Voids Fill Up Differently by Students of IACT (books for students to read txt) 📕

By now, I was sure that even the stars etched into the darkness had expected a senseless retort like that, with the way they were blinking at me. Talking to Scott wasn’t like what it was before. He was a brick wall now, with a broken CD record built into its diameter. Every word I said would only come back to me bruised and butchered. I knew it too, yet I tried again. “He’s my father. Let me go alone at least, just this once.” 

“The heck, Nina. Just let me bathe and don’t you dare try to visit that old man,” he snarled viciously. 

It wasn't painful. Hearing his remark so blatantly disguised as a command made me realise something I wish I had known earlier. I used to think that love was what I watched in movies. I remember dreaming of the day when I would become the damsel in distress and my prince charming would bring me into his palace teeming with treasures. I was indeed the damsel, still in distress and my prince seemed to have abandoned his charm at the club where we first met. Turns out, he was the villain after all.

"I'm going. It's been months since I stepped out of this house and you're not going to stop me from seeing my own father," I calmly lashed at his back faced towards me. For a minute moment, it was as if I could physically feel my firm words towering over him. This was the first time I’ve talked back to him to get his attention and it worked, seeing how they pierced his arrogant self-esteem, freezing his movements.

"You’ve gone freaking mad now, huh? Where’s the girl I fell in love with? The one who did everything I told her to do and wasn’t such a fussy prick before."

I shuddered at the truth of his disturbing claim because I was that girl he fell in love with and any attempt to deny his statement question would have appeared pathetic.

"You're right. I was that girl. The one you promised to marry years ago but I guess even when the moon falls from the sky, you won't. You should have told me it was an empty promise then maybe I would have believed it wasn't a lie," the words I wanted to say so badly escaped my lips before they had a chance to be processed by my conscience. At this point, I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel but I felt anything but bad. It was such a foreign mixture of victory, relief and elation that coursed through the surprisingly cool blood in my veins. He though, scrunched his face in disbelief and could only let out a rough scoff.

“You don’t trust me enou-”

“I don’t anymore. All this while, I’ve been silently obeying everything you told me to do because I thought you would love me more but I’m the foolish one for not realising that it wasn’t about us in this relationship. It has always only been about you,” my mind professed.

My legs already had a plan of its own when it started to guide my feet to the door. With a determined facade over the incoherent deep noises and occasional grunts and explicit curses of “Don’t you freaking dare” from the man in the house, I strutted out of the four walls with a newfound confidence masking the layer of fear underneath my muscles. 

“You won’t regret this,” I convinced myself before I shut the door.

It was nothing short of regular. The light blue tiles that carpeted the cement floor accompanied by a sterile scent that wafted through the dingy atmosphere screamed, “hospital”. I flashed a poker face which boasted a stark contrast to the irrational excitement surging on my insides. Any normal being would have thought that I was crazy for feeling happy to be in a hospital as if I had never seen one before. They would have been right. This was my first time in a long time being out.

“Miss Nina Cheng?” a lady in white asked.

“Yes. I’m Nina Cheng. What happened to my father?” I questioned back with an underlying sadness hidden in my tone. Seated next to a bed that was slightly elevated, I found myself staring at a pair of closed eyes that were resting on wrinkly features. My father was never one to show weakness but age and its partner in crime, time, will always attack without notice.

“You probably already heard it over the phone earlier. He had a fall and the impact to his head made him lose consciousness. The doctors diagnosed him with a mild traumatic brain injury or what you know as concussion,” the petite lady dressed in a neat nurse uniform explained verbatim, with a rather dazed look spread across her delicate eyes as if this was the thousand time she had repeated this to someone.

“He fell hard but it’s only a minor concussion so don’t worry too much. He should be awake in about half an hour,” she added before she stepped out of the room, covering an obvious yawn with her small palms.

I hadn’t realised it was past one in the morning until my eyelids batted a few times, trying to carry the invisible load that sat on them. Soon enough, the only sounds that could be heard were my own breathing that synced consistently with my father’s. With no care as to what uncomfortable position I was in, I let myself be lulled by the rhythm of silence with my head, falling into its much needed slumber.

It was short and I awoke to numb fingers against my flat cheeks. “I’m leaving him,” I whispered, afraid of surprising my father if I spoke any louder. Considering the weight of my words and what they really meant, it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to say to someone who had just woken up with a headache.

