[spicycurrypuff]

He fucked behind my mom’s back and out came a bunch of kids. It’s screwed up. But that’s the sum of my childhood. Except for an outing out to the beach, I really don’t remember anything happy about my childhood or pre-teens with my family. Maybe it got so fucked up that my mind blocked out the trauma. The brain is a fascinating organ. It really has the ability to do that.

And then there was me. The middle child of 5 siblings, I was constantly the odd one out. I grew up thinking it was because of the age gap between me and the others but I later learnt that it was because I was born out of wedlock. Officially, mom had 2 husbands. And my father wasn’t it. He was a seafarer and left when I was 2. I looked like my dad and that was never good for me. My stepdad’s relatives brought me up mostly. I owe them a lot.

But I still had to go home.

So, what does one learn, living in such a chaotic environment?

I learnt to lie. To steal. To appear silent and invisible when I needed to. I learnt to act at that young age. Forget method acting. This is the real school of the arts. In living, fucking colour. And I got really good at it.

But of course, at home. I was the resident thief. The crook that was always in the wrong. That made me hate going home. Hate looking at my siblings who were the angels in my parent’s eyes. It also meant that I was blamed for eating a lot or for taking food that was not mine.

I shrank because of that. At 12years old, primary school, I was a mere 100cm tall. When I hit sec 3, I was 1.2m. Life was quite shit back then. I usually appeared gaunt, often with rings under my eyes since I slept so late all the time reading comics. Arms and legs were odd attachments that stuck out of my uniform like matchsticks. The mess of hair on my head could never be tamed and it always flipped out strangely. Even globs of gel didn’t do the trick. An annoyance I had to learn to live with.

Some call it ugly. I call it having character. It all changed in my second year in sec 3.