Never before in my life, have I felt the urge to record my stories… to lay down scenes from my past, or immediate present on paper. It is a thing that I would defy my students to participate in. It is a thing kept entirely for mortals, as a mean to remember their pitiful excuse for an existence, as their poor brains are too dull, and overflowing with utter nonsense to catch up the dark scenes of a lost childhood, in the intricate cobwebs of their minds. Minds that they cannot begin to understand… misused muscles.

Wonder then, if your mind is intelligent enough to generate the thought, why I stoop low enough to write of this. I’m almost certain that even the most moronic of you will…. if this ever leaves the smoky confines of my tower; the fragranced drawers of my desk.

Truth be told, my unfortunate reader, the only reason is my own insecurity. I wish to relay my past upon parchment, merely to re-read it myself… I wish to delve into those corners of my mind that I sealed up upon the happening, which dwells within.

And judge me all you will; I, Azia Danyan, will be dead if you are reading this.

Need I account the times of my childhood? I lived in a poverty-stricken town, in the far corners of Japan; my mother was a seamstress, and my father was dead. I didn’t care for either of them, anyway, so close your mouths and refrain from sighing with pity. When I was seventeen, I boarded a ship for the Orient; I had heard stories of what those journeys held, and I wanted to be amongst those other idiots that set sail for the lush countries of the East.

The ship itself stank… I loathed every moment of the journey, and I discovered myself to be extremely seasick. For six days, I lay curled up in a tiny wooden chamber, with at least forty other males; ages ranging from thirteen to thirty-seven. I remember staring at them…. puzzling over their ages, and attempting to add names to their sallow, yellowing faces; backgrounds to the names, and then deaths to the backgrounds.

On the seventh night, however, I fell asleep up on deck…skin slicked with a cold sweat, I had spent the past several hours vomiting over the side of the ship. My legs had finally given up holding my body, and I had allowed darkness to envelope my weary mind.

A man, I still, to this very day, do not know his name… he found me in my prone state; feverish and ill, on the bilge-covered upper deck. He must have given me something, because when I woke up, that lurching feeling of sick had subsided, and I was able to sit up to eat the noodles that he brought me. His cabin was far above mine… more like quarters, really; the heavy walls actually decorated with fine linen, and material.

Although nothing shocked me so much as his appearance…. ash-blonde hair, so very rare for a Japanese man, lay cropped about his shoulders; actually bordering a similar length to mine…something strange for the times we lived in. The eyes that peered at me, from the cover of long lashes, however, were merely kissed with a chocolaty brown; a thing startlingly at odds with the rest of his appearance. He was beautiful. I traced the curves of his face with my eyes, my mind replacing the air with my fingertips, and I imagined that I touched him, myself.

For the rest of that treacherous journey, I remained in his company…. I shared his bed, although he didn’t once lay hands on me, as I longed for. Hour after hour I would merely stare at him in the darkness, my face flushed and dyed with crimson as I imagined the most dreadful of things, yet I was terrified to so much as lay a finger upon him. I would become feverish if our hands brushed; my face burning up, I often insisted that the constant sway of the sea made my insides writhe, although the excuse was empty. I later learned that he had given me a drug that would soothe my sickness, for the rest of the journey. Several times I lay in a lust-crazed daze, after that sheet of ashen hair fanned across my chest like silk, as he adhered to my lies of sickness, and cooled my half-naked body with chilled water.

I would give my soul to return to there. I would…give my life for him to see me, as I am now. A grown man, not the seventeen-year-old child, who trembled for him.
He would find that our places were switched, if he saw me now…

Upon the day of the ship’s docking, I awoke to an empty bed, and a deserted chamber… next to me lay only a book; something or other on Asian Mythology. The mere sight of this scorched my insides, and I flew into a rage…he had left me without so much as a goodbye. Not once had his mouth touched mine, and not once had I had his hands against me.

I tore the front page of the book to shreds, and threw it over the side of the ship.

The only way I could possibly have ever found him, I had forsaken to the ocean. It was then that I realised why he had left the book… all books hold a name of the author, and this was undeniably his… I had watched him write it, lying next to me, night after night…

Choked with sobs, I remember spending that next hour in a blur of tears… howling, and screaming with anger, until my throat constricted, and my head throbbed with pain, at the sound my own voice had made.

I caught sight of myself in the glass windows of the cabin. My face was streaked with tears, while my eyes had swollen dangerously… even my mouth seemed too big; and I saw how ridiculous my screeching with sorrow caused me to seem. A quivering little brat, kneeling on the wooden surface of a deserted ship, clutching a book in one hand, while the other held tight to the rail.

Azia.

Me.

I hated myself, then…I despised the sight before me, and forced myself away from the glass; stumbling over the gangplank, and into the milling crowds of the Chinese docks.