The only exception

Part ONE

PART 1

At the age of six, I saw my father cry for the first time in our living room. He was alone with nothing, but the bottles, at that age, I don't have knowledge of. When I got older, I found out that he was drowning himself, not to ease the pain in his chest, but to die. The loud weeping made by my father was so loud that it echoed in our living room, and for a moment, I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to him for him to weep so badly.

With my two feet, I sat on our stairs as I watched from a distance. I can hear my father's thunderous voice from afar as he throws thousands of curses at the wind. I wanted to move my feet, approach my father and perhaps ask him why he was acting like someone I didn't know, but my feet wouldn't move. I didn't have the courage, so I slapped my legs to move until my skin turned red.

In the end, there was nothing I could do besides watch him weep.

The next day, he drank himself to sleep, and I wondered where my mother could have gone off. My mother never liked the smell of alcohol, so I often witnessed my father getting scolded by my mother. Yet, she's not here.

A week later, my father's hobby of drinking got worse, and it stayed like that until he started to shout at me. My father had never raised his voice at me until that time. A month later, I got used to his shouting and saw my mother, whose presence I miss most. She was standing beside him, speaking in a hushed tone that I could barely hear from the stairs. I wished I could hear what they had been talking about, but then I stopped wishing when I saw how my father had shoved her away from him.

I held a gap between my lips. Despite the distance, I could clearly see the guilt forming on his face, which I guessed was because of what he had done to my mother. My mother gasped, and all of a sudden, she wept on the floor as she moved her lips, spitting hatred words at my father. Then the guilt on his face starts to twitch, changing to hatred, just like my mother had.

I did nothing of the sort aside from witnessing the hatred they'd exchanged with each other, and it went on like that until I reached the age of eleven.

At the age of eleven, she finally left me. She was at our porch door, ready to leave without hesitation. I could hear my father's voice behind me, calling her names, and I think she was not listening, because the moment I opened my mouth as I called for her, she turned to me. I knew my mother was never going to go on one of her so-called business trips. Not when I've seen how she almost took all of her belongings from the house, as if she was erasing the fact that she existed here. The fact that she's my mother.

I don't want that. I never want that. I want my mother to stay, and not for my father, but for her daughter. It was a selfish request, but I didn't know that at the time. I was just a young kid back then, begging for my family to be okay just like before.

The memory of my mother lying before she walked out of my life was still vivid in my mind. I remember her fancy vanilla scent on me. I remember asking about the places when her boss asked her to go to some places, even though I had no knowledge of them. I wasn't even sure if those places existed, but I tried my hardest to remember them so I could figure out how and where she was going. I remember how she reached out to tuck my hair behind my ear for the last time and whispered that she would be back for me. Then she kissed my cheek, longingly. I remember how watching her left me completely helpless. I remember how I cried for her as I let myself sprint freely to the car, never accepting that she was going to leave me forever. But she never stopped the car.

I remember how I would wait for her every day at the window. I remember the disappointment I would get when I saw a black automobile only to find out that it was not her. I remember the pang of jealousy in me whenever I saw kids interacting with their mothers with smiles on their faces. I remember visiting my mom's old room, trying to feel her presence with me. I remember how I wept when I came to learn that my father had decided to move to Seoul, South Korea. And mostly, I remembered that I would cry only in the shower, where no one could see me or hear me, where I couldn't tell what my tears were and what the water was.