"So you'll be leaving, next week, huh." His father's voice was unnaturally even, a tight thread stretched over a chasm of unspoken grief. He was roaming the small room, his gaze lingering on the faded blueprints and college posters plastered on the walls—relics of the son who used to be.
"Yahh, Dad." Emerald's reply was a low hum, stripped of the vibrant energy Zinan usually lent him. Every word exchanged was weighted with the crushing density of an imminent, permanent loss.
"What you gonna do about the room?" His father stopped by a worn map of the world, pinned with small, hopeful flags.
"Mavia said she wants to move up, so I guess it's a choice." Letting my little sister inherit this room is my final act of continuity, Emerald thought, a small lie that life will go on normally here.
"I bet Little Mavia won't like the posters." His father finally chuckled, a dry, rusty sound, before leaving the room. Every phrase, every mundane inquiry about posters and rooms, carried the crushing weight of a lifetime of unspoken love. Each weight taught Emerald one final lesson: the deepest bonds are often reflected in the most trivial details.
When Emerald finally walked out of the house—the sanctuary he had lived, loved, and, in a metaphorical sense, died in—the scene was spectral. He saw his own ghost, the anxious, slightly awkward boy in the old, faded clothes, standing by the doorway, waving him a final, melancholic goodbye.
His mother was already weeping, silent tears tracking paths through the flour on her hands—a perpetual state of domestic grief. He tried his best to tell her, through his eyes and his tight smile, that he wasn't coming back in four years. But how could a boy speak something as sharp as a forged sword—the truth—to the heart of his mother? He couldn't. He offered a strained hug, absorbed her sorrow like a sponge, and pulled away.
He didn't look back as he stepped into the waiting car. He fled from his motherland, his chest constricted with guilt. There is no human who could just see what is happening over a few kilometers away, but Emerald saw his father's tears—a single, brilliant drop clinging to the side of his cheek, a tear that had perhaps been hidden for a lifetime, only freed by the departure of his son.
The air inside the luxurious cabin of the first-class flight felt sterile and suffocating. Emerald was settled into his plush seat, but the comfort was a biting irony. His first flight, meant to be a moment of triumphant launch into a prestigious postgraduate course abroad, was instead toxified over the fact that he was, essentially, no more. The genuine Emerald—the boy who had grown up wanting to be a world-class engineer, who dreamed of changing the world through diplomatic words and game-changing innovations—would never see the light of that future. That boy had been consumed by a fate he'd merely dreamt of.
He closed his eyes and took a deep, centering breath, trying to anchor himself, but the air was thin, the reality thinner.
When he opened his eyes, he scanned the faces of his fellow travelers in the quiet, exclusive section of the aircraft, a silver prison speeding through the stratosphere.
The entire world is a stage of elaborate lies, Zinan's cold logic asserted in the back of his mind.
Emerald saw the successful venture capitalist across the aisle, scrolling through complex spreadsheets, his brow furrowed in concentration. He saw the elegant, polished woman meticulously editing a presentation on her laptop, her expression one of forced, tireless efficiency.
Everyone, he realized, was doing something they perhaps secretly hated, or enduring something extraordinary just to maintain an external image. They were all performing, desperately trying to tell the public, or perhaps just themselves, that they were precisely what the world saw of them. It was a tiring, ceaseless performance.
He stared at his own reflection in the window—the sculpted jawline, the unnatural white hair, the intense blue-tinted eyes.
When you look close enough, Emerald mused bitterly, his thoughts dropping to a whisper audible only to himself, you can tell that all that ambition, all that frantic activity, is just a scapegoat they put up to please the mind of one's own.
They traded their inner peace for external approval, using their careers, their wealth, or their perfect presentations as shields. They were fleeing the simple, flawed reality of their souls.
He was fleeing the life he knew, using the persona of a destined genius to justify his disappearance.
The old Emerald is gone, he concluded, the words settling like ice in his chest.
(To be continued)