strange

it's weird when you know you're living a layered life, especially when everyone else around you is supposedly living with their heart on their sleeves.

why do i feel such isolation and loneliness? i don't really understand why i can't seem to move forward with my life and with what i want from myself and other people, and i don't know what i care so much about how other people treat people.

perhaps it's because i spent my adolescence watching my father act like a dick to my mother, and she had no choice but to tell her only child left in the house, her baby daughter, that her husband is doing things that she doesn't understand, that he's no longer going home at night, and no longer....

really there.

she feels empty, and she has nothing else to do but to yell at this young girl, to push her, and fill her own emptiness and lack of love.

i never understood why she yelled at me, why she was never openly proud of me, and why she never told me, "that's good enough.."

i just kept waking up at 5am, and i kept driving myself for the next day and the next, and i never really understood what it was all for, and why i was hurting myself with over-training.

there were days i just had strange back aches with just one push of my right skate. i knew there was something wrong with the strange push of my left foot, and then my right, but i kept pushing and stroking, and it just felt good to practice, or so i thought.

the pain kept adding up, and i cried to let it out. meanwhile, she worried about me, and asked what the matter was, and i just told her that it hurt, and nothing more. i didn't occur to me that i was trying too hard, and that i just physically couldn't handle the rigors that i put myself through. i tried to complain and shout about the pain, but she kept threatening and saying, "every time you don't practice, your competitor is getting better and better." those weren't her exact words, but the fact that i just wasn't good enough was what she was getting at.

i don't know why i didn't hate her, why i didn't scream at her, but it was only after a few hours of her berating me did i SCREAM for her to stop, for her to STOP YELLING at me, and for her to lower her voice. i never hated her, i never despised her, but i didn't feel guilty for yelling at her. i yelled back and called her stupid, ignorant. but i did feel guilty for treating her poorly. i felt guilty for being a poor daughter, and for not being like sophia.

i didn't stand in my underwear, and do the dishes at the age of 7. i didn't lift a finger and help her clean the bathrooms. but i wasn't sophia and i didn't have a room that looked like a tornado ripped through it. mine was spotless. everything in the exact place that i put it, everything in a certain order, nothing out of place. everything, exactly where i left it.

she had nothing to say about the spotlessness, and there wasn't anything that she did say about it. it was just left that way. spotless. but it was never my room. it was a room of a room. my brother's old room, the one we shared during his middle school years and during my elementary school years, the years he read bedtime stories to me in his "squeaky" voice, and i climbed into his side of the room, and into his bed, while he read me stories about Really Tall Mouse and Really Short Mouse. I wanted him to read the next story and the next story, until one day, the day that tanya wansom came over and grandma made korean style toast, he couldn't do "squeaky" voice for us that day. he cracked and croaked and awkwardly smiled to himself.

i felt so sad that he never did squeaky voice after that, and why i couldn't put the blanket between us when i got afraid of the dark.