Eventually, you learn how to read a house like a pulse. The wreckage writes itself and you only have to listen. When you do, count all the broken things.

1. Remember the Hardiflex walls your brother punched? Their crevices now filled with dust mark the years gone by. No one dared to touch that same wall again.

2. Your father's favourite mug and when he smashed it to the floor. Every day, your mother prepared him coffee. Was it why, when she once forgot to be the woman he had made her to be—a woman who killed her dreams for him—he shouted until your ears bled?

“I lived my entire life giving you everything,” he says. You saw the porcelain shards on the floor, and coffee spilled like blood. You wished he would just die.

3. Remember as well, they fight over broken stuff too; that they fight and fight because your father is broken.

4. Your eldest brother kneeled in front of your father with his fists clenched. For being born was a sin in itself, your father cannot forgive him. You knew he wanted to throw punches even if it meant throwing away everything he’s ever built with the blood your parents gave. But when the war was over, he refused to utter a word and ran upstairs instead.

They say clenched fists are the same size as one’s heart. Soon enough, his fists slammed the Hardiflex walls. 

You could have had the wall fixed if you wanted to, but you were all terrified. Was it even repairable? Nobody wanted to know the answer.

5. Simply, your mother's heart. And while she tried to fix everything, your father didn't. 

6. Your faith.

7. Your voice as you ask them to stop.

8. And your father’s phone—the first thing he ever bought for himself. He held quite a lot of things with the same big hands. A shovel in the construction site. Hollow blocks. Mops. Perfumes. Your mother’s hands. Young, crying you. For the longest time, he held steering wheels for a job that paid barely enough to treat himself.

One time, you were holding his phone until he suddenly shouted. The tension on the nape of your neck worsened. Your hands trembled, and you dropped the phone. The screen broke. That's when it hit you: he has given you everything and you robbed life off of him. 

9. You break down. 

So you count and count. You put it down on paper, knowing that if you failed to write, you'd fail to remember. You’ll keep it under your bed. 

Sometimes, you’d wish to live not in a home as fragile as glass but as mendable as paper. You dismiss the thought. Just like the broken shards, you cannot endure being torn apart then glued back together like you're still whole.

Everything is beyond repair.

-Kristine Aimee Millonte

(Layout by Jonathan Carlos B. Ponio/FEU Advocate)