A/N: I hate looking back at my writing, because they only validate my fear that I’m a really, really bad writer. But then again, there are some lines in my old composition books that make me go incredulously, “Did I really write that?!” This is probably no better than some of the other discarded fragments that I have lying around under my bed, but something about this just compelled me to type it anyways. I hope you enjoy:)

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I pushed the cup to my mouth. As I stared at its content sloshing about, my eyes were cross-eyed. After a time though, when there was no longer any liquid in the cup except for the faint traces that still clung desperately to the sides, my eyes were no longer oddly centered. Instead, they were alert, brimming with curiosity and an intense emotion that I could not identify at the time.

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It was an antique cup, passed down through generations in my family. My dad was the last owner of it, before he silently laid it on my desk and said gruffly, “Here.” He dismissed my words of surprised gratitude with a disgusted wave of his hand before locking the door behind him.

At the bottom of the cup, I noticed, were bluish-black scratch marks that came from years of stirring coffee with a metal spoon. I never liked coffee myself. It was coarse, black, and bitter to the taste. Sometimes the smell was so strong that the breath would get caught in my throat. It was one of the reasons why I never went to any of the group study dates that my friends organized, because they wanted to do it in coffee shops. The aroma of those places reminded me too much of painful times.

But I still used that cup. Not for coffee, of course. I filled it with orange juice, water – sometimes punch. And when I happened to break that special cup as I was washing the plates because I was distracted by the news on television, I remembered how my dad used to scream whenever I broke something.

“You stupid fool!” His voice would reverberate through the walls, chilling every part of my body. “Why can’t you be more careful?”

I stared at him blankly, unable to respond. He gave me another one of those disgusted glares and made his way back to his study. He didn’t even care that I had cut myself with one of the shards, hot blood dripping from my palm to my elbow and down the floor. I felt them coming then – the tears. But I didn’t cry…not then, not while he was nearby. He would have cherished in my display of weakness, and I didn’t want to give him that kind of satisfaction. Instead, I collected the shards with a dustpan, threw them away, and continued to wash the plates as though nothing had happened. When I looked up from what I was doing, he was inspecting the cleanliness of the kitchen, and I saw him grin smugly as he took a sip from that special cup.

Even after his death, I can still remember. The special cup now lay broken in my hands, much like my heart. My fingers were uncut and no blood poured out. I was physically uninjured, so I had no reason to cry. But still, the tears of defeat flowed, from my palms that I had pressed against my flushed face, to my elbows, and down to the floor.

“You stupid fool!” I told myself, the ache constricting in my chest. “Will you ever forget?”