Incence

Okay, now it's almost 6:30am and I can feel tingling in my fingers which is a sure sign that I'm getting ready to pass out. I'm kind of in a delirious state and funny thing is, I started thinking about a certain memory I usually block out. Right around 5:30am, I had a memory of when I was 6 or 7. I don't know what triggered that memory or why I even remembered it but it's something i've never forgotten. I think it was the first time I was hurt, I mean really hurt... by my mother. I've always loved my mother and I still do. Since I was a child, my mother was my world. I think this one day changed all that.


I must have been around 6 or 7 because I was already going to school in Hawaii after coming from Japan. One day after school, I came home and found myself starving so went to look for something in the refrigerator. I found a package of hot dogs and decided that I wanted some. I read the instructions on the package and realized I needed to cook them before I could eat the sausages. However I remember my mother warning me many times not to touch any of the kitchen appliances as they were too dangerous for me to handle. So at first I thought I could boil the sausages in hot water. I turned on the faucet and waited for the water to become really hot. I stuck a chopstick through a sausage and made it like a popsicle. I thought I was really clever but after doing that for about a minute, I realized that this wasn't going to cook the sausage. So against my mother's orders, I decided to really cook my sausage the real way. The instructions on the package told me to boil some water in a pot so I poured some water into a small pot and put it on the stove. I carefully turned the dial on the stove to "hot". After awhile, the water came to a boil so I carefully put one sausage into the boiling water and cooked it for the recommended time. After it was done, I switched the heat off as I've seen my mother do thousands of times, took the sausage out and started to eat it. I was so proud of what I could do . I Actually cooked for the first time and felt very much like an adult. That was until my mother walked in from somewhere. I'm not sure exactly where she had been, but she came in just in time to see me eating the sausage in the kitchen with the pot of very hot water on the stove still sitting there. I really didn't think she would mind as I hadn't really messed anything up or burned down the house or anything major like that. But what she did to me was so amazing you would've thought I burned down the whole neighborhood. She grabbed my arm in on angry motion, and sat me down on the living room sofa. She then started screaming at me for being a very bad boy and slapped me across the face several times. I was already crying by but that wasn't the end of it. She got a stick of incense and lighted one with a match until it was burning bright at the tip. I had no idea what she was going to do but I was scared shitless and was screaming at the top of my lungs by now. I tried to run away from her grasp but couldn't and remember regretting even going into the kitchen that day. I prayed to God that I would do anything to make my mother stop and love me again. I loved my mother and she loved me and she wouldn't do anything to hurt me. There was no way she was going to hurt me. At that moment her facial expression softened and she loosened her grip so I thought she had forgiven me. I was ready to go into her arms and cry for forgiveness. She caught me off guard and poked the tip of the burning end of the incence on the top of my hand. It was the most pain I've ever felt since birth and this time, the pain didn't go away. The pain lingered there for a long time after. As I started to cry silently this time, she stood up without saying a word, went to her bedroom and started to get ready to go to work.