"You don't need to sleep on bed, do you? You are already used to sleeping on floor," she gloated.
The daughter cowered into a corner, taken aback by the sudden display of cruelty.
"What's the problem with you letting me sleep on bed? It's not a big deal!" Her bloodshot eyes began tearing up.
"Then sleep on floor," she said and went back to her show.
The girl gritted her teeth. She saw no mother in that woman. Only a sadist.
She packed up her things to live in the isolated storage room.
Life had not been kind to her...she had her dream home but no means to keep her alive there.
Her mother knew that and she was taking advantage of it.
Of all the foes I have, she thought, my mother is the worst.
She gritted her teeth in the hot, stuff room.
She hadn't chosen that room to be hers out of intention; her room was supposed to be an actual one but her parents had given it to her brother in their endless magnanimity for him.
Boys are investment, they earn and take care of their parents after retirement.
Girls are married off, they are someone else's property.
For those two people who made a family to alleviate their loneliness and to have means for their retirement, their two children were nothing more than investments to ensure their own safety.
Motherhood, fatherhood, being a parent - these were all foreign concepts to them.
A child must obey their parents, they had indoctrinated their kids early on, they always think the best for you and guide you.
Sure as hell doesn't feel like that right now, she lamented her existence.
Her parents' may have been proving themselves superior to prove their absoluteness to their kids, but more than instilling that lesson, such incidents made her question herself, her life and her alive.
"Why birth me when you didn't even want me?"
She was always trapped in that paradox; the web of hate that always made her crash into that same pit of worthless existence.
That night, she cried herself to sleep alone. Tears mixed with sweat, and she wasn't sure what was what anymore.
The next morning, her mother cheerfully knocked on the door of the storage room.
"Will you eat noodles?" She asked.
The door creaked open as much as it could, which was not a lot.
The mother stamped in, slippers and all, bemoaning at how her things were stuffed away.
"You will break my trolley!" She complained. It was as if she couldn't see the broken form of her daughter crumpled on the floor on the untidily spread bedsheet.
"You will break this pot too! It's so expensive." She took it outside with her.
I wished and wished she would take me outside too, but she just closed the door behind her.
Somewhere, deep inside me, I am still hoping she would take me outside too. It doesn’t have to be my mother, but whoever it will be, they will have given me a new life.
Reflections