Time flew by. In seven hours, the farewell night would arrive. Jeremy kept his head down and reeled in the memories that he had in his life. A note from his diary spoke a lot about his childhood. On one page, it read “I don’t really know what hurts me. I don’t know… I lost my mother when I was ten. And my father left me alone in a hostel. I grew up there with all my sorrows. Later I got used to it. I treated myself as a friend in despair. But now, when I see her, my heart aches… I don’t know if it’s pain. But I’ve started to feel again, and I guess I am not numb anymore. Perhaps, I love her… Well, maybe…”
Jeremy grew up seeing his mother beaten by his father. He never had the courage to stop him, because he was an ill-tempered, militant man. He often found his mother crying. He never knew how to console her. His hatred towards life and his father made him a vagrant. He used to leave his house early morning and come back at night. His father used to burn the metal plates and burn his hands. When his classmates used to ask about it, he often smiled and told them, it was a game he played with fire.
Everything changed drastically when his mother was killed by his father when he was ten years old. He didn’t cry. He didn’t speak to anyone. He sat near her grave in the cemetery for days. He didn’t lose his temper. He touched her tomb and slept beside it for days. And one day, someone who came to dig a new grave for an old widow, noticed the half-dead body of Jeremy and took him to the hospital. When he woke up, he found himself in an orphanage, and the priest told him that his father had come to see him, that he was sleeping, and later arranged to shift him to this orphanage as he was going for a war. Jeremy spent his days in that orphanage, playing an old rusty guitar the priest had given him.
And he used to sing,
“Thought I oughta bare my naked feelings,
Thought I oughta tear the curtain down.
I held the blade in trembling hands
Prepared to make it but just then the phone rang
I never had the nerve to make the final cut.”
