaze drifted downwards, landing at a ball at the foot of one of the mannequins.

…A soccer ball.

...

He didn’t care what it was. He just wanted something that wouldn’t be a waste of money. Something solid, something that would last for a while, no matter what he did or what happened to it.

Something that could make him feel something again. Feel alive, just a little bit more.

Something that could maybe even give him meaning, or a purpose, however small it was.

Something that he could accept, without needing anything in return. And that would accept him, without wanting anything in return.

Something that could belong to him, and that he could also belong to.

...A soccer ball.

On that day, he chose something to live for.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*  *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