03 - Parents

John POV

I barely slept last night. Sarah wanted to have a family lunch and for that we would have to convince our eldest son, Zhanye, to participate too. We have tried many things to convince him to leave the room and spend some time with us, but nothing has worked.

Children sometimes ask us where their brother is, or why they can't enter the basement. Sarah and I always said that their brother was sick and that he couldn't leave the basement, we just didn't tell them that the disease was depression. But this always made the children want to go even more to the basement to take care of their sick brother, even though they remembered him very little.

Last night, Sarah and I stayed up late thinking about how to convince him to join us, but at some point, we both started to cry worried about him, until we only calmed down almost 2:00 am.

I woke up early today, as a route on Saturday to take a walk. I got up at 5:30 and left to refresh my mind.

When I came home, when I opened the door, I smelled a delicious smell coming from the kitchen. "Maybe it's something Sarah thought she'd use to lure Zhanye?" I said in a low voice, laughing at myself.

Only when I arrived at the kitchen portal, what received me was not Sarah cooking... the vision of what was happening in the kitchen made all the hair on my body shiver.

Suddenly my nose started to scratch and as I realized, my face was a little wet with the tears that began to fall when I saw the happiest scene of the whole year.

In the kitchen, Sue and Henry, who always wake up earlier than we do, were sitting in their plastic chairs with happy faces while tasting some very fragrant food.

And sitting between them was a boy I hadn't seen in a long time... my eldest son... Zhanye!

I quickly wiped the tears from my face and as I was about to go towards them, I heard a scream that scared me like hell.

"ZHAANYYEE!"

...

Zhanye POV

Yeah... the other little head looking at me through the door was Henry. When I looked at him, he had a shy look on his face trying to understand what Sue was doing. When he saw me looking at him, his reaction was identical to hers, hiding and coming back a few seconds later to see if everything was okay.

The story was repeated almost scripted until the present moment, where the two children ate my two Eggs Benedict... But seeing their satisfied eyes made me happy too, as I got up from the ground to do another portion, I heard a scream that scared me like hell.

"ZHAANYYEE!"

Hearing this scream, my involuntary reflection threw the plate I was holding into the direction of the counter I was going and shattered it. When I looked at the fountain of the voice, I saw a beautiful woman with light red hair, almost in a golden tone, wearing pajamas and coming running towards me with red eyes full of tears.

My first reaction was to see that she was barefoot and run towards her to prevent her from stepping on the shards of glass that were on the floor of the plate I broke.

"My son! Are you all right? How long has it been since I've seen you..." Sarah hugged me while I was crying.

While she was doing that, I was left unresponsive. I really didn't know what to do at that moment. When I woke up from my astonishment, I saw that my right hand was caressing her back to calm her down, but it seems she started crying even more as she said things she couldn't understand.

My eyes got a little damp, no one ever cared about me like that... and even with his parents caring so much about him, the other Zhanye was pretty dumb about them. I began to get angry at the old Zhanye who lived in this body, but I didn't demonstrate in front of them since you could be misinterpreted.

Before I knew it, I had already said it. "It's okay, Mom."

When I said those words, everything remained quiet, it was as if time had stopped at that moment. For someone who had just been reincarnated, nothing related to time was good, so I began to despair. But to prove to me that the weather hadn't stopped, Sarah, my... mother, who was now making no more crying noises, squeezed me harder in her embrace.

"You called me mother again." She said it while she was taking her head off my chest. When I saw a beautiful smile on her face, I was happy and started to ask myself if I would also look good in case I lost weight, after all the children are probably the cutest that I had ever seen in life.

While my mother tried to control her emotions between happiness and sadness, a man entered the kitchen also with a red and wet face, but showing a serious expression as if this was not happening.

"Good morning, Zhanye." He said.

John Black, my father. A blond man, who appears to be at most 40 years old, athletic body and blue eyes, always well dressed and concerned with health. That was the information I got when Zhanye's life passed through my eyes before I fainted. Even if he tried to look tough on the outside, on the inside everyone knew what a soft heart he was.

"Good morning, Dad." I answered.

In my head, saying those two words would be almost impossible. But feeling such intense emotions, the words simply flowed out of my mouth, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"What happened to you leaving the room today? Is everything all right?" My mother asked me, worried.