Mio - Sounds of the Heart 2 - Co-produced with ChatGPT
Chapter 2: The Staring Photograph
The hallway leading to my grandmother's room was like a completely different place between day and night.
During the day, soft sunlight streamed through the shoji screens, and the scent of tatami mats drifted pleasantly. Every time the wind blew, the trees in the garden swayed, and even that sound felt like a lullaby.
But at night, the house was wrapped in silence.
Only the grandfather clock,
Tick... tock...
Marked time rhythmically, and that sound echoed throughout the house.
As a young child, I didn't really like that sound.
In my grandmother's room, there was a large Buddhist altar.
Next to it, an old photograph in a black frame was displayed.
My grandfather and another man.
Both of them were staring straight ahead, not smiling at all.
During the day, it was a photograph I didn't think anything of.
But at night, something strange would happen.
Every time moonlight reflected on the glass, it looked as if their eyes were moving slowly.
“...They’re watching.”
The moment I thought that, I would hurriedly pull my futon over my head.
Even though it was stifling inside the futon, I didn't have the courage to show my face.
I felt like the two people in the photo were still looking at me.
As a child, that was truly terrifying.
Now, I can think that it must have been the moonlight or the reflection on the glass.
But back then, I truly believed I was being watched.
I felt as if unspoken thoughts were quietly lingering in that room.
Before my grandmother's room was my parents' bedroom.
At night, my mother would sleep holding my younger brother close.
I would get into my futon in a different room.
I had never thought it strange.
Because I thought that was just how things were.
Long after I became an adult, my mother once told me quietly,
“Actually, I wanted to sleep with you, Mio.”
My mother was smiling a little.
But deep behind that smile, it seemed like the loneliness of the past remained.
“But your grandmother said, ‘She smells like milk, so no.’”
It seems it ended with that one remark.
I couldn't answer anything.
As a young child, not knowing the reason why I couldn't be held by my mother, I had simply gone to sleep carrying only that feeling of a little bit of loneliness in my chest at night.
To me as a child, my grandmother was a scary person.
The atmosphere of the house changed based on my grandmother's mood.
My father never defied her in front of her.
Why was that?
As a child, I had never even thought about it.
I just thought, “That’s just how it is.”
I learned the reason only after I became an adult.
My grandmother had no children of her own.
My father was the son of my grandmother's younger brother.
It is said that as a young boy, my father was sometimes not given enough to eat while living with his stepmother.
He would be hungry, take the rice tub, run outside, and eat by himself.
Feeling pity for such a father, my grandmother took him in as an adopted son and raised him as her own child.
That is why, to my father, my grandmother was both a parent and a benefactor.
When I learned the reason why he couldn't defy her, for the first time, I was able to see my grandmother in a slightly different light.
Even a person who was only scary when I was a child had a life of her own.
There were tears and suffering that I didn't know about.
However, the young Mio of that time still knew nothing.
She was just a little girl who was scared of the photograph at night and could only pull the futon over her head.
What was that photograph continuing to stare at?
What kind of thoughts had my grandmother been keeping locked deep in her heart?
Knowing that is a story for much later.