A home is a place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to get back

John Ed Pearce

I dragged myself up the porch of my house. I was still sniffing and feeling so incredibly down that I felt like I could drown in my own sadness. Too bad for me that I still had to go back to school eventually.

I touched my nose slightly, to feel if there was still blood coming out of it. But after I felt my nostrils, I knew that I didn’t need to worry about that anymore. The thing I should worry about the most now was that my parents couldn’t see my current state.

So I tiptoed to the front door and wanted to touch the doorknob when I heard voices. My parents’ voices to be exact.

“You take him along, Chyonhae! I don’t want to have anything to do with that little pest anymore!” Was that my mother’s voice? I had hardly seen her angry before. I remember her being angry twice. Once because I broke a plate and the second time when I had shown her my school results.

“Why should I?! You’re the mother and mother’s always take their child along!” He yelled back but I didn’t care about that anymore. I felt my heart freeze. I wasn’t completely understanding what was going on anymore. My parents had always been nice to me and I had never been a trouble for them, well, at least that was what I thought. Where did all of this come from?

“He stopped being my son since-” My mother abruptly stopped as if she didn’t even want to say what exactly happened, I heard my father snort as if he already expected that my mother didn’t have the guts to say it. What had I done that I wasn’t her son anymore? What in the world happened that everyone seemed to hate me that much?

My fingers trembled on the doorknob and I felt tears stinging in my eyes again. I wanted to run away but I had nowhere to go, there was no friend where I could go to. I had no family members that could take me in and frankly, I saw myself dying if I ran away from home.

“Can’t we just leave everything and go away, just the two of us? I’m getting tired of pretending. It seems to the life out of me, Chyonhae.”

“Soomin…” It seemed like my father wanted some time to think about it and despite my red eyes and the feeling of a breaking heart in my chest, I decided to ‘release’ him from that though question by opening the door and saying: “I’m home.”

It was more sad than funny to see how my parents wanted to cover up the evidence of the fighting. I saw a broken lamp by the side table where my father quickly ran to as if he was just busy with cleaning it up while my mother quickly dried her own red eyes.

“Oh, Donghae… You’re home?” Her voice seemed a bit strained or had it always been that way? I didn’t know anymore. Part of me wanted to think that the scene in front of my eyes was real. That one of my mother’s lamps were broken which was the reason why she cried. And that my father looked so anxious because he didn’t want my mother to be upset thus he was frantically trying to clean everything up.

How I wished that all of that could’ve been true. But it wasn’t.

“Yeah, I decided to run home because I couldn’t wait to see you guys.” My mother’s smile widened but it seemed so incredibly fake. Had my parents always been this way? Why hadn’t I seen it before? Because if I was honest, it was terrible acting.

“What happened?” I forced myself to say, it would’ve been what I would’ve said if I hadn’t heard the conversation from before.

“I accidentally knocked the lamp over and your mother is crying because it was your grandmother’s lamp.” My father quickly lied and my mother showed me a little smile as if she wanted to say: ‘yes, that’s what happened!’

I would’ve caught onto the lie even if I hadn’t heard the conversation from before. My mother and I had bought that lamp years ago. Even if it was ugly and looked old, the truth was that it hadn’t belonged to my grandmother.

Still, I decided to leave that little mistake where it was. My biggest priority now was to reach my bedroom without showing any of my tears.

“I’m going to my room.” Suddenly there was a lump in my throat as I saw my mother nod. She made a gesture that urged me to go upstairs. Before the conversation, I would’ve thought that she didn’t want me here because I could get hurt because of the broken pieces of the lamp, but now…

Tears welled up and I ran as quickly as I could upstairs. In the end of the hallway, I saw the white door of my room. I hastily opened it and had to use all of my self-control, not to slam the door because that could alarm my parents.

I let myself fall on my bed, my face collided with the pillow but I didn’t care as I let all the tears flow from my eyes. My sobs were muffled because of the thick fabric of the pillow. My world was broken, I didn’t have anybody anymore. But the thing that hurt the most was that I had no idea why that was.

Not able to handle the pillow on my face all the time, I forced myself to sit up my bed which automatically meant that I would look in the mirror which stood across my bed.

I stared at my own reflection. Besides the bump on my temple and the light traces of blood on my nostrils, I couldn’t find anything particularly wrong with me. Soft brown locks fell on my front head, I had brown eyes that didn’t se