My Pen: An Essential Figure

My pen is very essential to my life as a student. It’s only about the size of my palm but it has walked with me through my studies. It may also be small but its purpose changes my world. It is slim but it can shape a country. It can even run a government with its ink. It may be in different color but they are equally important. Moreover, a pen can be lost and never be found or even be gone because someone else took it away. Like when a moment your classmate borrowed your pen from you but never returned it back. Like the pen in my life, my father is one of the most important person to me but he’s gone. He’s gone because someone took him away from us. An image I try so hard to forget but keeps running back into my head afraid that he might die wondering alone in the wilderness.

Waking up one morning in an empty room. Looking around, I found no one. Not my mom. Not my sisters. And especially not my dad. No one seems to remember that I'm still here, in this room, alone. Studies seems to hold my sisters up since it was then a school day. Waiting for them to arrive, I hear the birds chirp, the winds blow, children's laugh playing across the house. I looked at the window just to know that my Dad's motorcycle was gone. Just then I knew he went far. A moment of waiting, I heard the keys jiggle. Mom has arrived! With a questioned look, I asked my mom, "where's Dad?” Shaking her head, she said that it was so early when he left.

The kid in me cried, longing for my dad. I cried my heart out until I heard an engine roar entering the premises of our home. Without my Dad, I saw a woman driving and getting off his motorcycle. A query popped into my head like balloons floating. Who’s that woman? Who is she to use my father’s motor without him driving? It looks odd seeing another woman driving your father’s motorcycle without him. My mom greeted the woman as she parked the vehicle asking who she was only to be responded that my father requested him to return the motorcycle then left.

My Mom, the pessimist, knew that something is not right. That maybe, the woman a while ago was my father’s mistress for she was also his mistress back then. With swelling eyes, bulging knuckles, and a bent head, my mom waited outside the house until he arrived. My dad was actually trying to make a light conversation by asking my mom why she was outside. My mom then grabbed and dragged my dad just to stop by me and told me to stay where I am and not to follow them. After hearing the bellowing voices above me, I gave up the urge of not following them. I slowly, ever slowly, climbed up the stairs as tender as I could as if it would be my last then stopped in a particular room where my parents were shouting.

What I saw is unexpected. Where no one can ever imagine me seeing, a knife in my mom’s hand threatening my father to back out but, then, I also see, my father aiming my mom’s hand to him to intentionally hurt himself so I would see that it was my mom who hurt him. He succeeded in victory, which made my mom jump immediately grab a piece of cloth and put a pressure on his hand. She then forced him to go to the hospital, he decline but he forgot that my mom was a persistent person. They wanted to leave me alone, again. I ran after them and told them I would go. Together, the three of us, went to the hospital. Patiently my mom and I waited for my dad to come out of the emergency room as the doctors healed him. Seconds became minutes and minutes became hours, my mom stood up, went to the attending nurse and asked how my father was. She shook her head and told my mom that he already left.

Running our hearts out, we went home only to be welcomed by an empty house. We called him, only to be answered by an answering machine. Hours became days, days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years, my father never came home again. Just like that, the woman went to school without a pen, borrowed mine, and never returned it back.