Father quit his work.
Too stressed, too tiring, too little pay.
I knew the feeling, now, the trick was to not spiral into depression since you had nothing else to do to distract yourself from your miserable existence and the constant pressure called life that weighed on your shoulders.
Man, growing up sucked.
Once, I found myself agreeing with the parent in a Disney movie.
Like, seriously, child, you only saw the guy once, he's older than you, it's not even legal, how the hell do you fall in love?
Now, he was out job hunting.
So we were on the savings they had amassed over the last thirteen years, and mother's paycheck.
I still remember the feeling, it started early in adulthood. I didn't know what I wanted after I finished high school, so my parents put me with tutors, preparing me for university a year earlier than I actually finished.
I didn't know what to do, so they took advantage, from morning until late in the evening, I wasn't home, moving from the center of the city, back to the edge, and then to the center again.
I think that was when it all started, slowly, everything became a routine, wake up, wash my face, leave the house, buy a snack on the way to last for an hour, sit on two two-hour tutoring session that I couldn't really pay attention to, leave for the next tutor right after that, two hours there, leave again, buy another snack for the next session, arrive, two hours there, leave for the next one, with one hour breaks that I used to get to the destinations.
When I arrived home, I didn't even want to take a shower I was so tired, but I got used to that after a week and just asked for a coffee to be left at the table while I went over the notes I took for biology, math, my first language, and English... I didn't even learn anything new in English!
The only thing I looked forward to was sleep, but then that too became routine, fast forwarding me to the next day to start everything again.
That went on for a year, then came the last week before the exams.
It was a bust.
I was so tired, with my parents pushing me to study "Harder", and get to the tutors early to get more time out of them, the said tutors gave me more and more things to go over and I had to compromise my sleep more and more.
In the end, I went on the first exam with four hours of sleep,
The exams were one right after the other, with a day break in between.
I tried, honest to god I did and I still almost failed.
My only saving grace was the slight, point-half percent boost in grades I got in the math exams and my seventy-six percent in English.
Then, it got worse.
The first time I went to another town to stay there permanently, I sat down on the bed of my newly rented house and cried.
I didn't cry because I would miss my parents, I didn't cry because I was sad, I cried because I was relieved. I didn't have to listen to my parents trying to tell me to study every minute I was in the house, trying to relax, I didn't have to tell excuses, lies, to the good people who just wanted me to learn things that would help me in the future.
I thought everything would be different now.
Then I attended university and realized that in the next few weeks, that it indeed wouldn't be the same.
It would be worse.
I continued, of course, for another year, watching the same scenes pass by as I walked from one building to another, watching the same paper, same screen for hours, trying to memorize everything that was written.
I blinked, snapping out of the trip down memory lane, and looked down at the notebooks, homework that I was doing...
Was I...
Perhaps, perhaps I was.
I closed the notebook, slid it across the table, and stood up from the chair. Walking over to the bed, I picked up the pillow, took a deep breath, and screamed into it.
It was muffled, of course.
When I dropped the pillow back in its place again, I was back to normal. Sitting down, I intertwined my fingers and placed my forehead on them.
The clock on the wall ticked quietly but in the deafening silence of the room, each tick sounded like a bullet going off.
I took a deep breath, releasing it through my nose.
"I'm fucking pathetic."
The whisper left my mouth, forever to stay in the empty room, unheard.