I wish Mum was here. I need her here with me. I miss her so much that my words are powerless for this. I forget my mum little by little every day. Her smell, her looks, her face… As the days passed, she was moving away from me.
Sometimes… Sometimes I think she’s right next to me, that she never died. I imagine her looking at me. I try to remember her gaze. Even the thought is beautiful, but… it’s just a dream. If you were next to me right now, I would take you in my arms and never let you go. You would leave me because I know you would leave me, but more importantly, I would stand in front of you and tell you everything in my mind. I would first tell you how much I love you.
God only knows where she is now. I’m sure you’re looking down from somewhere above. Keep those beautiful eyes on me, Mum, I need them.
You were like God to me. I used to cry with you, laugh with you. When something hurt, it hurt me too. I felt her pain. God, why did you take her away from me? Was it because I loved her so much, or because I saw her as a god?
My mum was always very strong. She was good enough to be called perfect, but she had flaws. I can see that now. It’s something I’ve always asked myself in my heart, but I’ve never been able to articulate it.
Why did my mum continue to live with my dad after all this? I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve been trying to find an answer on my own, but I couldn’t find a way to rationalize it. Why all this pain, all this grief? If she had left, we could have been spared all the pain, our lives would have been more organized. A fresh start, a new life. If she could have done what I did, maybe… maybe she would be alive.
Mum never had the courage to leave Dad. I didn’t feel like badmouthing her, but it was the truth. I’m only just beginning to realize that. You were always protective of me against my father. Why, why didn’t you leave him? If you cared so much about me, was it so hard to break up with him?
I overestimated my mother. I don’t remember her ever being angry or saying a bad word to me. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t ease the pain. At the time, it made it bearable. My mum was with me, and I had to hold on for her. In her absence I see the truth. My mum’s absence gave me so much.
God, please take her to heaven and protect her.
With the death of the person I loved, I was left alone in this life. I sank deeper and deeper into loneliness. I never found a decent person. I couldn’t say that I had many friends even in the presence of my mother. After my mother’s death, I quickly distanced myself from the one or two people I talked to at school. At school, the kids would always play with each other, and I would watch them from the corner. I never got involved with them. It was like a rule. At the places where I worked, there were people I talked to. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if this was called talking. Most of the conversations were one-sided. It didn’t go beyond doing this and doing that. When I did talk, I would have made a mistake and apologize.
Did I have to be on my own? God had left me alone, didn’t he? It was a question no different from any other. The answer would never come. No matter how many times you begged God, He would never answer. He always preferred to remain silent. I’m thinking, wasn’t I that lonely? What kind of a question was that, of course I was lonely. I was always lonely.
In the past, I was the one who preferred to be alone. Over time, I had drifted further and further away from people. I was too blinded by my own problems to see my surroundings. I was being unfair to Simon and Alexis. They were thinking about me. But how much was I thinking about them? Every day they would ask me how I was doing. I wouldn’t answer or I’d just brush it off with one word. The blue-eyed girl I had trouble remembering… She tried to talk to me many times, didn’t she? She came to the café every day and always saw me.
I had tried so hard to put out the big fire burning inside me that the size of the fire prevented me from seeing my surroundings. All I could see was the fire itself. It was burning fiercely in front of me. It was getting bigger and bigger and would eventually destroy me. There was something I could never see. There were people around me with buckets helping me. They were there for me.
I was very unfair to them, but all this happened because I had a bad father. That person I called my father, he stole my life. He stole my mum. He stole everything. I was never going to forgive him. He used to beat me for no reason… No, he beat us. He had no reason to beat us, and he didn’t need a reason. It didn’t matter how or what form it took. He made us pay for our mistake many times over.
Of all people, should I be the one to go through this? Why did it have to be like this, God? Wasn’t that unfair? I could have had a good father. I wanted to tell him what was on my mind, but I never had the chance. When I saw him, I was just looking for a place to run.
A father who loved me, who protected me instead of beating me… And not just me. He should have loved my mum too. We could have been a family. We could have been a beautiful family, couldn’t we, God? I know you’ll never answer my questions, but we could have been a beautiful family. How nice it would have been to feel his love in my heart when he held my hand. I don’t remember him ever holding my hand. If he had taken me to the park like other children, if he had stood beside me while I played, if he had run to me when I fell and started to cry… There was a big void inside me, and I knew I would never be able to fill it. The strange part was that I needed him to fill the void inside me.
Ever since I ran away from home, I wondered if he had such thoughts. He always beats us, but did he harbor the slightest love for us? Something told me he did. That’s exactly what I wanted to believe. I wanted so much to see that he loved us, but it was nothing more than fooling myself. He didn’t even have a shred of love in him. Could anyone hurt the one they loved?
As a result of all this, I tried to kill myself many times. In some attempts I backed down; in others I didn’t even take the first step. I think it was all so I could meet my mum, so I could see her once more. Now I’m here and I’m still alive. I guess God doesn’t want me to die, he kept me alive every time. I never understood what he wanted, though.
I’ll never get death out of my head, that’s for sure. It became part of me, it took my mum away from me. That’s why I wanted to die. I wanted to escape from the past, I wanted my past to never exist, but that wasn’t possible. I can never erase it. I must find a way to make peace with it because I…
I want to live.