I have one dream in life, and that is to see a starry sky. All this started because I feel that my life is being wasted on working and getting money to support my family. I would like to explore the world and be able to see a sky full of stars, a sky that doesn’t seem like this world, with this I think I would feel free and incredibly full of happiness and joy. My name is Finn, I am 23 years old and I hate this world because no one is living every moment of their life, and that’s pathetic. But let’s start from the beginning and how this became my biggest dream!

I’m a normal guy, in a normal city, in a normal world, not so much a normal world as a boring world. No one does exciting things and we never experience things that make the world more exciting or challenging. I would like to live in an anime or manga, they are full of magic, monsters, epic battles, or even cute romance. Anyway let me introduce myself, I’m Finn I’m 23 years old and I'm working as a half-time pizza deliverer and a full-time manga drawer, I have to work a lot so I can maintain my family. 

My sister is in high school, my mother is in the hospital due to a car accident she and my dad had when I was 5 years old, my father died and she fell in an induced coma because of a terrible blow to the head during the accident, the doctors call it traumatic brain injury, she has been asleep since then, 15 year now. Because I and my sister were too young to live alone we had to go with my mom’s sister, Joy, she took care of us and she is like our mom now, but since I need to work a lot I don’t have the time to go visit her. Thanks to her im a great man and I want my sister to be a successful person and a woman with great values, that can transform this world full of evil. But for my luckily I´m not alone. I have two great friends who are with me on this journey, one of them is Eva she is 22 years old and the other is Arth, he’s name is kinda funny, it comes from an Indian language called Sanskrit, It means meaning or synonym, they both I know them seems I am a kid and I went to the kindergarten.

As time was passing by I started feeling that every day was the same, nothing new and nothing exciting was happening, my job as a manga drawer was becoming extremely bad. At first, everything was okay, my work was good, but everyone always told me that there, in my drawing, I wasnt printing my personality, nothing of my work was made with something that made it mine, it was in-personal. With time my creativity and inspiration became low, my stories were poor. Because of this, my salary was cut, they started to pay me so damn low that I almost can’t afford to pay my rent, and aunt Joy works as a barmaid, so she doesn’t have a lot of money either to help me. So because of this, I had to take secondary work as a pizza deliver, With this work, I was going to get some more money that could help me pay for the things I had pending. It could also help me in my other job to get inspiration, by changing the space where I work. 

I chose the pizza deliverer job because I love to see the sky, feel the wind in my face gives me a feeling of freedom that nothing else can give me. Also, that may be going I could see how other people, maybe I could get inspired by seeing how they argue, laugh or even cry. But with time working there I understood that no one does that, every single person I saw in the streets didn’t show a pinch of happiness or even sadness, we all were living in a monotone world. Wake up early, go work in a job that most people hate and they just do it because they need the money and hope someday something interesting happens, most of them always are depressed and wish to die. But in my personal case, I wasnt feeling anything, I couldn’t feel either sadness, happiness, madness, or any other feeling, everything was always a neutral feeling, not a feeling where I felt happiness or sadness all the time, but a feeling  I don’t feel them at all, maybe I can laugh with people and show that Im happy, but I am truly happy? or I just do it so others don’t feel pity about me, or as my mom said to me ones “they are just being supportive”. But I don’t feel correct that other people have to carry my things for me and I don’t want their solidarity at all.

One day when I was working on a new manga about the sadness of the world, I received a message from Arth, one of my best friends, he said: “Heeeey Finn! I am organizing camping this weekend with Evaaa. Want to join? 0.o”. At first I thought that it would be a distraction going to a trip, but then I realized that a distraction its all I need, maybe it can help me see another perspective, people adventuring, people not having to deal with the suffering of their normal lives, and also could be kinda wholesome to share time with my best friends. So I decided to go. I finished the part of the manga for that week and took the weekend free at the pizzeria. 

