Letter from ‘Home’ | Day 11/30

A story was once told, of how I stashed a letter from home and got ambushed by a letter from ‘home’.

***

The weekend that was.

Life is worth writing home about. I am in my 2nd year in Highschool. Drama adores hanging out with me. If it isn’t happening to me, then it probably is happening to the person next to me. You’d recall I’m not one to give out any details of my mom’s passing. So far, it’s only my deskmate who is aware of the sudden demise.

She is very supportive. She’d never tell. I still want to believe that.

My dad has written a letter to my class teacher, informing him of our loss during the holidays and asking for moral support. He seems worried about me. I’m not. I got this.  I just have one job – deliver the letter from home to my teacher.

Let’s just say I still have it.

In my world, my mother existed nonetheless. I would be ashamed if I had no contributions of my own during the my-mother-did-this-and-that conversations. Everyone has a story to tell, right?

I don’t. So I would only speak of how grand she is, how she loved loves us and that it would be next to impossible to let her go. She is ailing. I let that slip to a few. This bit of outdated information is 1 year late but who cares? They don’t know. In hindsight, some could sense the gruelling pain in my voice, the stutter, the weakness, the gloom.

I get punished.

One of them gets one over me by writing a letter impersonating mom. I almost puke in my mouth while reading it. Yes, I somewhat fall for it and boy isn’t she happy for that priceless look on my face. For a moment I thought the letter must have arrived late, you know? In it, she seems to say she is feeling better and promises to visit soon.

But that’s not her handwriting so what then? Miss wonderful friend beat me at my own game? Still, I’m not telling. It’s none of their business. High school survival depended on the useless notion that everything is a competition. Locked in a perpetual grudge match, they are waiting anxiously for her to show up at our next visiting day…

It was such a darkly disturbing tale that you wish to erase from your memory vault in vain. I wish I was bold enough then to ask why she would do that. But there are no reasons enough to justify that act. Now it’s just one of those stories I would narrate to my would-be grandchildren, as they gather around a firepit with a no phone policy and I’ve run out of stories.

I am aware that I was in deep denial. And that I was surrounded by a bunch of weirdos.