PART 2
My father slowly opened the worn cardboard box he’d been clutching to his chest since they arrived. His hands shook as if the box itself weighed too much. Inside was a folded letter, yellowed with age, the edges soft and fragile.
He handed it to me like it might break.
“This… this was written by your grandmother,” he said quietly. “The night before she died.”
I didn’t want to touch it. Every instinct in me said to push it away. But curiosity—sharp and stubborn—pushed past the resentment. The paper smelled like dust and time, like memories that were never mine to begin with.
The handwriting was shaky, but deliberate.
She wrote that she never wanted children.
Any children.
She admitted she raised her sons in emotional silence because she didn’t know how to give anything else. She confessed that affection felt foreign to her, that warmth scared her, and that she feared she had passed that emptiness—that void—to her eldest son.
My father.
My father’s voice cracked as he spoke again.
“I grew up in a house where silence was normal. Where affection felt… embarrassing. Sarcasm—jokes—that’s how I learned to survive.” He swallowed hard. “If I kept everything light, if I turned life into a joke, I didn’t have to feel the rest.”
He looked up at me, eyes glassy.
“That night… when I made that joke about you… I thought I was being funny. I didn’t realize I was hurting you the same way I was hurt.”
I said nothing.
I didn’t trust my voice not to shatter.
Then my mother stepped forward.
Her hands were clenched tightly around a small leather journal, her knuckles white.
“I was twenty when I had you,” she whispered. “And I didn’t want to be a mother. Not then… not with him.” Her voice trembled. “I had been accepted into an art program in Manila. Something I’d dreamed about since I was a kid.”
She took a shaky breath.
“The moment the pregnancy test turned positive… everything ended.”
The room felt like it tilted.
“Every time I looked at you,” she continued, tears spilling freely now, “I didn’t see a son. I saw the life I lost. And instead of facing that pain… I turned it on you.”
Hearing cruelty is one thing.
Hearing the truth behind it is something else entirely.
She wasn’t defending herself. She wasn’t asking for sympathy. She was laying bare the rot beneath the walls of the family I once believed everyone else had.
She held the journal out to me.
“After you left, I started writing letters to you. I didn’t know if you were alive. I didn’t know if you hated me. I just… needed a way to talk to you.”
I took it—slowly, reluctantly—like it might burn.
My father spoke again, softer now.
“We looked for you. For years. We hired someone. We kept hoping we’d find you before it was too late.”
“Too late for what?” I asked, my voice flat, distant.
My mother’s eyes filled again.
“Too late for us… to try to fix what we broke.”
For a moment, the apartment felt unbearably small. Their regret hung in the air like thick humidity—heavy, suffocating, impossible to escape.
But regret doesn’t erase a childhood.
Regret doesn’t build what was never built.
Regret doesn’t undo that night—the laughter, the pointing, the way my world split in two.
I finally spoke.
“You had six years,” I said quietly. “Six years of silence. Six years where I starved, slept on concrete, and learned how to survive on my own. You lived comfortably while I learned how to be my own parent.”
My mother collapsed into sobs, covering her face.
My father stared at the floor like a man already condemned.
I didn’t raise my voice.
I didn’t cry.
“You can leave now,” I said. “I’ll let you know… if I ever want to talk again.”
They hesitated.
Then slowly, they walked out.
When the door clicked shut, the apartment felt painfully quiet.
And that’s when I opened the journal.
PART 3
The first page of the journal wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t poetic.
It was raw—uneven handwriting, ink pressed too hard into the paper, every word soaked in guilt.
“I don’t know where you are. I don’t know if you’re warm, fed, or safe.
I don’t deserve to ask for your forgiveness.
But I hope that one day, somehow, you’ll read this and know that I think about you every single day.”
My vision blurred.
Not because I forgave her—
but because of the weight of everything I had carried alone for so long.
I turned the pages.
Letters written on every birthday.
Every Christmas.
Random Tuesdays—when she saw a boy at the mall who walked like me, laughed like me, had my same haircut at sixteen.
She wrote through guilt.
Through self-hatred.
Through a grief she never learned how to face.
None of it erased what she did.
But it revealed a truth I never expected:
She had changed.
Just… far too late.
I set the journal down and reached for the old photo album they’d left behind.
Most of the photos felt staged—plastic smiles, stiff poses, moments meant to look like a happy family.
Then I saw one that stopped me cold.
I was about six years old, asleep on a couch.
My mother lay beside me, curled protectively, her arm draped over my small body. She looked exhausted. Worn down. But gentle. Human.
That photo hurt more than the rest.
I closed the album and sat there for what felt like hours.
I wasn’t thinking about forgiveness.
I wasn’t thinking about revenge.
I was thinking about choices.
The choices they made.
The choices I made.
The choices that kept me alive when I had nothing—no safety net, no home, no one waiting for me.
As the afternoon sun spilled into my living room, something finally became clear:
I wasn’t searching for the people they are now.
I was grieving the parents I needed back then.
Their growth didn’t rewrite my past.
It didn’t erase the nights I slept behind buildings or the mornings I worked until my hands cracked and bled.
It didn’t undo the moment they broke something in me at sixteen.
But knowing the truth… loosened something.
A knot I had kept pulled tight for years.
I didn’t call them.
I didn’t text.
I didn’t decide anything.
But for the first time, forgiveness didn’t feel impossible.
Just distant—like a long road I wasn’t ready to walk yet.
That night, I sat on my bed staring at the ceiling and finally allowed myself to cry.
I cried for the kid who thought he was unlovable.
For the teenager who walked into the night with nothing but a backpack and stubborn hope.
For the man I became—the one who survived, rebuilt, and stood on his own when no one else stood with him.
I don’t know if I’ll ever let them back into my life.
I don’t know if I’ll finish the journal or open the album again.
But I know this:
I am no one’s mistake.
I never was.
My worth was never tied to their ability to love me.
I built myself—brick by brick, scar by scar.
And whether they stay in my life… or walk away again—
that does not define me.
I define me.
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