june 6th, 2013

                   6:35pm

dear stupid diary

sorry for not writing for a while, something awful happened at school.

our homeroom teacher died on sunday, and we were informed on monday upon our arrival to school. and it feels particularly strange? to have known a person for so long you’ve come to view them as a permanent fixture in your life. you’ve gotten used to seeing them performing certain tasks, acting out certain roles, that any extraneous behaviour sort of breaks that mold of normalcy, and then it’s like you’re seeing them clearly, for the first time again.

such was my experience when the news of mrs. hwang’s death got to me that morning. as though a stripe of my life-canvas had been ripped off, and suddenly, my existential art piece was now incomplete. funny to say, i hadn’t thought her remotely important before this incident. she was always just mrs. hwang, the pretty, soft-spoken teacher who everyone loved and doted on because you could get away with basically anything if you were in her good book. mrs. hwang, who always donned on some pink, to go with her skirt suits. mrs. hwang, who brought us  cupcakes every friday without fail.

and what makes me most upset isn’t the palpability of her death, but rather, the involvement of her husband in it! now obviously, the school didn’t tell us this, that he killed her. but i found out from the local news, and i was so livid. how do you kill someone precious and soft like mrs. hwang? what kind of demon do you have to be to punch her to an early grave? in all truth, he should count himself lucky to be held up by the law, otherwise i, along with my classmates, would have found him and punched him to a bloody pulp. like he did to her.

but you know what i find the most shocking? that none of us ing knew. that none of us could have guessed the misery behind her pretty eye smiles and motherly looks. that behind all the lipgloss and pink coats was a woman withering und