離れて (Harante)/Away:

That night, I jolted awake to the shades of moonlight peering through my bedroom window, and mayhem. In darkness, I heard the sound of my parents speaking with a shouting group of men. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel that my once-brave parents seemed like crumpled pieces of paper, ready to be pushed over by the wind.

“HURRY UP, JAP” one of them yelled. I immediately sprung up. 

There was no time at all for questions. My mom ran upstairs and stuffed whatever she could into cloth bags. I went along with her, in my heart, knowing what had happened to us. I slipped into my dress and went to help my mother by mindlessly grabbing whatever I could find. 

The signs had been approaching us, like footprints on sand from invisible people–ever since we heard about Executive Order 9066. 

Two weeks ago, in the cozy embrace of the living room, the air filled the room with the familiar crackle of radio. The reporter's voice–once so incredibly mundane, was now underlined with a pang of urgency.

“Breaking news just in. Executive Order 9066 has been issued.”

My mother, hands still in the midst of folding laundry, exchanged a silent glance with my father. The laundry basket lay forgotten, a fellow witness to the shock of this moment.

"What does it mean?" My father’s voice shook–his concerned voice betrayed the false narrative that everything was alright.  

My mother's eyes, usually warm pools of confidence, now held a flicker of apprehension. "They're talking about relocation, evacuation," she slowly spat out. 

"...Evacuation? Where will we go?" My father's question hung in the air like words stuck in a throat–it was unanswered and at this moment, unanswerable.

I stood in the doorway and felt like a silent observer to this unraveling scene. The room, once a sanctuary, now felt laced with an unsettling feeling. The radio crackled again, with their words weaving a sense of hatred against us.

Soon, I myself heard of enforced curfews, frozen bank accounts, murmurs and stares of people on the street. How many times was it when I clutched my coat to my chest on the sidewalk after this, trying to cover my face–trying to be unrecognizable, trying to just be a person, and not a foreign enemy–just once. 

At this moment, in darkness, I knew exactly what was happening–soldiers at the door, trying to take us away. Still, I couldn’t help but sputter questions to them. "Haoya, otou-san, what's happening? Why are they yelling? Where are we going?" My words stumbled out and all my questions piled up faster than they could be answered.

My mothers hands still moved almost mechanically to pack and grab objects.She looked at me with eyes that grasped both love and weighted sorrow. "We have to leave, Isamu. They’re taking us away.” Her words hung in the air, heavy with the weight of a reality that they gave us after robbing our peaceful haven from us.

Suddenly, all those mutters and insults and murmurs and “JAP’S” and stares on the street mixed together and erupted inside me. I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. However , this knot wasn’t crafted from fear but scarlet, flaming hot, anger that burned my skin. "BUT THIS IS OUR HOME. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS??!" 

My father, usually a confident pillar of strength, seemed even more shaken up than me and my mom."We'll figure it out, Isamu. We stick together, no matter what."

The day after the soldiers came for us, we were brought to a racetrack. I looked around. It was filled with Japanese men and women, loading on suitcases with battered breath, calling for names. 

I stared off into space and tried to block out everything around me–I didn’t notice another girl walk up to me until my eyes shifted down and saw her silhouette. When I finally blanked out and saw her, the first thing I noticed was that her  foot was bandaged and she wore a broken slipper on her right foot. 

“My little brother got scared and tried to run away when they came for us”, she hastily explained. “I chased him all around our apartment, and ended up tripping on the legs of a lamp.” 

"Tripping on a lamp... you guys must’ve been completely terrified by the soldiers" I muttered hastily, with my voice carrying an undertone of worry for her ordeal. In that moment, the shared struggle of trying to protect our family felt like a quiet bond between us. She seemed to sense my worry very well. 

“We'll be fine. They can scrape our clothes, but can’t even get close to scraping our souls.”

And just like that, the girl with old slippers clenched my hand

キャンプ(Kyampu)Camp:

On the train, I have nothing left to do but watch the sunsets. The sunsets soon leave us–they paint the lonely sky indigo and dark blue with despair, just like last night when they took us away. As the sun goes down, I can feel the collective heartbeat of everyone in the train–when will it be over?

The racetrack journeyed/zoomed into a makeshift city of tarpaper barracks. As the train slowly screeched to a stop, my peppery bated breath breathed in , breathed out, until I lost count and it just turned into breathing. My stomach felt like it was filled with dust and it was rumpling in my stomach every second.

I walked across the crisp dirt, and saw what was on the horizon. Badly constructed barracks hung around the grass.

I clutched borrowed hopes in my hands as me and my parents ventured to the one assigned to us. One tall soldier had given my mom a slip of paper “47–F”. This number, this cut out letter on a sheet of paper–would be my home for what seemed like the rest of eternity.

