DISEASE

By the time Mun was eight, she had already seen more than many adults.

Her childhood never included lullabies or bedtime stories. It was silence. The kind that presses down on your chest, heavy and unrelenting. After Nix was born, her mother barely had the time or energy to look at her, much less care for her. At first, Mun waited. Waited for her mother to spoon-feed her like before, to braid her hair, to tuck her in at night. But those moments never came again.

So, Mun taught herself to eat.

With trembling hands too small for the rice bowl, she learned to balance bites without spilling. She sat alone, quietly chewing through each grain as though it might disappear if she looked away. She burned her fingers trying to heat leftovers, because no one was there to do it for her. It wasn't just food—it was every little thing. She taught herself to comb her hair. Wash her socks. Read between the lines of schoolbooks she didn't fully understand.

Her father had moved to another city for work. His pay was barely enough to survive, and his presence slowly became a memory. She would wait for his voice on the phone—short, tired, distant. Her mother was left behind, overwhelmed with two children and a collapsing life. But instead of seeking comfort in her daughter, she pushed Mun further away.

One evening, while trying to light the old stove to warm some rice, Mun burned her palm. The sharp hiss of the flame caught her off guard, and her scream echoed in the hollow kitchen. No one came running. Her mother didn't ask what happened. She just glared and muttered, "Why are you so careless?" Mun spent the night pressing her swollen hand against a cold metal bowl. She still wrote her homework the next day with her other hand, determined not to fall behind.

At school, Mun wore the same faded uniform every day. While other girls shared pencils and laughter, she sat in the corner scribbling quietly with a broken one. Her eyes didn't shine anymore, but they watched—everything. She noticed how love worked for others. How support made things easier. She didn't envy them. She just wondered how it felt.

One day, she came home with a B on a math test. She had tried so hard. Stayed up with a candle when the electricity was gone, practiced in the margins of her textbooks. But the moment her mother saw the paper, her face twisted in disgust. The slap came before the words.

"Why can't you be like them? Why are you so stupid?"

That night, Mun didn't cry. She just sat at the edge of her thin mattress, legs folded, fingers shaking, her test paper still clutched in her hands. That B had meant something to her. It meant she was trying. But in her mother's eyes, it was failure.

Another time, it was a rainy afternoon. Thunder rumbled above the rusted tin roof, and she hadn't eaten all day. Her mother was too busy nursing Nix's fever to notice Mun's pale lips or the way she clutched her stomach. She took a piece of stale bread from the counter and ate it quietly by the window. She didn't feel anger—just numbness. It was a kind of hunger that didn't end with food.

That's when she began to realize something: love, in her world, was conditional.

She didn't give up though. She couldn't. Not because she believed in miracles—but because she didn't want to become the kind of person who stopped trying. So, she kept learning, eating quietly, dreaming silently. Even if her family never noticed.

Even if she had to raise herself.

"No one taught her how to live. So she invented herself out of broken moments and bruised silence."

-----