Bed Friend (English Version)

EP2 : The Thing Called Weakness

Since I was a child, I have always lived alone.

I am the only child in a middle-class family. My father is a police officer. My mother is a company employee. This sounds like a normal family. As the only child, in my childhood, I should have been my parents' beloved child. I should have been well pampered, I should have been happy like other kids my age had it not been for the problems in my parents' marriage that made them fight seriously. I was not even ten years old, and I just stood quivering in shock to see my parents shouting at each other almost every single day.

An elementary school kid like me did not understand adults that much, but I caught a few things about which they were fighting. My father had cheated on my mother with a new woman. When my mother found out, she made a fuss, fought with him and cried begrudgingly. Eventually, after half a year of witnessing my parents fight every day when I returned from school, they finally got divorced and separated.

Actually, they had been thinking of getting divorced since the first month that my mother found out about my father's affair, but they did not get divorced right away because they had me as an obstacle. I would have had to be under someone's care, and they just could not agree on who I should have been with – each of them wanted the other to take me – and my father ended up being free while my mother had to take the burden of raising me.

The day my mother took me out of my father's house, my father looked especially happy and did not even bother to look at me. Since then I have never seen him again, and I think he would be happy to not have to see me again too.

My mother and I started a new life in a small apartment in the heart of the city. My father never sent us any money to support us. It was only my mother who had to be responsible for all the expenses. It must have worn her out considerably to earn a living to raise me, so she often vented off her dissatisfaction by scolding me. I just sat there and listened quietly. I did not dare to say anything because I was afraid that she would hate me. A child under ten right then was afraid to be abandoned, so I tried to be a good boy, study hard and make her proud of me.

I only had my mother and I did not want her to abandon me as my father had.

I lived with my mother for around a year. Then one day, she came back from work with a man whom I had never seen. That man told me to call him "dad", and my mother told me that that man was the one she would marry.

One year after her divorce, she remarried and started a new life. I moved into my stepfather's house which was a three-story attached house in the suburbs which was unlike the apartment where I lived with my mother in the city. At first, I was very happy because I thought that once she became happy, she would talk to me nicely unlike before. However, I was too naïve, I thought too highly of myself.

My mother never scolded me again. No, in fact, she was not interested in me ever again, and it became even more obvious when she had a baby with my stepfather. Right then, I was in the eighth grade and I clearly understood what I was to my mother.

A scar from the old life? A parasite? More or less.

She never cared how late I got home, where I went or who I was with. She only cared about her new husband and her new daughter. My half-sister was so adorable then. As for me, I had just got into an all-boys middle school, and I just started to figure out that I was not interested in girls.

"Who's that!?" my mother yelled when I arrived home on the back of a boyfriend's motorcycle.

I hesitated for a while before answering, "A friend."

"What kind of friends hold hands that long? Do you think I'm dumb!?"

She did not in the least bit believe me. I could not blame her because no matter how you looked at it, we really did not look like just friends anyway.