Breya, Kids With Guitars, and the Peace Park
I knew she would start crying any second; “Breya, come on sweetie, over here.” I softly told her, pulling her away from the pictures: people melting, buildings destroyed, babies crushed in the rubble. I’d seen it all before, I knew what to expect, I’d seen the movie. That day I watched it, only three years ago, seems far off now that I was there, the real place, where it all went down. But she hadn’t see the movie, Breya had no idea, and as I looked around I realized few of those wide-eyed, back-pack toting Americans had. The movie was called Barefoot Gen; it’s a cartoon made by a survivor of Hiroshima to tell his story. The movie had shown me the melting bodies walking the flaming streets, the people begging for thirst and dying when they drank because that need for water was the only thing keeping them alive. When we had gotten off the bus that afternoon we weren’t ready for this, we were all just our regular selves, some kooky American kids on a four-week trip to Japan visiting another historical site. The site was the Hiroshima Peace Park and the park was only half of it. In order to reach to gardens you had to walk the museum and I was now wondering if Breya was going to make it. She was staring at a charred pair of shoes; her big eyes open and shiny, her skinny arms crossed over her pink tee shirt, covered in sparkly letters and bad Japanese-English; knees slightly shaking under the white princess skirt. “Come on.” I say again and she turns slowly on her little pink converse, still stained from the cocoa she spilled the first day.
On that first day I didn’t know her, but shockingly, I wanted to. Breya always wears pink; she always smiles, it is impossible for her to act sexy, she rode sheep when she was little, she’s older then me but looks five years younger, and she likes the same movies I do. You know someone’s okay if you like the same movies. To those who don’t know us well, and even those who do, our friendship is a bit of an enigma. For example, in the high school we visited Breya was known as “cute peach girl” while everyone called me “samurai!” Breya dresses like a five-year-old’s princess doll; over half my wardrobe is thick army material in olive drab colors. When Breya was 11 she wanted her room to look like a My Little Pont on Prozac; when I was 11 I was reading comics called “Johnny the Homicidal Manic” and drawing like a crazy person all over everything with black ink. Breya smiles, I smirk; she’s giggly, I’m cynical, and here I am (one of the few who didn’t leave the theater tear stained after Passion of the Christ) staring at these images I have seen before watching her (the girl who has to abandon the room every time Bambi’s mom gets shot) unable to rip her wide, teary eyes away from these horrors. I had to get her out of there.
“Come on, let’s go outside.” She can’t talk, if she does she’ll loose it, all she can do is nod with a small sniff. We walk fast, past the wax figures of radiation poisoning, past the tape players where people listen to ancient Japanese tell their story, past the tiny paper cranes sealed behind glass that a little girl folded in the depths of illness to try and reach the thousand. The story goes, if you make a thousand paper cranes you get a wish, but she died before she made them all. The dry, cold air shoots from the air conditioner as we walks fast down the carpeted hallway. She gasps a little bit. I put my hand on her back, “It’s okay.” There’s the door. I push it open and am instantly hit with the Japanese air: 95 degrees, so humid you can feel push when you walk, and for the first time ever: refreshing. We hurry down the stairs not talking. I don’t really feel like doing anything. “You want to go sit over there?” I ask her. “Yeah, that’s perfect.” We sit on the wooden bench; she leaning back, hands folded in her lap; me leaning forward, staring blankly at some birds.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah…”
We sit there, staring at the ground, letting the grief sink deep enough to hold it in tight. Finally we get up, we should walk through the park, it’s really what we should do. We walk past trees, and flowers, the images of the fire and flesh still in our heads. The steel skeleton of the only building left standing when the bomb was dropped, an observatory, hovering over our heads. Finally we reach the end, a river, and on the other side we can see the city. “Let’s go sit a couple sets down.”
“Yeah good idea.” She says.
We sit their watching the water, thinking about fire, war, death, blood, flames, and how we did it all, we did it all and they did it too, everyone causes death, it’s happening now, death everywhere, death eating the world, it’s unavoidable, the violence the terror, eating everything anyone has ever know! And then, something happened.
As we sat there, we heard something. We turned towards the noise and under the bridge we saw a band. There were about three Japanese boys holding guitars. There were several other people sitting watching them, under the bride, next to the river. The boys started to play with these big goofy Japanese smiles on their faces. They started to sing along with their guitars, they weren’t too bad but they kept cracking up, they kept loosing it, and everyone who was there watching them was loosing it too, but they never stopped playing the guitars, the music never ended. Breya and I watched and then, slowly, we stared to laugh, we laughed with them, those kids under the bridge, we laughed and laughed and then with crazy smiles on our faces, we stared to cry. We laughed at each other with tears pouring down our faces, we laughed because could, we cried because we could. It was in that moment that something changed in us. We turned around and saw the park, the flowers spurting the ground, the birds picking scraps of food off the cement, the shining silhouette of the observatory and every single Japanese face we could see was smiling. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Suddenly there was no longer terror; there was no longer death, all we could see was hope. We got up, staring around us, laughing as we whipped the tears from our faces. We smiled at each other, “I’m dying for some ice cream.” Breya laughed.
“Oh man, me too.” And with that we left the park.
I will always remember that day as long as I live as the day I knew it would all be okay. As I said before I am cynical and Breya is the exact opposite, but we both got off the bus that day thinking some place deep in our minds that the world would kill itself, bomb itself out of existence, fill with death and horror. But when we stepped back on that bus we knew that it wouldn’t. They said that nothing would grow on that ground for one hundred years and low and behold there is a garden – a beautiful garden with kids who laugh and a sun that shines and ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. As long as we can cry, as long as we can laugh, I know that everyone will feel what we felt in that garden on that hot Japanese day: everyone will hope.