My First Relationship Heartache (Flash Fiction Part 1)

Flash Fiction #178

Many years ago, I attended a boarding high school hundreds of miles away from home. My parents didn’t want me to go, but I insisted on it. The school was well known for its bad food, worn out dorms, rigid rules, and indifferent teachers. It would have discouraged any normal people from ever setting foot in it, but I was excited. I wanted to leave home. It didn’t matter where. Any place was better than home where my two narcissistic parents created a hell with no exit for themselves—divorce was unthinkable at the time. I had an irrational fear that it could somehow become a hell without exit for me too if I didn’t get away as soon as I could.

As it turned out after I left, the relationship between my parents got worst. As a grey rock child, I served as a relationship lubricant for them. They could differ on every topic under the sun and lock themselves in their rivalry, but whenever it concerned me, they became united. I was their common enemy and metaphorical punch bag since I was sulky, silent, depressed, ungrateful. I did breathe and occupy space inevitably at home, but I did nothing else.

The high school was located in a big city along the Pacific coast. I was allocated into a class, where I was the only student who didn’t speak the local dialect. Most people who came to the city from rural areas were eager to learn to speak like the locals, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why I was so stubborn. The tone of the dialect just didn’t appeal to me and I had no willingness to learn. That was it.  

At the time, the counselor of my class was my math teacher. She was an extremely energetic lady and strived to be an honor teacher of the school. How could a rural student like me be left alone under an honored teacher like her? So she paired me up with a girl named Apeng, who strived to become our class president. Apeng was a good student, but she was not good with math. So we ended up helping each other—I helped her with math and she helped to “urbanize” me.  

The problem was that we only had the appearance of being good friends. We did help each other willingly and graciously, but friendship of utility could only reach limited depth, beyond which we could not possibly go. She talked about her family in glowing terms—a caring mother, a capable father, a nice younger brother who didn’t suck all the attention away from her parents. How could my family be compared with such a shining perfection of modern nuclear family? In response, I was silent about my own family, for fear that she or my other classmates would despise me even more—not only couldn’t I speak their dialect, but I also possessed such a dysfunctional father and a crazy mother.

“You look so much like your mother.” Apeng said to me after my mother left. My mother came only once to my dorm during my high school years and stayed for less than five minutes. If Apeng was observant, she would have noticed the indifferent attitude we assumed in our mother-daughter relationship, which I had always dreamed of escaping. To this day, I can still remember that Apeng tried to make me talk about my mother, but I stayed resolutely silent. She had a good mother and a functional family. I knew her type. She would uphold her own family as the image of perfection that all families should conform to. I knew back then that people with nice parents usually became a believer of the cult of family and forced other people to abide by their impossible standard.

(To Be Continued Here)