I broke up with my first true love for each other and my whole world fell apart. It is only the recorded breakup that led me to smoke cigarettes again. I quit smoking because my first true love, Miss N. ordered me to quit smoking. It was because of the course that while he was dating Miss N. he wouldn’t smoke.
Certainly, Miss N. was indeed my kind of girl: petite, tall, and fair-skinned, a real bone yellow. When I broke up with her, it hurt so much that I thought I would never recover from the heartache. He certainly hated the sun, the sunrise and, yes, the sunset too. He hated life itself. I missed everything about her: perfume, kind smile, and her generally uplifting demeanor.
The breakup was bitter, messy, and heartbreaking. At the heart of the breakup was a mixture of immaturity, jealousy, and alleged infidelity on his part. Of course, no one said anything about my own casual business antics while dating Miss N.
With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps, it shouldn’t have happened. The breakup happened dramatically after I learned that she had visited an ex-boyfriend. I did not get to know the whole story, for me something broke that day. The golden cup was broken and there was no turning back. This despite the fact that I was deeply in love with Miss N. She was my first real love for each other. She may not have known how deeply I had invested my emotion in our relationship.
Compounding the situation is that at the time of our relationship, I was a broken man. My life was out of control. My position as president of the Student Representative Council (SRC) was precarious at best. Sure enough, he had stopped attending academic classes. He had full-time armed guards lurking in the background. My life was in danger from the group of concerned students. I retired to my apartment, read novels, and played love songs. I had been diagnosed with depression. He was not receiving any treatment. As far as I was concerned, my life had reached a dead end. She did not have a deep understanding of my situation. On the surface, everything looked good.
However, it is a pedantic detail that at the time of the breakup she was pregnant and I did not know it. It was not here or there that I began the breakdown of our relationship. I specifically told him on the phone never to speak or come to see me. It is also irrelevant that the allegations of infidelity were never proven. I guess it’s also a moot point that many feeble attempts at reconciliation were made after I found out about her pregnancy. All of this resulted in nothing. The problem was, I wanted Miss N. to say that the fetus was mine and not the boy she was supposedly dating. She reasoned that it was being impossible. In his mind, he should have accepted the responsibility, ‘man up’ so to speak. It was clear to me that he took the breakup badly and couldn’t handle my anger and suspicions. These unresolved issues of anger and despair led her to make what to this day I consider to have been “a terrible decision.” She decided that she would raise the unborn baby alone.
Anyway, he loved Miss N. In fact, he loved her long after our breakup. I told everyone who wanted to hear me that one day I would marry Miss N. It never happened. Instead, life happened.
As a result of the bitter breakup, she gave birth to my firstborn by herself. I didn’t even know the due date. I never had any proof of the boy’s existence. Well, well, until that life-changing moment on a mundane noon when I met my baby for the first time by accident at a mall. He was four years old. It was an emotional reunion. Rubbing salt on the open wound is that he didn’t even know that I was his real father. For my part, I couldn’t even acknowledge his presence. I had no right to hug my own son and kiss him. As she spoke to her mom, she squeezed the man who was holding her hand tighter. He might have been afraid of meeting a stranger. I was in the arms of another man, a man unknown to me. It hurt me deeply that my son had been raised by another random stranger.
All my life, I had believed in the mantra that says: there has been no greater villain in the history of mankind than the bad father. Of course, I knew better. I was raised by an abusive father. He had verbal tantrums. He physically abused my brothers. He screamed profanity at the slightest provocation. He ruled out of fear. He would humiliate both the boy and his wife with non-printable words in one sentence. He showed no affection to his wife or children. It really was a monster.
For four long years, before the chance meeting with my son, I feared that I would become the man I hated: my father. He had children scattered all over the place. He paid no attention to them. To him, his children were a necessary nuisance that could be ignored. In my father’s life, all of his children were an absence that was never felt. I speak of my father in the past tense, because in my world he does not exist. In the bottom of my heart I have always known that I am not my father.
I dreamed of a family different from yours. My dream has always been to start a new family line, a humble line of my own in parallel to my father’s line. He had imagined a house full of children, yes, he only wanted boys. I wanted my new family line to continue to infinity. I imagined that my first child would be, “the obedient one, he will stay home and be a pillar of help, he will marry a good girl”, and he will continue the family line. I’m glad I lived to tell stories. Except there is a twist in my real life story, I have a girl that I love so much that she knows it.