Artful Awakening in Mystery of Life & Purposes

Chapter 1: Brushstrokes of Despair

In a home comforted within the heart of Miri, a 10 year old named Bob sat at the kitchen table, his small frame hunched over his homework. In the dim light cast shadows across the room, shrouded in darkness that seemed to envelop his heart and mind.
      
At just 10 years old, Bob felt a bore the weight of a world far beyond his years, a world that was filled with loneliness, uncertainty and despair.
      
Then Bob's mother Hua Zhe Ying, a weary accountant tiredless working to provide for her son, her brow furrowed with worry as she poured over endless spreadsheets of billing and financial reports.
      
Her days and nights are consumed by the relentless demands of single parenthood.  As she returned home from another exhausting day at the office, she found her son still sitting at the kitchen table, his homework untouched. With a frustrated sigh she approached her son with her loud tinged.

"Ah-Bob, why haven't you finished your homework yet?" she scolded in a tone sharp with exhaustion.

"You know how important your studies are. You can't afford to fall behind."

Bob lowered his gaze, his heart sinking with shame. He knew he had disappointed his mother once again adding to the burden that already weighed heavily upon his shoulders.

"I'm so sorry Mummy," he murmured softly. "I'll try harder, I promise."

But Zhe Ying's patience was thin, her nerves frayed from the relentless pressures of work and parenthood. She sighed heavily and turned away from her son, her mind beginning to be consumed by a thousand worries and fears.
      
As Bob scurried to his room, he overheard the echoes of his mother's disappointment ringing in his ears, he couldn't help but feel a sense of despair wash over him.
      
He longed for the warmth of a loving family, for the reassurance of a father's embrace. But his father had been absent from his life since he was a child, leaving behind.

And now, with the arrival of Uncle Nestor, Zhe Ying's new partner from the Philippines.Though Nestor tried his best to be a father figure to Bob, he couldn't shake the feeling of bitterness that gnawed at his soul which born from years of abandonment and neglect.

Alone in his room surrounded by the silence of darkness, Bob reached for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. With each stroke of his hand he poured out his heart and soul onto the page, the lines and curves taking shape before his eyes. In that moment, he found the act of creation, a brief respite from the turmoil that raged within him.
     
By the time he was 16 and was University, Bob knew his journey had only just begun a journey that would lead him to discover the true power of art with a little magic it held within. But for now, he remained lost in the strokes of despair in a silent cry for help in a world that seemed determined to break his spirit.