let lemons be angry

Just yesterday, i was overflowing with joy. That rare feeling of clarity. I found a home for monster and mogu and saw how little moments of obedience added up to God's will, i visited cassie's house and fell in love with louisa, and the whole kitten saga was over. No more smuggling kittens into the art room, no more smell of milk on shirts, no more worrying about who was taking them home for the night.

And today. Overturn. Mr Ho is dead. Michael messaged me, "jul have you heard the news". I hadn't. "Apparently mr ho passed away in a biking trip in malaysia" he said. The words were so alien, so coarse, that i wanted to laugh to confirm my heart's hasty suspicion that it was a joke. Such things can't happen. But i called mr liew and asked him if it was true, and with his one word "yes" all my walls came crumbling down. I'm still in shock. The situation is too unreal, too cruel. What is it, guilt? Guilty that i was the worst maths student he had ever taught, guilty because all he'd ever studied to be was a maths teacher and i told him this was all he'd gotten after years of studying. Guilty because i laughed when he was angry and convinced him that he wasn't angry. Guilty because i tore up and scribbled on the tome that contained all he valued in this system--maths. Guilty because i kept him waiting before class and turned him into a singing, laughing madman. Guilty because i happily kept that sheet of paper on which he, rendered speechless by us, wrote all the reasons he was angry. And yet it's not all guilt, but a kind of abandonment. It's been more than an hour since i've heard the news, and i'm not quite used to it yet. But i've given up believing that it's a bad joke. This is wrong, this is wrong, this can't ever be right. I'd balanced a hundred cares on my fingers with such attention, and someone who i've shown so little care about has disappeared. And just like that there's a giant hole in the sky where something important used to be. I want drudgery and monotony more than i want this hole. I want to drag my feet to maths class and have weird lessons again. I want to be able to consider doing my homework out of pity for mr ho again. I want to have my head shaken when i don't understand maths. I want to feel bad for bullying him. But there's no time for all of that, no more time. I'm not in a place i want to be. I don't want to go to school tomorrow because they'll announce it, and i will just break down again when it's most inconvenient. And i don't want to face tuesday and thursday and friday because now i realise that those three days of my weeks will never ever be the same again. This sounds like a dreadful ending to a chapter, hopelessly premature and badly scripted. Because such things don't happen in the movies.

I'm remembering the last lesson i had, and i'm sorry but i can't write it here because it's funny, and writing it will break me.