Five things my mother taught me

No. 5: How to have a self esteem

If you cover your face In makeup, body in revealing clothes and you're at a bar, someone will sleep with you. That was her logic, as flawed as the rest of her. 

While she was dressing herself in makeup to drown in cheap liquor, suicide had been a word in Hitoshi's vocabulary. How she has never been there when really mattered, and If she was there physically, She was hungover. Too tired to care. Never listening, until it was too late. 

His mom made excuses and fret illness to get out of work, she was too sore, too hungover to get up, how she'd make it up to them in vacation days (she wouldn't). It taught Hitoshi not to make the excuses for self-pity that she does. But was his downfall when he was really sick. 

She taught him what no to do. How not to act if he doesn't want his children to have to grow up Like him. Lonely. 

She had taught him that the world will always beat you down, no matter what he'd always be at a disadvantage, she taught him it doesn't matter if he fought back, stood up for himself or if he respected himself or if he cared about anybody else, the world hates him, just as much as the strange men she brought home. 

The last time he was at that house, she came home hungover, early in the morning, to start drinking again. 

He opened the window and threw the bottle out, his mother too silly to stand. 

He found himself sitting on the porch, the cold bottle in his shaking grasp.

Hitoshi didn't even cry.

He knew he needed to get up, that the battle is the hardest part of life. He knew that he was broken, Shattered, a shallow shell of the person he once was. He knew she would never be good enough to teach him one more god damn useless thing in his life because he deserved better. 

 He tipped the bottle to his lips, and to his own self-satisfaction, he tasted her vodka, not his. And he learned that vodka doesn't fix everything, but talking helps.