Don't Eat Flowers

Chapter Twenty-Five: She Is

- With Nami that morning -

"Hey Dad, I was wondering... If you could send me more cash, for a longer stay here in the valley?" Nami asked him hesitantly as she spoke into the inn's telephone behind the desk, her voice low.

"Why?" he demands venomously, his voice so loud over the phone that it hurt Nami's eardrum. "Are you really that ungrateful for what I have given you so far? You have the audacity to ask me for more?"

Nami held back a frustrated sigh. "I just said. ...For a longer stay in the valley," she repeated.

"Well, that reason isn't good enough. You've never wanted to stay in a place for so long before. Why is that dump so special?" he asked, him growing angrier by second.

"I have my reasons," Nami firmly answered. "I'd like to...stay here long-term, for a couple more years," she confessed. 'Or maybe even forever.' Nami thought to herself hopefully, but she couldn't dare say such a thing to her father. She sadly knows that he just secretly gets a thrill at watching her suffer and struggle going from place to place around the world; he likes having that power over her.

Her father scoffed. "You know, I'm so tired of you always causing so much trouble for your mother and I. It's your own fault why you even have to travel on your own with no place to call home in the first place. You're lucky we even give you any money at all. It's simply so the Harvest Goddess doesn't punish us with bad karma or whatever. Your life would have been so much easier if you would have just married a man like we wanted."

Nami looked down at the wooden floor boards she was standing on and was quiet. She had nothing to say.

Her dad then let out a rather condescending laugh. "Don't tell me you're 'in love' and that's why you want to stay in that pathetic place? Pft. If you're really in love with a girl, if you really love her, then you'll let her go. Because that girl deserves better than you. You'd be selfish to pursue something with her, you're a nobody. You have no skills, you can never keep a job. You've got nothing to offer her. No one could actually love you with the way you are now anyway. You'll just hold her back from true happiness and will just hurt her in the end, just like how you hurt your mother and I with your selfishness. All you do is hurt people."

With that, Nami's father slammed the phone down, cutting off the call. It left Nami quiet and trembling, yet at the same time she felt a numbness lurking in her heart. She felt like she hated him, yet for some reason she always wanted his opinion, his validation, but she'll never admit that to anyone, even herself. She always so easily believed his words deep down even though she acts like she doesn't believe them whenever she talks to him. She acts indifferent and puts up a tough front, but she wishes that her parents cared about her the way that she still cares about them, despite the past. Despite them kicking her out of their home for certain reasons when she was in her early twenties.

What Nami doesn't know, is that every time she tried to have a job anywhere, her father would always call her employer, and would complain about Nami in someway, sabotaging her, and always causing her to get fired, which always resulted in her relying on him. He'd get a thrill having that kind of power over her while that lead Nami to believe that she was totally useless and not good enough anywhere that she went. Her self-worth went down the toilet and she wonders why she even bothers anymore, and she kind of always just went with the flow not caring about anything and not really caring about her own life until... her.

Until the new farmer girl came into town. And that farmer girl...

She Is...

Everything that Nami never knew she needed.