Periapt : A Family's Secret

TWO : OPPRESSION

THE ONLY family I ever had is now laying inside a dark brown oak coffin. I wanted to cry, but it seems like my mind is still in denial.

"Mia," a gentle hand touched my shoulder as I greeted them in return. It is Aunt Rose's husband who is also my father's friend, "We're sorry for your loss."

I'm not sure how to let out a proper reaction to the people around me. Aunt Rose is my father's sister. She's the closest to what we can call a family we can turn into, not until I was blamed for the death of their unborn child just because the curious child in me asks what's a baby doing inside a woman's stomach while she touches her precious aunt's belly.

Since then, I was labeled as the bringer of bad luck in my family, like a stray black cat that they wouldn't want to see.

I'm tired of hating the people whom I had great expectations with.

I feel nothing but indifference towards the people around me.

Looking in their eyes, for sure that they're also blaming me for my father's death.

I gulped and instinctively held on to the pendant that my father gave me in case I felt suffocated by the judgment of my environment. The tiny silver amulet comforted me as if my own father was standing beside me telling me that everything will be fine.

This was a gift from him when I was seven years old. He said that through this pendant, I could negate bad luck in order to welcome the good ones. The child in me believed in him. This has been my lucky charm since then.

I may not have had a normal childhood when I was still in grade school, but a lot has changed when I reached high school. I came to adapt even if I'm being alienated by the people just because of what they heard happened back when I was still a child.

I can totally understand that people outside my family will never bother to understand someone like me. However, it's different when your own family treats you like an outcast.

That I am an abomination made because of a one night mistake.

I don't understand the metaphor behind those words back then. But after I hear the actual rumor itself that damaged the credibility of my father, I was immediately enraged by it because people believed such lie for a very long time without even knowing my father.

My father is not some crazy guy who fell in love with a witch that lived over a millennia who sold her soul to the demon that would grant her an immortal life.

People believe in lies just because someone is different from them.

If the manifestation of me being a daughter of a witch was that time when I took care of a crow, it's just a mere coincidence.

Crows are smart creatures and they will remember if you are good or bad.

What's wrong with helping a bird that stumbled on your window? In the end I set it free because its wings healed up.

Though I'm not sure if it was the same crow that stalks me every time I went outside my house.

I'm not sure if a flock of crows were migrating just because most of them were seen outside my school one day. It was a strange phenomenon that my teachers thought of as a bad omen that they don't want to deal with. Everyone of us offered a prayer to God hoping that calamity would just pass silently.

And it did.

However, the parents of my classmates blamed me for being the daughter of a witch that caused a massive pandemic back in the day. Which the present-time called 'bird flu' by the way.

"Your father loved you very much." My aunt says with her deepest condolences bringing me back to reality with a sad smile holding my hand. I simply nodded at her yet unexpectedly she gave me a warm hug caressing my back as if she is carrying a certain weight in her heart that she wants to unload through this embrace.

"If you need anything, I just want you to know that we're here for you." she uttered as a tear almost escaped her eye, "I'm here for you, okay?"

People seldom honor their word.

"Thank you Aunt Rose." That's all I can say towards them because I can't lie to myself just to please the people around me.

Minutes turned into hours.

Days turn into nights.

Different people come and go, some stay for a while but not for long.

Since when funerals turned into a sad family reunion?

I'm glad that most of my father's siblings came as they accommodate his visitors from here and there.

I almost felt their sympathy from how they let me grieve in my own way.

Every night I look at my father's sleeping face as I carry the last memories of him in my heart.

Why does every good soul die so soon?