Past Memories

Somewhere far from the busy city, a boy arrived at the front of a desolate house. He looked to be around 8 to 10 years old and was dressed in tattered clothes. Bruises were clearly visible on his body. He went to knock on the door, but there was no response from inside. His movements had been quite normal before, but when there was still no response after some time, he gave the door a huge bang, and with a loud thud, the door fell down with a "boom." He looked shocked, and the smile he had earlier, hoping to see a familiar face, became stiff.

The boy fell to his knees, grabbed his hair with both hands, and started to cry bitterly.

Boy's POV:

Mom, where are you? Mom, didn’t you say you would wait for me here? He felt a pulsating pain in his head and then drifted back to some memories from a few years ago. Remembering them, the boy began stomping his hands on the floor, and because of the scattered wood, his hands were cut, and blood began to flow. Upon seeing the blood, the boy suddenly felt dizzy and collapsed on the ground.

Five Years Ago:

A little boy with a thin frame was cooking dinner in the kitchen. Later, while humming a gentle tune, he was busy doing the dishes with one hand and wiping down the sauce scattered around the counter with the other.

Suddenly, there was a loud crash from upstairs. Hearing the sound, the boy froze, then quickly ran upstairs. "Mom! Mom! Mom, what happened? Are you alright?" The boy reached the door, and as he was about to push it open, he seemed to remember something. He paused and said, "Mom, can I come inside? Mom, please reply. I'm coming in, okay?" The boy pushed the door, and suddenly a glass came flying toward him.

He tried to dodge, but he was a little too late and got hit by it. He felt a tingling sensation, and when he touched his forehead, he saw blood. Ignoring it, he entered the room and saw a woman lying on the carpet with her hand still raised from before. Seeing the boy approaching her, she started to cry and moved back. The woman seemed to be in her early 20s, around 23 to 25 years old.

As the boy tried to reach her, she suddenly screamed and said, "Go away! I said go away! Don’t come near me, don’t touch me, you bastard! You should just die!" While saying this, she tried to grab the scattered glass on the floor. Succeeding in getting a piece, she tried to stab him with it, but the boy quickly caught his mother’s hand.

Despite being smaller and much younger, the struggles and hardships he had faced over the years had made him quite strong. He succeeded in restraining his mother and tried to soothe her. At first, she was screaming, shouting, and spitting at him, but then she seemed to get tired and suddenly stopped moving.

The boy said, "Mom, it’s alright. You’re okay. You are safe, Mommy, and I'm here to protect you." The boy gave his mother a tight hug, and while hugging each other, they both had tears streaming down their faces.

The boy had once had a very happy family. Even though his mother was quite young when she became pregnant with him, his father loved her dearly. There was an age gap between them, and because his mother was an orphan, she had no one to care for her. Being loved for the first time, she easily fell in love with his dad. His father was a PE teacher at the school where his mother had studied. He didn’t know how they fell in love, but when his mother became pregnant while still in school, she had to drop out.

Everything was normal until he was 7 years old when they received the news that someone crazy on the train had stabbed his dad. The stab wound was in a vital spot, and his father lost his life instantly. After hearing the news, his mom suddenly fainted. Misfortune after misfortune started to hit their family.

Suddenly, unknown relatives they had never heard of before came knocking on their door, asking for money. His mom began having problems with her mental health and was unable to take care of herself or her son. She started to experience hallucinations and depression, involving herself with different characters.

Sometimes she would act like she was a well-known model, and other times she would become his stepmother. Beating and cursing became routine. It was really hard for the boy to transition from a normal environment to such a situation. There was no one to earn money for the family, and given his mother’s condition, he couldn’t expect much from her. Thankfully, the house was in his mother’s name, so even though loan sharks kept coming to demand money and took all the valuable things from home, the family at least had a place to live.

After several visits, curses, and threats, the loan sharks stopped coming. However, because of their harsh words and the weekly drama, the neighbors stopped talking to them. When they learned that his mother had become pregnant at a young age and had been involved with her teacher, gossip started to circulate around the town. People would point and spit whenever they saw them. Men would look at his mother with ill intentions, and women were jealous. All the happy moments crumbled. He started hearing things like, "If you hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be in this situation. You are the reason for all this misfortune. Why didn’t you die in his place? Why don’t you listen to me? Haha, of course, you won’t, since you were born an animal, not a human." Sometimes, she would say it would have been better to have a dog as her son rather than him.

Even though he was young, he knew how to manage the finances. He had some savings and later rented out a room in their house. Even though the money wasn’t much, it was enough to at least put bread on the table. His clothes were neat and tidy, but because he had been wearing them for so long, they were worn out and too small for him. He had some friends in his previous school, but because it was too expensive for their current situation, he transferred to a new one.

Suddenly, in the new school, he was left out. He wasn’t bullied, but he became invisible in that class. He started to become introverted, and his routine became simply going from home to school and school to home. He began to lose interest in his studies, stopped doing homework, and didn’t join any clubs. However, the school didn’t seem to care, and even though his grades were at the bottom, he still passed.

His mother began buying silly novels about blood, murder, romance, and mafia, becoming more engrossed with the characters. He tried many times to get her to go to the hospital for treatment, but she didn’t listen. One day, when he called paramedics to take her for treatment, she suddenly started acting normal, as if she wasn’t the one who had been acting like she was switched at birth, and he wasn’t the boy she had swapped with. She wasn’t in her right mind, and even though she was abusive to him and an unwanted child but for him she was someone who is very dear and the only person he could call family.

One day, just as usual, his mother had become another character—this time, she was a mafia princess who had been kidnapped by him. He was just in her room to check on the loud noise and make sure she was alright, but she first threw a glass at him and later tried to stab him with shards of glass. He managed to restrain her, but somehow, she got hold of a knife and stabbed him in the back. He was shocked, and the agonizing pain made him question why he was even born, forced to live in such pain, with a mother who didn’t recognize him and a fatherless life. Tears were continuously falling from his eyes as he groaned in pain.

His mother’s hand never left the knife, but then she suddenly pushed him away, looked at him, and then at the knife in her hand. She threw the knife on the floor, tried to touch the stab wound, and, seeing the blood on her hands, began whispering, "Sorry, sorry, my son. Rhio, Rhio, I’m sorry. Mother is sorry." She suddenly stood up and started looking around as if searching for something, but then she heard Rhio say, "Mom, Mom, where are you going? It’s alright. I’m okay. Just don’t leave me." Even though Rhio was in pain, hearing his mother call him by his name for the first time made him happy. He smiled through the pain. His mother came near him, saying, "Don’t cry, don’t cry. Doctor, get a doctor, come back." Her voice was trembling, but suddenly, Rhio lost consciousness. His mother tried to wake him up, shaking him, but he didn’t respond.

The whole floor was covered in blood. She froze, staring at her son’s lifeless face and then at the family photo near the bed. With her face full of tears, she looked at her son and said, "I could never be a good mother or a good wife." Then, picking up the knife from the floor, she stabbed herself in the heart and collapsed on top of her son.

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