I meet at Arth’s house and took a car to the fuji mountain, the distance was 150km, so we had to travel 2 hours and 20 minutes, but honestly was one of the best trips I’ve made so far. We went talking, making jokes, and telling each other what were we doing and how was our life going. Since we stopped talking because of the different works we had, but I felt that the connection between us didn’t break. This reminded me of a manga I read a while ago, that’s about a girl, his sister, and his grandmother. They are doing traditional Japanese work with strings and the grandmother says “The strings represent time itself. The strings twist, wobble, unravel and connect again. That's the time”. Even though that time passed and we stopped being teenagers, our relationship didn’t end and it prevails until the present. When we finally arrived there my heart started bumping rapidly as it was going to explode, my eyes started to drop tears suddenly, it was an experience that I have never felt before, I felt free, loved, and happy. These tears were produced because of the ecstasy of the moment. In my whole life, I was always trapped in the view that I had to study and work so my family could go through these hard moments, but I never stopped to see the beauty of the world and how bright it can be. When all the emotion of the moment passed I apologized because for making that stupid moment, but I didn’t know why I was apologizing, I didn’t do anything wrong, but I felt I had to do it, they know the situation im going through and they said to me to not worry about it.

We went to the store to buy some food and went to the bathroom after a very long trip. I buy a cafe soda and some chips, Arth buy a cola, and Eva bought a hot chocolate. After having our little recess and we ate we head to the camping zone to put everything in place. We placed the tent, make the fire camp, and placed the chairs in front of it. It was chill, we had an enormous lake in front and the fuji mount just behind, it was a precious view, it was like it was taken from a movie, it was a surrealist landscape, the time passed as we talk and listened to Neil Halstead. When we least realized it was the late afternoon, the sun was hiding on the other side of Mount Fuji, it was reflected in the lake as if there were a sky above the other. Late that night when the moon was at the top of the sky and everyone was sleeping I couldn’t, I stayed awake watching the stars. Since I was a little boy I have always liked to see the sky and the stars. The wind in my face gives me a feeling of freedom and peace like those stars far above the sky, they are floating in the deep space, maybe they already died but their light is still reaching us. It kind of reminds me of something my mom said before falling asleep, “Finn, try always to be like the stars, stars illuminate the space and other planets, some of them have more power than our sun, but they are so far far away that their light takes time to reach us. Always give light to people, illuminate them, maybe that light reaches them in the future. And remember to smile always, even if you’re sad, depressed, or exhaust, in that moments you have to smile even harder. If you don’t stay strong, who will?” Sorpriseley those were the last words my mom told me, they were heading to a meeting with their old friends, in the way a drunk driver crash them.

Without knowing my eyes started tearing up, but they weren’t sad tears, it was a feeling of revelation, the light of my mom was reaching me, I didn’t want to die, from that moment I wanted to live for the others, make my friends, my sister, my aunt, and even people I didn’t know happy. Smile in the harsher times so everyone else can also stay strong, even if im not doing okay and things aren’t going the way I want them to go.

At that moment when I turned my head, my eyes couldn’t believe what I was seeing, light brown hair, dark brown eyes,  white clothes, it was an angel, but there was something strange with this “angel” she was also in tears, she looked sad, I could notice that she was in a pain similar to mine, we are forced to live in a world full of limitations and rules that don’t live the life at the fullest, at school we have to follow the instructions of the teachers that act as police officers more than another thing, we are forced to see subjects that have a low impact in real life, in university the same thing, and in the work, we are exploded as slaves and most of the people don’t like their jobs, money is the center of the world and if you don’t have it you will not have the opportunity to shine.

When I saw her my eyes were still in tears, she looked at me back with her eyes wet too. My heart was feeling things that my brain couldn’t understand and my mouth couldn’t pronounce, it was just like my head was blank, my tongue was cut and my heart was pumping until the point that it was going to explode, I was seeing a star. The star that was missing in my starry sky.