For once, I really thought it was the end for me. Literally. Curtains down, bounded for the great adventure, finally off of this pathetic planet.
I began to savor the lazy moments in bed since Monday, because there is simply no other feeling like it in the world. I missed my math classes four times in succession, including today, in preparation for our eventual permanent separation. I scoffed at my books, armed with the blessed mercury as a herald of the final rest that I so wanted.
I gleefully smile at the thought of parting from the things I hated and escaping through the gentle drip of an IV pack of sedatives or through the pleasant shadow of a coma. It was flu. Simply a flu, and yet my mind has taken off to morbid and impossible paths that I embraced so long as I will not have to face the sciences. Three 5’s in my transcript are too much to erase with time.
But, almost symbolically, I broke the thermometer the other night. I accidentally hit it across the table, surprised and unable to trace the droplets of shattered mercury. Then it occurred to me:
Mercury is poison.
There were few droplets on the surface of the table, which I gathered with a piece of tissue paper. I rolled it around, amazed at its properties, both physical and lethal. But, in my dismay, it, too, fell and shattered.
I realized that I was mad, mad in its truest sense. My apathy for things seemed to have grown out of hand, and I have no idea how it came about.
This morning, after a bout of tears (I missed a final exam in the morning, and there is another one later this afternoon which I resolve not to miss), I decided that even if I did get three 5’s this semester (Calculus, Physics, and Lab) I will obtain three 1’s on the next. I unlocked the door and trudged downstairs to where my mom had just scolded me for my neglect and evident irresponsibility before I ran up and locked myself in the room. I felt like crying again when I noticed that she softened a bit and, well, maybe thought that I was trying and that I simply could not do it.
She looked up from her work. “Well?”
“Just give me the fare money. I’ll go to school myself.”
“I thought your next exam was at 1?” I was really thankful she hadn’t got her glasses on, because I was tearing up already.
“W-what am I going to do at home?”
“Well, what are you going to do at school?”
“…study?” I haven’t really thought about it. I just thought that maybe going to school, bane of my existence, would show that I was not afraid of it and can face it by myself.
“I’ll just bring you there at one. Turns out we won’t be making the delivery then. Just take this chance to keep drinking vitamin C.”
“O-okay.” As I was about to go upstairs to cry properly, she told me (in Chinese):
“You know, you can’t keep forcing yourself through Math and Physics. Just shift to PSID, I think that will be better rather than to keep failing. Besides, no one’s forcing you to finish Architecture. You can even just stay at home and help me out. That would be better, even. It’s hard to do things by myself.”
Inside me, then, was a rush of emotions—relief, gratitude, shame, sadness, excitement, anything and everything but apathy. Again I cried, but this time it isn’t out of hopelessness.
In a way, it still was the end. End of madness, end of misery…well, I can’t say what’s in store for me in the next chapter, but, with all tenacity, I will avoid regret.
