It was a random day in the beach. The sunlight was bright enough to hurt the eyes.
Sunlight spilled across the sand in long, warm sheets. Waves rolled in lazily, glittering as they broke and people dotted the shore—families laughing, couples arguing softly, children shrieking as they chased each other into the water.
Harriet sat far from them. He was only thirteen by then, thin and sun-browned, knees dusty with sand.
Green pants rolled up to his calves. Wearing no shirt at all. His hands were busy and careful, shaping walls and towers with an intensity that made the rest of the beach feel distant.
Beside him sat his mother. She wore loose, casual clothes that covered her fully despite the heat, sleeves down to her wrists, fabric light but deliberate.
A feathered hat shaded her face. Its brim fluttered slightly in the sea breeze. She looked relaxed but there was a stillness about her that separated her from the world just as much as their chosen spot did.
Harriet placed the final shell atop his sand castle and leaned back proudly. "Mom," he said, brushing sand from his hands. "Look."
She leaned closer, eyes softening seeing his adorable face.
"It's beautiful," she said. "You made the walls stronger this time."
He grinned, chest swelling. "So the waves will not break it again."
She smiled wider, reaching out to ruffle his hair. "You are learning."
For a moment, that was enough. Then Harriet's eyes drifted. Beyond the floating barricade in the water, a group of kids swam freely.
They dove, splashed, climbed onto each other's shoulders, laughter carrying easily over the waves. No one told them to come back. No one watched them too closely.
Harriet watched until his smile faded.
"Mom." he said quietly.
"Yes?"
"Why can't I swim out there...." He pointed. " "....outside the barricade?"
She didn't answer immediately.
"I can swim," he added quickly. "I am good at it. I don't get tired easily and they are having fun together." He hesitated, then asked, softer, "Is it because I am different?"
The word hung between them, heavier than the heat.
His mother folded her hands in her lap. "Everyone is different, my son." she said gently. "But difference isn't always about ability. Sometimes it's about directions."
Harriet frowned. "That doesn't sound fair."
"It isn't," she admitted. "but fairness and freedom aren't the same thing."
He dug his fingers into the sand. "Then what's the point of wanting something, if you are not allowed to choose it?"
She looked at him then, truly looked, as if memorizing his face. "Your will matters," she said softly. "That's why it has to be protected."
"From what?"
She smiled, sad and warm at once. "From answers you are not ready to carry."
Harriet looked back at the water. The barricade bobbed gently.
They returned to a house that barely deserved the name.
It stood crooked at the edge of the district, walls thin and patched, roof sagging like it had given up long ago. The door creaked even when the wind was calm.
Inside, there was little, one narrow bed, a small table, a stove that worked only when it wanted to. Sunlight never reached far past the doorway.
Harriet learned the rhythm of it early.
At dusk, his mother would prepare him a simple meal, touch his head once, then lock the door from the outside. The sound of the latch sliding into place always echoed longer than it should have.
Darkness came quickly after that. The house lost light and Harriet swallowed time.
He spent his nights alone. Sometimes he counted his breaths. Sometimes he traced shapes on the wall with his fingers imagining waves, castles, barricades.
Hunger came and went. Fear stayed longer. He learned how silence could feel heavy, how shadows could grow personalities. How waiting could lengthen until it felt endless.
His mother worked through the all day in other people's homes as slave.
She returned at dusk. All the time, Harriet has to live alone locked in a dark room. The first hint of moon light would slip through the cracks in the door and then the lock would turn. That sound of metal yielding—became Harriet's favorite sound in the world.
He would rush forward, heart racing, relief flooding his small body before he even saw her.
She always looked tired. Sometimes, Harriet noticed the bruises. Dark marks on her arms.
Faint discolorations near her wrists. Once, a cut hidden beneath fabric. She moved carefully on those mornings, slower than usual as if pain had taught her new rules for motion. She never explained how those came at first place. She never complained.
Harriet never asked, because he was just a child. Instead, he smiled for her. He clung to her presence to the warmth of her return, to the simple fact that she came back every time. That was enough to silence questions.
In the pale light of dawn, as she rested and he watched over her, Harriet learned something without words.
Love could exist alongside suffering and survival often demanded cruelty.
Outside the house, the world had teeth. Whenever Harriet stepped beyond the threshold barefoot and with torn clothes, those voices followed him.
Some laughed openly. Fatherless, they said. A Bastard. As if the absence of a man defined the identity and value of a child's existence. As if lineage decided worth.
He was thirteen but he understood early how the world arranged itself. Power sat above. Mercy was optional.
Words were weapons used by those who had nothing else to fear. He learned not to react, not because it didn't hurt but because reacting cost more than enduring.
Home was different in that case.
At night, there was only one bed. Too small for two, yet never empty. They used to argue over it with stubborn affection.
Harriet insisted as she rests. His mother insisting he needed to sleep to grow. There was only one bed, they could argue all night to make the other one sleep on it and spend the night.
The argument always ended the same way. She would lie down first, exhausted beyond negotiation and Harriet would climb onto her chest, curling against her warmth like he belonged there.
Harriet lied on her chest. Her heartbeat became his clock. Proof that tomorrow might come, a miracle will occur, ascending them towards heaven.
That was how they slept. Her arms spread around him, his head rose and fell with her breath. In that fragile space, the world outside lost its authority.
Sometimes, before sleep took him, Harriet would ask the same question, voice small but insistent.
"Will you ever leave me?"
Her answer never changed.
"No."
He believed it, not because it was logical but because it was necessary. He both could hug eachother tightly, holding themselves together.
One night, the air felt heavier. Her breathing was uneven, shallow in places. She held him tighter than usual, fingers trembling against his back. That night, she told him the truth she had been folding away for years.
