It was August 5th of 1945 when we got to Japan. I had gone with my fiance Megan to shoot a documentary about the war we were living in; more specifically World War II. My desire to make films started when I was only thirteen. In 1925 I had seen a movie called “The Gold Rush” starring Charlie Chaplin. I remember how it made me feel and how I wanted to make other people feel the same way I had. I remember watching all the beauty that films had portrayed, and wanting to recreate that view. When I was sixteen I started making short films, and I had finally had gotten work on sets when I was about eighteen or nineteen.
I met Megan on a music video I was working on. I was a production assistant, which is the lowest position in the crew, but I wished I was filming that day; I wished to be filming her. She was hired as a ballet dancer for the music video of a song I can’t recall. The only sound I can remember was the sound of her voice and her beautiful mumbled singing during break time. I hadn’t said anything, but when I got home that day, I opened my bag to find a folded note inside. I opened the note and it had a written phone number and a message: ‘The soul that can speak through the eyes, can also kiss with a gaze ­Meg.’ I had called her, and with one word through the speaker that rang into my ear and through my veins, I knew I loved her. She had told me that she dreams of being a dancer and living in New York City, and often times ask me if I thought she was pretty. I had told her my dreams of being with her in any city in the world, and answered her questions with “nothing can compare to a beauty like yours”. I had asked her to marry me in May of 1945, and she had said yes.
We had traveled fourteen hours together till we got to Japan. We decided to stay in a smaller city by the name of Hiroshima, in a small house we planned to rent for the rest of August. I had told her I wanted to film the biggest documentary of the century, and she had become more excited than I was. The house was small and almost vacant. When we had entered, the only thing that was kept in the house was a couch, a stove and one mattress that lay on cold, wooden floors. However I didn’t mind because I was with Meg, and we were about to create my dream in the palm of our hands. After around eleven­thirty, the whole city shut down. Almost every light was out and it was pitch black. Meg and I sat in the streets in front of our rental home, and gazed up at the stars. We measured the width of each star with our fingertips and compared it with the size of a pea and the size of our fears, because they were also microscopic.
The following day, I had awoken early in the morning. I was hoping to travel all the way to Toyohashi, one of the major cities in Japan, to film interviews of citizens and ask how the war took effect of them. I woke Meg up but she told me she wanted to sleep in today and that I could go on without her. I cooked her scrambled eggs, leaving the plate that was calling out her name beside her, and was on my way.
Once I arrived in Toyohashi, I ran to a corner store to buy a bottle of water. While in the store, the television in the corner of the room changed from a commercial about whiskey, into a news broadcast. Though I could not understand her, the reporter on the screen seemed to be in some sort of panic. The cashier behind the counter widen his eyes as he grabbed my hand and sprinted out of the store with me. I was feeling frightened and was wondering what was going on. I pushed past a crowd of people to see a huge cloud, shaped like a mushroom, hovering over a city far away. My heart slowly began to sink as I watched the cloud and heard the people around me screaming an abundance of words; words like ‘bomb’.
I stood in shock and soon thought to myself, ‘Meg.’ I ran back into the corner store and reached for the phone that sat behind the cash register. I called Meg’s cell over and over, but no answer. Calluses began to form on my fingertips from all the strength I was using to slam down on each key. Tears rushed down my face as I kept repeating, “Meg pick up, Meg pick up.” I had finally stopped when her phone did not show proof of an existing dial tone.
It has been a week since the bomb, and five days after the second bomb hit in Nagasaki. I have been living on the streets because my rental house was gone, and so was my fiance. I attempted to bring myself back to civilization, but everytime I tried, I just kept thinking about how alone and scared I felt. I kept thinking about how my fears weren’t the size of the stars anymore, but the size of the mushroom cloud I had seen over my sanity.
I began to walk another eight blocks, when I came across a small boy sitting in the streets. I bent down to look at him, but he hid his face under his arms. I lifted up his chin with my hands to see a burnt face with beautiful eyes looking up at me. He seemed to be about eight years old. “I’m Bryan. What is your name?” I asked him. His eyes were filled with sorrow and isolation all at once, and he did not make any sounds. I did not speak Japanese and I assumed that he did not speak any English either. He was wearing a necklace with the letter ‘M’ dangling off of the chain. “I’ll just call you M,” I pronounced. He looked up at me and it almost seemed like a spark of hope ran through his eyes. I lifted him up and seated him on my back as I began to walk to an open field I had seen in the distance.
The walk was longer than I had presumed, but once I placed the boy down on the grass, I ignored the strain in my calves. It was quiet, which was something I had not gotten in the past couple of years. I sat down next to the boy and we watched the sunset together. “Why are people so evil?” I asked him. “Why can’t we all live in peace? No one realizes the damage they have done until it is represented in textbooks, and even when crimes are represented in textbooks, there is always a fight for each side. People in this damn society. We are all greedy. We all power and to feel big, but compared to the universe, we are all so small. How come the stars in the universe, which look so tiny to us, all seem to be together in the same sky. They don’t make war, only peace. And if we are all humans living on this Earth, why can we not realize we are all the same? If every country, or human for that matter, thinks they are the most powerful or most sane, than really none of us are the most­”
I cut off my sentence to see if the boy was still next to me. He was staring off, following the direction of the sun with his eyes. It was getting dark and cold. He began to shiver and I took off my jacket to wrap it around his arms. He leaned in close to me and lay his head on my shoulder. Tears began to rush down his face, and landed on my feet. “Everything will be alright,” I whispered into the top of his head.
He took his head off of my shoulders and looked at me with faith in his eyes. In a thick, Japanese accent, he whispered back, “Bryan, you are the stars in a world darkness. We sit in the streets waiting for your light.”