14 Jul 2012

Dear Eonnie,

I was talking with Haha today during break. He would come to find me sometimes, now that Gary always spends this time during break for his part-time job. Sometimes Kwang Soo will join us too, but today it was just Haha and I.

We ate at a table, with some other students. We ate silently, because he knew I didn’t talk much, but the other students played and chatted loudly. They sort of went overboard and spilled their noodles all over the floor. But instead of cleaning up, they laughed and ran away. I frowned. Haha shook his head and went over to get the cleaner lady to clean up.

And she just yelled at us for making a mess and wasting food. I was annoyed (and I was rarely annoyed)- it wasn’t even our fault. I opened my mouth to protest, but Haha shook his head. Instead, he bowed and apologised to her, before leading me away.

“What was that!” I asked, frowning.

“What?”

I sighed.

“Maybe she was having a bad day,” Haha said.

“But that doesn’t give her the right to lose her temper at us!” I argued.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter; we didn’t get hurt because of it.”

I sighed again, not knowing what to say. But he continued, “Sometimes, people act like they’re okay on the outside, but they might be struggling to hold their lives together on the inside… and we would never know. Their lives get shattered but the world still goes on and it to feel like that. It to feel that everyone’s moving on ‘cept yourself. And sometimes you just feel like the entire world owes you something because of your screwed up life.”

He paused and looked at me. “You know that feeling?”

I thought of you then. When you left so suddenly, my life shattered. Our lives. And I did feel angry at the world. While I did not flare up at anyone I see, I held in my anger and refused to open up, refused to talk to anyone. It was suffocating.

I nodded.

“See?” he said. “If we get angry at her, she would get more upset. And if her life was really falling apart, wouldn’t it be a horrid thing to do?”

I looked down, feeling ashamed. The thing about Haha is that he sounds so wise sometimes, I feel like I’m talking to an adult. And th