Taeyeon asked me how Tiffany was doing.
I wanted to tell her a lot of things.
Like how Tiffany was remembering her past, crying over the realization her mother was dead.
But her new companion named Moose is licking her tears away.
I wanted to tell her that she could never warm Tiffany up better than a dog.
But all I said was that Tiffany was doing good.
I should have said fine or well, but Tiffany was really doing good, at least she wasn't hurting anyone.
Or turned from prey to a true predator.
She was actually sleeping on my bed right now.
It was a default response, the word good, but also a dangerous response.
People might actually think you're drowning in depression because of some angsty teenage Facebook posts nowadays when you reply with the word good, and just the word good.
It used to just mean you were neutral, not too spectacular, but it wasn't like you were on the verge of hanging yourself.
By now that word has taken a whole new dimension, it has such beneath the surface meaning.
When you hear or see something vague, it's like sitting in English class, like you're obligated to decipher and dissect a hidden message at risk of losing a letter grade.
Or a friend.
Utter craziness, I say.
Taeyeon told me that she missed Tiffany.
Utter craziness.
I never lowered my pad and pen; I just bore my gaze into hers, that never wavered.
The camera rolled on, it wasted some film of just pure silence splashing into the air, evaporating into thin air.
It rained silence.
She misses Tiffany, she repeats.
My eyes just steel over even more, because she is telling the truth, and I don't like it.
Even if you don't like someone, you still can miss them, as long as you keep your feelings to yourself, there's no pride to lose.
Love kills our pride the most, men drop their barriers for the mothers in their lives, knowing that there's nothing to hide from them.
Mother knows your struggles, when you last cried because you were crying on their shoulders, they know when you are being lazy or giving your all in the cruel world.
They may not know all your secrets or understand all your values, but they know who you are.
A mother is only a mother if she raised her child, if she loved her child, and if the child acknowledges her as his or her mother.
If not, then you are a woman, just a woman.
But you're still a woman with power, even without a child, you have power.
Because without you, there would be no men.
There would only be boys.
A man is a man when he learns that not all women like to be pushed into the sand on the playground, not all women like their dollhouses crushed.
And that he learns to accept that some women can join him in the mud to play with toy trucks all day.
Taeyeon, though, does not play with dolls or trucks, she plays with fire.
She taps her fingers on the table and asks me how my hand is healing.
I say it's fine, it really is fine, there is no mark.
Taeyeon says it's because Liquid Knowledge was programmed that way, cooked in a way for herself, therefore if she accidentally touched it, it wouldn't sear her flesh off.
Because if it did, how could she ever continue her experiments?
Invalidity proved to be difficult to overcome.
Then she suddenly tells me that she's tired, and she wants to go back to her quarters and sleep.
I relent to her request, I can't think of her and Tiffany's current status at the same time, never have I been so distracted from an interview at all.
All these twisted woven pieces of the story is just to invigorating.
Jung Jessica, the mental institute tells me, is sobbing too much to speak.
I just sigh at her attempt of being insane, because she doesn't even need to try.
I placed my pad of paper down on the table, almost three fourths of it is blank.
I can only sigh again as I watch Taeyeon slip through my fingers, and Tiffany slip into my mind.
And I think again as I trace the sides of the pad with the absence of the mind.
Throughout the whole story, you may wonder why I chose this job.
And as much as I complain about the craziness of the world, why I did not just quit.
This job that has exploited so many, to people like me they have turned their hearts inside out for the sake of a story.
Just one story...
I say I was tricked.
I used to have a fascination with crime, mainly homicide.
Of course, I had no fancy thoughts of committing it, and that still stays true.
Even so, my mother did warn me that this job was like dancing with the dead.
Despite her warning that I would tread in and between the unspoken words of the dead, I pressed on with my endeavors in this type of journalism.
When things went wrong, I figured that they had some uses, even if they weren't materialistic.
Things break to be fixed, and from mistakes, the human race advances.
They do not advance from technology, or open mindedness, they advance from the glitches in technology, and the mistakes born from narrow mindedness.
And they finally realize that money cannot solve everything.
Money cannot buy life or time, if you are about to be stabbed, no one will take your petty cash.
And with the mainstream encircling money nowadays, crime is just like a refreshing dump of water to the face.
Things come to the surface, abused children tell their stories, bankrupt officials, corrupted minds confess to the world only when it is too late.
You wonder why they didn't tell you earlier, it is because they weren't abused earlier.
If a human doesn't make a sound, then there is nothing wrong.
Therefore, we feel like there is nothing wrong only in our sleep.
But even as I try to write this down, my lips not saying a thing, only moving to breathe, everything is wrong.
Perhaps everything is wrong because my breath is a sound, a small, wispy sound.
But still a sound.
No wonder everything is just so wrong.