A sickness very long hidden. It was hidden.... she couldn't afford the money. A body failing faster than money could follow. She spoke without drama, without fear—only certainty. She would not last. Harriet didn't cry in the place.
He pressed himself closer, hugging her chest as if proximity could bargain with fate. There was nothing inappropriate, nothing confused.
Only a child anchoring himself to the only constant he had ever known. She stroked his hair slowly and began to hum.
Not a song meant to impressnbut a rhyme—simple rhymes she made up on the spot, words soft and uneven, stitched together just to keep him calm. Her voice wavered but it never broke.
Harriet quietly listened. His breathing slowed. His grip loosened. Sleep came, gentle and merciful. She stayed awake longer, listening to him rest.
And in that bed too small, fragile, poor but Harriet learned what love truly was.
When loneliness settled in, it did not announce itself loudly. It crept.
In the locked room all day, Harriet learned to fill the silence by playing alone—not with toys, which he rarely had but with imagination.
He traced patterns on the wall, whispered stories to himself, made games out of shadows and dust. Sometimes he pretended there was someone else there, sitting across from him, listening. It was not mischief. It was survival which was worse.
His mother noticed his feelings. She always did and then one night, when the room was sealed in darkness and only their breathing proved the world still existed, Harriet asked a question that came from quiet observation rather than curiosity.
"Why don't I have a girlfriend?"
The words startled her not in anger but in surprise. She lay still for a moment, as if measuring where such a question could have been born. Streets? Cruel mouths? Older boys pretending to know things they didn't?
She turned toward him instead of away.
Harriet felt her arms draw him closer, her hand rested on his back, grounding. In the dark, her presence was the only previous thing that mattered.
She did not scold him or laugh. She spoke softly, explaining without explaining—telling him that,
Companionship was not something the world assigned on a schedule. That love was not a reward for growing older, nor a badge earned by copying others. That people often confused closeness with possession, and affection with performance.
Harriet listened carefully.
He asked questions not about bodies but about staying. About why people leave, why doesn't anyone like him? About whether love disappears when money does.
Whether it is possible to belong to someone without being owned by them. She held him tighter hearing those words.
She told him she would protect him until her last breath. That as long as she lived, he would never be truly alone. That even if the world named him wrongly, she would always name him son.
In the dark, Harriet pressed his forehead against her chest, listening to her heart.
That became his definition of love—everything.
From then on, he thought carefully.
Love, he decided, was not touching for the sake of touching. It was not declarations or imitation.
Love was constancy. It was choosing to stay when leaving would hurt less. It was sharing warmth when the room was cold and nothing else was promised.
To him, she became something more than a mother not replacing anything but embodying what the word belonging was supposed to mean.
Years later, Have would understand why his definition of love never matched the world's.
Because it had been shaped in darkness, by hands that protected rather than demanded. People will only care about you when you supply them. And when you stop, they will start to think that you have forgot about them.
And if anyone ever asked him—honestly—what love meant to him, Harriet would answer without hesitation,
"My mother was my best girl-friend."
Lastly,
Harriet did not cry the day his mother died.
Rain fell instead.
It fell the way it always did— without asking, without caring and turning streets into mirrors and mud, washing faces clean of expression.
The house was quiet when she stopped living. Very quiet. Harriet sat beside her for a long time waiting for the rise of her chest that never came.
He did not scream. He did not beg. Gods are not going to hear a beggar like him.
"Understanding of nature" came early to him. When dawn arrived, he wrapped her body as best he could. The cloth was thin inadequate.
Like everything else he had ever owned. He dragged her through the streets alone, small body leaning backward, feet slipping on wet stone. People noticed the poor lad in muddy clothes.
They laughed.
Some pointed. Some whispered. A boy dragging death behind him, soaked to the bone, hair plastered to his face. To them, it was absurd.
To them, it was entertainment. Rain hid nothing but only Harriet's tears. It only made the scene clearer even more. Harriet kept walking.
He took her beyond the city, past the paths where voices reached, under a mountain site where the rain softened and the ground turned soft and dark by the trees.
The earth there was thick with mud, stubborn, unwelcoming. He dug.
Not with any tools. There were none but with his hands. With his fingernails. He clawed at the soil until pain became meaningless. Nails split and skin tore. Blood mixed with rain and mud, staining the ground a deep, ugly red.
He didn't stop until it was finished. The grave was uneven and imperfect. It was enough.
He laid her down gently as if she were sleeping.
As if she might still wake. Then he covered her with earth, pressing it down with trembling palms, sealing her from the sky she would never see again.
When it was done, Harriet sat there.
Rain fell on his shoulders, his hair, the fresh mound of dirt. It felt like the world was trying to wash him away too.
That was when he remembered.
Red. She once said that she loved red.
Because it was painful. Because it reminded her of her little sister—Rose—lost long before Harriet was born.
A name that meant beauty but carried thorns. A love that survived loss by turning into color.
Harriet looked at his bloodied hands.
Red.... It was....
The rain diluted it but it was there. Proof he had stayed until she died. Proof he had done something that mattered.
Her last words rang in his mind, soft and impossibly warm against the cold.
"Wish, you always stay smiling.... my son."
He sat there for a long time.
Then slowly, carefully—Harriet smiled. There was nothing, just him laying beside a tree and wrapped in mud and muddy clothes.
It was not because he was happy or the pain was gone. It was the only thing she had asked of him.
From that day on, his smile became armor. A promise carved into his face. A quiet rebellion against a world that laughed at suffering and forgot the dead.
Rain would come again in his life—many times.... And absolutely did.
Every time it did, Harriet would smile through it. Because he had already learned what it meant to endure.