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Kim Namjoon One-shot: Reality or Fantasy?
˚✧₊⁎⁺˳✧༚
When I was younger, my mother was hardly ever home. She worked three jobs and the only times I saw her was when I got up to use the bathroom late at night to find her preparing to leave for her next job. To me, it was normal. Not because I was use to it, that played a part, but because everyone's mother was like that.
All of my friends each had a mother that worked three jobs. It was normal for a low class, such as us. For middle class—people that owned bikes, could ride the bus to school, and got hand-me-downs—it was two jobs; high class—people that got driven to school, people that wore new clothes and got to own phones—it was one; elite classes didn't need to have jobs because they were so wealthy and were important people.
Men were teachers, the government declaring they were the wisest among men and women, and were meant to teach the history of the world and more to children. Based on your social class, you got placed with whichever teacher came from there. Most fathers of the lower class were like our mothers; too busy to see us. They stayed long enough to teach us how to cook and clean and take care of ourselves when we were younger. Once we were decent enough in those skills, we hardly ever saw them, and if we did, we never spoke to them, only exchanging a glance at the foreign man.
Mine wasn't like that, mine disappeared right after I was born as my mother had said. I didn't bother to ask why or what happened to him. That was because I didn't necessarily care. Even if he was there in my life, he would have been like my mother and wouldn't appear. So it didn't matter to me.
As for school, the school I attended, there were fences with barbwire at the top that separated the classes. It was a grim reminder that the lower classes couldn't ever make it in life—a taunting thing. The school I went to was also a discipline center where the upperclassmen sent their children whenever they were trying to discipline them. It was a way to show them that if they continued to misbehave, they would end up like us and that they should be grateful for what they had.
Still, it was completely normal. No one thought of it as anything else. It was a daily life thing that was passed down for years, never once changing. Besides, what was the point of thinking much about it? That was what I told myself every day, because honestly, I didn't care. I never cared about how the world was. To me, it was a game on repeat, especially because I was in the lowest class. We live to die, so what was the point of making some type of change just to be forgotten?
Despite being only six, I already had a mindset such as that one. Everyone did. It was normal.
I learned at the tender age of eight that it wasn't. That everything around me, how we all behaved so dully, already done with life as soon as you learned how to fend for yourself, was certainly not normal. That nothing was supposed to be like this. That I wasn't supposed to be walking to school barefoot everyday, that my parents were supposed to be with me every day of my life, beaming at me as I returned home from school. That only having a kitchen, living room, and a tiny bathroom in a house too small for more than two people wasn't normal. That having no lights in the broken house unless you lit up a shitty candle was certainly not normal.