As my Otou-san turned the creaking wooden door knob, a wave of heat burst at us, causing my father to stumble back. The room was completely pitch black–the heat and darkness mingled with the unmistakable scent of uncertainty held in the atmosphere of this room. 

“オーブンの中に入っているような気分です” a pedestrian murmured. 

My parents and I headed inside the room. The room had a few rows of beige cots, each a canvas for restless sleep. I looked at the dusty doorknob at the door and wondered how many times someone would turn it.

The next few nights blurred together. They seemed like a chain of shared spaces and whispered conversations poured in earlobes. What can I even hear? I’m too numb.

I think it’s Tuesday, I thought one night. Hm. Is this real? I didn’t know. All I could latch my eyes was the husky blur of twilight fading away. It looked like the panel of my bedroom window was the opening where all sun and life came out of. I didn’t know what to do.

There was only one thing left to do. I didn’t know where to run. 

I ran. I ran through the sorrow pathways of dirt roads near the barracks, the breathless dirt beneath my feet serving as a reminder of this horrible reality eclipsing me entirely. The camp's makeshift city was just a labyrinth of unborn hopes and dreams, completely stolen from us. As I sprinted away, I briefly jolted my head left and right–I caught glimpses of families huddled together, their eyes harrowing the same uncertainty that lingered in me.

As I flew forward, I heard faint echoes of laughter from children trying to find a scrap of normalcy in this world. I felt a mix of desperation and determination propelling me forward, pushing me to escape the suffocating confines of our assigned space. My breath quickened, and the unrhythmic pounding of my heart collapsed the distant sounds of the camp. I wasn't sure where I was headed, but I knew that I needed to break free from the suffocating chains of the unknown. The crisp air stung my cheeks as I continued to run, guided only by the faint glimmer of moonlight that struggled to ooze into the shadows of the internment camp.

I don’t know how long I ran for, why I did it, or how. Eventually, I reached a gray fence at the edge of the camp that loomed over me. My breaths were heavy against my chest, and my heart was pounding in my ears. My back brushed against the cold wire and I turned to look into the landscape I spent so long running away from. 

 I turned to see the girl with the bandaged foot limping towards me. Her silhouette was outlined by the dusky shine of moonlight.

 “Isamu! She exclaimed, her bright eyes widening. Suddenly, instead of running, I could see birds taking flight. I could see the tucking of her tongue as she braided her vowels into the beautiful phrase I so desperately wanted to hear. "You made it," she spoke, a faint smile gracing her lips.

I nodded, still catching my breath, feeling like I was grasping my words in the back of my throat. She reached out, her hand clutching mine. She could immediately sense the different colors of emotion that swirled down deep inside me, and reached to weave together the loneliness that illuminated the both of us. 

"Everything will be okay," she reassured me. Suddenly, her words seemed to weigh in and destroy any remnants of despair or gloom that I held inside me. Suddenly, as I turned to hug my arms around her, I didn’t notice the rusting wire of the fence–I saw the pink flowers that budded at the bottom.

In that moment, standing by the fence that separated us from an uncertain future, her determination became a flaming source of strength for me. We exchanged a silent understanding, a shared acknowledgment of the challenges ahead. As soon as it had started, it ended. We walked away from each other. 

あるだろうか？(Arudarou ka?)/Will there?

That night, my bare feet journeyed back to the barracks on breathy soil. I thought of the girl and the fragile flowers near the barbed fences I saw. No matter how ugly those fences were, the flowers still blossomed. They pushed through the cracks of embraced concretes. Did they whisper dreams in hushed tones to each other too? Like us? Maybe. That seemed to be the answer to many of life's questions.

Maybe, just maybe, the same feet that had been forced into slippers and shuffled through the dust were now dancing to this beautiful rhythm of resolve. In this face of adversity, I saw the silence of flowers on the scattered fences – beauty and strength could sprout even in the most barren of landscapes. As I moved forward into the unknown, I carried with me the delicate yet unyielding spirit of those flowers, so I knew that I too could find beauty and growth amidst the piercing thorns of hardship.

As I stepped outside my barack, my back to “47-F’s” door, the night sky overhead seemed to cradle the stories of everyone in this camp, with stars woven into constellations of hope. The navy and silver hue pastels were painted from the sunsets, the stomach rumblings, and the whispered conversations sloshed in shared spaces–they all became fragments of a resilient determination I had inside me. As I ventured into the motion and madness of the present, I couldn't help but wonder if, in the grand tapestry of existence, our stories were just blossoms in a forest of endurance.