Eighteen years and six months…a long time for a woman over her thirties to rot away behind the grey, lifeless bars. Her existence is near-forgotten, only known as the killer of her own husband. And there she is now standing in front of a lousy apartment floor that shows itself for housing a mere office worker, just as she expected. Too confident to take the steps to come here yet too afraid to knock on the wooden door in front of her. Too afraid to face what she left behind perhaps. Her face as gloomy as the weather and her clothes as worn out as her soul. She shouldn’t have come.
Before pestering up the courage to go all the way back, the door pushes itself out and reveals a merely tall boy with a slim figure, eyes too dark for a young man, and skin too pale for any human of age, to be honest. With his strange yet familiar face stands there the boy she did it all for, his boy.
“Mother..?”
She sees the tears threatening to fall out of his son’s eyes, yet he still remains calm and collected. He was always a stubborn young boy, she thinks.
Unable to come up with a sentence that would soothe the pain of a child who was taken away from both of his parents at the age of twelve and was forced to grow up by himself, the hatred of being left behind eating him up from inside…so she just smiles despite not doing the action for over five years in that hell of a place.
“Won’t you say anything?”
“I don’t want you to slam the door to my face because I said something wrong.”
“Come on. I’m not a child now. It’s been eighteen years, mother. An infant becomes a full-functioning adult in that time”
“I know…I’m sorry.”
“Me too. I’m sorry too.”
“It must’ve been hard…I wasn’t there.”
The boy lets out a mocking laugh. She thinks she deserves that. However, it sounds more like the sound was directed at himself rather than her.
“Yeah. You weren’t there.”
She observes the young man who once was all she held onto to survive the next day, the one who now became an adult. An adult she didn’t know anymore but still loved more than anything. Her eyes went behind the figure standing in the way and she tried to imagine what was it like in there.
“I won’t let you inside. I’m not ready. However, I just want to ask you one question mother. Can I?”
She was kind of disappointed but guessed he would say that. What is always missing becomes unneeded thereafter. He had built a life without her where she was no longer a character in. She couldn’t blame him.
“Sure. You have every right.”
“Why did you write that book?”
Ah. The book. She knew it would come to this.
“Do you know how much trouble I had to face because of it? Everywhere I went people looked at me with pity and horror, branding me as the son of a murderer, the son of a cursed family. I was fired from many jobs and was forced to live on the streets for weeks. For what? So that you could have some money after you evacuated?”
“Do you still read books?”
“What? What does this have to do with-“
“Do you?”
A frustrated sigh left his lips as he crossed his arms.
“Yeah. I do. That was the only thing you left behind.”
She reminisced the nights when they would sit together and read countless of stories until they both couldn’t lift their eyelids anymore. It was a very distant memory. Too out of touch to reach that it didn’t feel hers anymore.
“Do you remember the first time you finished a whole book by yourself?”
The boy got lost in the tunnel of nostalgia with that simple sentence for a couple of minutes…
“[This… is the end?]
Perhaps it was similar to learning about death. For the first time, he realized that something was finite.
His mother said, [This is the end. ]
[There isn’t anything that comes next? ]
[There is no ‘next’. ]
His mother was cold as she told him a brutal truth.
[ However, just because it is the end doesn’t mean you’ve seen the whole story. ]
Then she gave him a piece of wise advice.
[Read it again. ]
Reread the finished story. As a child, he didn’t know what this meant.
[Why read a story I already know? ]
[If you read it again, it will definitely be a different story. ]
[…I don’t want to. ]
He was stubborn because he was afraid of feeling the deprivation again. Then the mother said, [Do you want to read it together? ]
Thus, he learned to read again.
The story changed every time he read it. The story was over but it wasn’t over. The story wouldn’t end unless the reader gave up on the story.”
“I wrote that book so you would have something else to reread instead of your memories that continues to guilt you. Son. It wasn’t your fault. The knife…You were only protecting me.”
The memories he tried so hard to repress were coming back to his mind at the speed of lightning. He always knew he was the one to kill his abusive father but the book and his mother’s words made this story different than his memories no matter how much he reread it. He guessed it was finally time to give up on this rotten old story. To finally get the conclusion he longed for.
“Come in. I made tea.”
She smiled as she entered the door. What is always missing becomes unneeded thereafter. However, the boy was simply never missing from his mind as she never was from his.