My Pain

As my left arm painfully type the letters unto my keyboard and my right hand stroking the other from time to time, I sit here on a rocking chair in my favorite café thinking of nothingness and desperately wishing to grow numb.

My father and I have a very rocky relationship. We are very different from one another despite our physical likeness and our common stubborn attitude. But everything else seems to be a clear division of black and white. I love to read and he does not. I have a passion for language and the arts and he can barely speak proper English. He is an Education Math Supervisor whilst I find Math to be tedious and boring. He loves being surrounded with people and attaining powerful positions whilst I like the company of only a few and have no interest in power. He lacks empathy while I can easily put myself in the shoes of others; and it is because of this that he is capable of doing the cruelest and relentless acts to other people.

And being his only child have not spared me from the suffering much physical and mental agony from him. Do I deserve it? Perhaps, depending on where you stand on how a parent should react on their children as disappointments.

Yes, to my father I am not nothing more than a humiliation—a great big disappointment who has caused him much to be ashamed of because as he keeps repeating to other people, "Rhoda went crazy when her mom died that's why she threw away her scholarship and quit college for a while." Am I proud of what I have done? No. But do I regret it? Certainly not! I may not have the brightest future ahead of me now but I am sure that it is a future where I will find my happiness—the happiness that he does not comprehend or wish to comprehend.

I should be used to it now— the sprained arm, the bashed head, the taste of my own blood and the broken heart… It's nothing new. But as I caress my injured hand, I can't help but let tears swell up and fall from my eyes—my heart is injured too. I close my eyes and hope that these excruciating pangs would stop. How can a father continue to hurt his only daughter—the only family that he has left?

But truth be told, what pains me the most is the feeling that I am all alone because the person that should be supporting me, caring for me and loving me continually and without remorse bruised my body and soul.