“Don’t tell me you’re talking a-about…”

“Scott,” I finished my father’s sentence. He couldn’t move much but a flare of confusion lit up his dark pupils and I knew immediately what he was thinking about. I was my father’s only daughter and all he ever wanted was for me to grow up happily and healthily but after my 25th birthday, happiness and health were secondary.

“You should be dating soon.”

“Have you found a boyfriend yet?”

“I want to see you get married before you turn 30.”

In the beginning, I thought I could fulfil my father’s forced prophecy upon me by dating Scott but if my father didn’t want to see his own daughter lose herself, I had to stop the relationship even if it meant upsetting him. Under the cotton sheets, he kept quiet and his frail body laid as still as a corpse. The interrogation would soon break the peace and I could imagine it lasting till the sun rays spiked through the glass windows. 

“I’m sorry,” my father muttered so softly it blared in my ears.

“I know that each time you said you were busy so you couldn’t visit home, you were lying. It was Scott. He didn’t let you out.”

That morning, I revealed everything in tears. The moonlight reflected even brighter that day, even though the clouds enveloped its luminosity. With each syllable that slipped off my tongue, a burden was lifted off me and my body felt so light it challenged gravity. I didn’t think I could smile talking about what a horrible man Scott was but the corners of my lips pulled themselves up unconsciously when they saw how intently my father was listening.

“I’ll move back in your house once I’m done packing my stuff,” I comforted my father whose concerned expression showed a little too obvious when he realised I had nowhere to go once I left Scott. Nodding as a sign of confirmation that it wouldn’t take long for him to see me at home again, I exited the hospital with a sense of solace showering over my silky hair, though the dreaded thought of returning to the place I once called my haven was the only thing still weighing my feet to the ground.

“Creak…,” the door whined, declaring my presence entering the habitual space. Balls of crumpled up business receipts, sticky pieces of food wrappers and dusty footprint marks veiled the ceramic-tiled floor and the vast living area looked like a tornado had swept through it. I had expected Scott to be absent in the middle of this virtual calamity and I was right. Even in broad daylight, drinking to drown his worries had never failed to be his go-to solution instead of talking it out.

I quickly flung open the door of our room only to be welcomed by everything oddly in place. Except for the tilted photo of us on one of our casual lunch dates, displayed against the textured wallpaper, everything else stood untouched- including the blankets on the bed.

"On the couch. That's where he slept last night," I thought to myself while quickly sliding my clothes off the plastic hangers in the closet. Although I was accustomed to Scott's drinking habits well enough to be unbothered by them, the unpredictable timing of when he would come home during day drinks made my flesh tingle with uneasiness and I knew I had to pack- fast.

"Clothes, clothes and just clothes," I sighed, looking at my open suitcase sprawled with fabric. It wasn't much. In fact, the amount of stuff I had couldn't even fill up the medium-sized luggage. It was almost bare, which reminded me of how I looked roaming around aimlessly in the house. I never had the chance to pamper myself and as I observed the decorated room of various trinkets and embellished walls, I felt mocked for I had spent more on the house for Scott than myself.

"Goodbye," an uncontrolled grin crafted my face when my fingers latched onto the doorknob, grasping it tightly for the last time before letting it go. It was a wreck of a place stained with hurtful memories better stored inside than bringing them with me.

The final goodbye.

The most ecstatic one.

Days had passed since my father was discharged from the hospital and I had moved back in with my parents. Although I quit my white-collar job during the toxic relationship, investing most of my time into taking care of someone who didn’t do the same for me, years of spending little to no money eventually accumulated enough in my bank account for me to sustain. In the midst of it all, my friends which I hadn’t been keeping in touch with messaged me all of a sudden asking to hang out. I had rejected it at first, not wanting to interact with anybody after the whole Scott situation but my phone notifications popped up like crazy until I finally agreed to the meetup. 

“All he ever talks about is how bad we did this or that but he never gives us suggestions on how to improve. We always have to figure that part out by ourselves. Seriously man..he really reminds me of how Puan Mira used to teach us Add Maths back in school,” a frustrated perky vent sounded over the feast of roti canai and biryani rice. It was the seven of us, seated around a cramped round plastic table with the edges a little chipped off and uneven. I only found out recently that the Mamak stall we were eating in was one of the most popular in town and being able to get a single seat was already a miracle. It was lunchtime and the bustling chatter of people in the background sounded so refreshing playing in tune with my ravenous chewing of crispy flatbread.

“Anyways, enough of my annoying boss. Let’s not ruin this once in a blue moon reunion and let’s talk about something more...uplifting?” my chirpy friend suggested, raising an eyebrow at me.

It was my oily