On a summer's day

I had a quite unremarkable life. 

I was an only child born in an average family living in a small suburban town outside of the capital. My mother worked as a cashier in a local supermarket and my father ran a small trading business, although it was only much later I found out what goods he was trading. All I knew as a kid was that he bought things and sold things with a little price difference in between and that's what put the food on the table. As for the money my mother made, she always said it was for my studies. So she bought me books - a lot of books, sent me to learn piano (which I hated), and paid for my cram schools. 

They were always very practical and realistic about money, and they always let me know it. My mother's time at work resulted in supporting my studies. Her time in life was exchanged to provide a different kind of time for my life. My father stressed that it was the accumulation of those little differences that put food on our table. Life is all about fine margins, he said. A penny earned from buying a bottle of water at 99 cents and selling it at 1 dollar is what provided for our livelihood. If you make a small miscalculation, misjudge, or make mistakes, then you could end up having nothing to eat for dinner. Like those predators in the wild who mistimed their attack and the prey ran away. 

And he did make mistakes. It seemed actually quite a lot of mistakes. By the time I entered middle school, we already moved house 6 times. I do not remember the very first house I lived in very well because we moved out of there when I was only three years old, apparently. Then I remembered we lived in this house that had a small garden and we even had a dog. But it wasn't by our choice. The previous tenant abandoned their dog when they moved out, so he just kinda stayed in that house and subsequently joined my family. 

Not for long though. After about two years of living there, my father hit a jackpot. Somehow our family had loads of money and my mother stopped working. We moved to a very nice apartment. It was spacious. Facing south. A lot of sunlight came in through the big windows in the living room on lazy afternoons. 

Back then I didn't know why we moved out of that nice apartment because only after about a year and a half living there we moved to an equally as nice but a little smaller apartment. 

Then we repeated that process a few more times. 

Every time we moved, our house got smaller and less nice. 

My mother started working again. She spent less and less time at home, but at the same time, my father started to have more days staying at home than at work. At some point I overheard my parents talking and learned that he couldn't afford to keep his office rent, so he'd be working from home. 

Happy days came and went. 

I was happy to have more time with my father. He was a very loving father. 

Then one day people came to our house and started to put stickers on things. 

Apparently, my father miscalculated, misjudged, and made mistakes. 

On the day that we were moving out of the house, I swore to myself that I was never going to forgive those guys who took everything away from us. 

We went to an even smaller house in an even smaller town. Mother found another work at a local shop again. Father started to teach. Apparently, he was a good teacher when he was in his 20s and it was a mistake that he started to run his own business in his 30s. 

I think we lived like that for about 2 years. 

Then father struck gold. 

He came home with a bunch of presents in his hands. There was so much stuff that he had to go back and forth a few times between our house door and his car because he couldn't carry them all in one go. 

He said we would move back to the town where I was born. He will stop teaching again. He has a good business planned and it's started well - well enough for us to get a modest apartment again back in our hometown. 

Life became good again. Father was happy, mother was happy, and I was happy. 

I entered middle school and started to enjoy school life. I made a few good friends and my grades were decent. I wasn't spectacular in anything but just like with everything else, I was average at them all. 

On the last day of the semester in my first year before the summer break, a boy in my year told me that I was pretty. He said he couldn't bear to go through the whole 4 weeks of summer break without seeing me. That's why he had to confess on the last day so we could meet up during those summer days. I didn't know what to say and he took my silence as a yes. 

We spent quite a bit of time together, doing nothing special. Just what you'd normally do with your any other friends, except that he was supposedly my boyfriend. 

We even held hands once. He said my hands were cold. 

Just a few days before school resumed, he asked me to come see him at a park where we used to hang out during those summer days. We sat on the bench in the shade of a tree in the scorching heat of summer afternoons. He always brought some snacks to eat together. 

When we met, he wasn't his usual self. He was quiet, hesitant, and fidgety. After talking round and round about some irrelevant things, he said we needed to break up. It's not you, it's me - he said. Apparently, there was something wrong with him. I never understood why he liked me in the first place so it wasn't a surprise that his heart went cold. So going out was difficult to understand, but breaking up was easy to understand. 

We said our goodbyes and he left. I sat around in the park for a while and remembered that I had brought some snacks to give him on this day, for a change. 

I rummaged through my pockets and found a small pack of mixed nuts that I brought. Mother used to tell me that those were good for your brains. 

As I opened the package and started to eat the nuts slowly, one by one, a squirrel came down from a tree and hopped onto the bench I was sitting on, looking at me with expectant eyes. 

I gave it some of my nuts and it grabbed them with its two tiny paws and munched on them with its tiny mouth.

It was very cute.