If Life Cheats You by Love, Please Cheat It Back (Part 1)

I had a very dreadful experience of trying to figure out what love means to me. Of course, I did know what means. Money, power, health and so on, are things just to put me to resist with life—they are what make me sustain my life of turbulence. But, love is different. Love is what my life is crawling up for. Love makes sense to life. With money and cars, life is just an entertainment. But with love, life is something absolute and priceless. In fact, I just realized my life is designed for two kinds of love—number one: “god-blessed love” coming from my mum, my brothers, and who I call family; number two: “self-discovered love” coming from the only woman I adore and choose for growing old and dying together. If you’ve been through the second love, you will realize life is a perfect liar who tricks you into series of hope and despair, again and again.

Part 1: Love Blessed from Above

I want to kick off the first kind of love for my mum in particular. Well, I cannot choose to whom I was born as it has to be blessed from above. For this, it is a paradox of love where I don’t know what words explain best. On one side, it sucks; on the other side, my family makes a lot of sense for love—I am not just fatherless but motherful—brotherful. At the beginning of my life, the first word I was familiar with was “mum” not “dad”—mom is a woman who lives from me in the same way I live for her. I was too young to learn that my father was not a living man who had been taken by three bullets of no one and in absolute amnesty. I’ve been wishing to be Sherlock Holmes using my horoscope to find out who had killed my father—to find out to whom the bullets belonged—to find out what’s wrong with my mum who had to pay the rest of her life taking care of six sons alone—mainly to find out what’s wrong with me who did not even know how it felt to be touched by my own dad.

Things went worse when I was growing up. Years later, I found that just one answer—it was that “life’s been cheating on me; life is my friendly enemy that I have to fight against and live for”. Failure and pain have been replaced by success and joy. Some days, life is kind enough to put me to joy and hope. Some days, life must have been dumped by his wife putting me through pain, sorrow, failure I barely resist. Some days, I had nothing in mind about my dad while getting incredible love and care by my exhausted-but-never-say mother. I felt so honored and joyful sitting behind her running bicycle on the way to have dinner at my kong kong’s house. I felt very great to have her hands rubbing on my itchy back and argued with my brother for taking turn to have my back rubbed by my mum’s healing hands—even though my back was not itchy at all. I’ve been honored to be part of her family, to be called son, to be lured with her world-best lullaby, to be raised up with endless love in spite of her life in the middle of hardship, hardship of tiredness and cheats.

My mum did cheat me once when I was little, and now the cheat has turned to fuel the engine of my will to move forward. Back then, in a morning I wanted to eat a pork noodle soup, which cost about 1.5 USD. I was taking money from her to buy it and asked her whether she needed one bowl for herself. She did cheat—cheat that took me time to realize. She told me that she did not like eating pork noodle soup as her preference was tricked to Khmer minced-fish noodle, which cost about 0.5 USD. It was a yummy dish, but years later I realized my mum had cheated me. It was such an abnormal cheat that not many mothers could do, actually. She liked pork and noodle. She just wanted to save money and get me a good dish by lying to me that she did not crave for pork noodle.

Things turn green and fresh today as I am able to see her sip her pork noodle soup and iced milk coffee in a time that my brothers and I are no longer needy boys but men who could try best to afford things for her. She no longer cheats me. I do cheat her back. Since I left her to university in Phnom Penh and even here in Thailand, I was not okay to be away from home. I was sick and stressed to the bottom of my pain. I always told me I am fine and doing great as always. It sounds like I take after my mother a lot. But it is what I choose. My life has cheated me first. I have to cheat it back.

Her kids-first policy is what drew me to be mature than my age as day by day I realized this life cheats me. I have to cheat it back. How to? I have to make a better future for my mum, me, and all my family. I have to cheat this life back to show that I am not destined to be in the darkness of pain or in ferocity of misfortunes. I have a mission to draw a unique picture of life—very different from common lives other boys have. I have to walk when they run; I have to run, when they walk, I have to run faster when they start to run, importantly, I do not need 8 hours to sleep as I need to go faster than those boys. My life has been on a race, a race that other competitors are still too young to realize, but I do. Maybe, this is a reason why some people look at me a freak old man because they do not know what my life has been through. I am not a freak, actually, who takes all things seriously. It is just my life that cheats and tricks me to be who I cannot choose to be. I just do not want my future matches my past. Running up this far depends on the first love I have from my mum and family. Without them I would have been exhausted to death since the first day of my birth.

That’s stupid! As I said, it is a paradox of love. Life gives me a loving family but a terrible environment of smile-stolen doom. When I get out of my home, to school and to anywhere, I face with them—people who painted a different color to the story about my gone dad. They were cruel to me. Maybe they were sent by this life to trick me into tears of innocence. They must have been felt into false casualty or correlation bias which led them to hurt me subconsciously and fairly. They are bad social animals whose behaviors and rationalities influenced one another.

I was born just accidentally 4 days after my dad got three bullets inside his body, but it did not mean I pulled the trigger. Please stop basing on your stupid superstition to tell me that I was the reason behind my dad’ tragedy just because I was born right after his last night to breathe. You, people and even my grade 3 and 12 teachers, must have been out of your mind. No son killed his own dad. No son wanted to have an incomplete family. On contrary, children of all kinds do need to have their red body seen, their first cry heard, and their soft skin touched by both mum and dad. Trust me no one wants to be incomplete. So, leave me alone people. Stop your subconscious acts putting me through pain and haunting memory as a father killer before I screwed you back. Let me be loved by my mum and all brothers. That’s all what I want from you—what I beg from you.

You know. Because these cruelties you, people, put on me, I always got sick of seeing myself as a “dirty” person—so dirty that I was afraid to do what I want to do. I looked at myself a dumpster no until I made myself to the university. I hated people I met, I hated my grade 3 and grade 12 math teacher. I hated them, but it was not them to presume guilty. They were just sent by this life to cheat me, so I have to cheat them back.