Happy Days

The musical bed incident ended with both Shu and Sayna stepping on me in the hallway as I was sleeping there. Shu was the first one and he must have gotten out of my (Sayna's…) bed to go to the loo. I let out an embarrassing yelp and Shu just kinda froze on the spot. I scathingly told him to just go back to his room and he duly obliged. 

Not too long after that, I was violently woken up again by Sayna stepping on my balls, which led to an even more embarrassing yelp. It really wasn't a nice way to be woken up. Sayna murmured something inaudible, bowed her head apologetically, and scuttled to her (my…) room.

After that incident, we all slept in our respective beds. Sayna didn't come to me in the middle of the night and neither did Shu. 

The school was ok. I slowly got into the rhythm of studying again. I seriously could not fail or get into any trouble. Our livelihood depended on me continuing in school and getting the government support money. Besides that though, there was also a part of me that genuinely wanted to just finally have a normal school life for once. I stayed low, friendly, responsible to everyone, and studied hard. 

While I always had a few kids surrounding me and wanting to hang out with me during the breaks and lunch times, Sayna was always alone, but she didn't seem to mind and I thought better than to interfere. She no longer wanted my spam and egg for lunch, and always disappeared during lunch time but I did not probe into it. 

We were having relatively quiet and uneventful days, and considering what we've been through you could say these were the happy days. 

For some time I was still waking up in cold sweats at night, but prescription medicine helped me calm down and get back to sleep, and I was taking them less frequently too so that was a good thing. I always had a niggling feeling though that this might just be a calm before the storm. But as more days, and even weeks passed without any drama this feeling started to fade away into the mundanity of everyday life. 

I then picked up the old 'hobby' of drawing again. It was something I did at the juvenile detention center before as so-called Art Therapy. Although I somehow grew to like it, it still didn't sit well with who I am, I suppose at least in the eyes of everyone else. 

I felt a bit embarrassed to show this side of me to Shu and Sayna too, so I hid this from them as well and just drew on my notebook with a pencil while they were all in their rooms. One day Shu saw me working on the notebook, got curious, and asked what I was doing. I was glad he didn't realize I was drawing things, so I just told him I was listing ways of punishing him if he did not clean his room until Sunday. He promptly shut up and went back to his room. 

We had art classes though in school and initially, I was torn between just drawing some whacky stuff to hide the fact that I was into Arts vs. just taking it as it comes and doing what felt natural. After some intentionally half-assed attempts on canvas during the art classes though, I really didn't want to do that anymore. I was limited to secretly drawing on my notebook with just a pencil at home. Here in school, they provided a proper canvas, oil paints, water paints, brushes, palettes, and all that good stuff. It felt such a waste for me to give up on all that just to hide myself, so at some point, I just said fuck it and started to paint more seriously. 

This has not gone unnoticed by our art teacher and my classmates alike, who first teased about the Big Boh being a fancy artist. It didn't take long for them to realize that I was taking it seriously though. I laughed when they joked, but that didn't make me shy away from what I wanted to do on the canvas. It has become some kind of a ritual for my classmates to come and check out my paintings at the end of each art class and I was getting the kind of praise that I've never received before from any classes in my life. Even Sayna sometimes came over to look at my picture closely, did not say anything but always left with a nod of approval. Yes, this was a sappy thing to do, but who cares anymore at this point?

I started to think that life is good and that perhaps there will come a time when this Big Boh does not have to be so big anymore.