Chapter 8: She Looked for a Mother and Found an Empty Room
538 Words
The nightmare returned.
I sat in the back of a pickup truck,
battered by eight hours of highway wind,
traveling from the northeastern countryside to the heart of Bangkok.
All I wanted was to find my mother.
But when I arrived at the old apartment where she once lived,
the landlord simply said:
“She left with a new man.”
A construction worker.
No one knew where they had gone.
They vanished,
leaving behind unpaid rent and a room full of dust.
I sat quietly,
hugging my sister in the back of the pickup,
tears spilling into the wind as we endured another eight-hour journey home.
I kept wondering:
“Did she ever think about me?”
“Did she ever care how much this would break me?”
Back at Grandma’s house,
I stopped pretending.
I smoked a pack of cigarettes every day.
Grandma smelled it.
She scolded me.
Every day.
But I didn’t care anymore.
I drank cheap liquor in front of her,
openly—
as if daring the world to hurt like I did.
Maybe Grandma loved me more than my mother ever did.
Maybe she always had.
When tenth grade started,
I dreamed of studying the general education track like my friends.
But school required money—money I didn’t have.
Grandma counted coins into my hands.
Enough for a single school uniform.
Every night, I washed that uniform by hand,
dried it under a fan,
woke up early to iron it damp and cold.
I fought to survive like that for two months.
But in the end,
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I ran away again.
This time, I stayed at a male friend’s dorm.
He never touched me.
Never hurt me.
He just gave me a place to sleep.
But he never took me to school either.
Instead, we drank ourselves into oblivion every night.
I stopped studying.
Stopped caring.
Eventually, I returned to live with my father and grandmother.
One day, a rich man gave me a new phone—
the latest model at the time.
I was ecstatic.
I jumped onto a songthaew (shared truck taxi),
rode three hours into the city just to show it off.
That’s when I saw a younger schoolmate—
a girl who used to ride an old motorbike with her father—
now living a life of luxury.
I envied her.
Desperately.
So I borrowed money from her.
But when the time came to pay it back,
I had nothing.
She exposed me online.
Uploaded my picture on f*******:,
shaming me in front of the world.
I couldn’t show my face anywhere after that.
Then I met someone new.
A boy with a car.
Sixteen years old,
driving around town like he owned it.
I thought he was rich.
I thought he could save me.
But he was addicted to drugs.
Badly.
Worse—
he started hitting me.
But I stayed.
Because at least…
I had food every day.
His family—
his parents, his siblings—
treated me like I was dirt.
Worse than anything I’d endured before.
And somewhere along the way,
a wound tore open inside me—
the kind that never really heals.
The kind that follows you forever.
- Writer
