Though I had to admit, the story of the single mother who took her children with her did make me unreasonably angry. While she was almost certainly suffering and wasn’t in a sound state of mind, you couldn’t just take innocent children with no agency along with you to the grave. If you wanted to commit suicide, you had to do it alone—while also making sure to cause as little trouble for those around you as possible. It was practically an unwritten rule.
There were studies that suggested a majority of people who committed (or at least considered) suicide were people who somehow fell into a one-track mindset where—be it due to depression or some other mental disorder—they ultimately became convinced that death was the only answer to their problems. I wondered if this was the case for me as well. I didn’t think it was, but then again, people with extremely narrow mindsets and cyclical thought processes didn’t tend to be the most self-aware.
As evening fell, I left my cram school and headed for home. On my way to the station, I passed by an art supply store I used to frequent quite a bit during my junior high days—virtually every day, in fact. A group of college-aged kids emerged from the store just as I walked past the entrance, and they started walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I could tell from their clothing and general vibes that they were probably art school students. They seemed to be having an awful lot of fun chatting about whatever it was they were discussing. As I turned and watched them walk down the street for a moment, a twinge of pain shot through my chest.
Then, as if the universe truly did have a sense of irony, a car I knew all too well pulled up along the sidewalk almost immediately thereafter. My mother rolled the window down and leaned her head out.
“Tomoya.”
“Mother.”
“I had a feeling you’d be getting out of class right about now, so I figured I’d swing by,” she said. “Get in.”
I walked over and climbed into the passenger seat. My mother waited for me to buckle my seatbelt and then promptly took off. She always drove to work and would occasionally pick me up from cram school on her way home when the timing worked out. I appreciated it a lot, actually.
My mother was a safe but decisive driver. While half-listening to the news program playing on the radio, I gazed lazily out the window. There was a group of high school kids hanging out in the parking lot of the corner store—both boys and girls. They looked like they just got back from a trip to the beach or the amusement park and were really laughing it up.
My mother cast them a sidelong glance. “Well, they certainly seem to be enjoying frittering away their little summer vacations,” she said. “You’d better take care not to end up like them, Tomoya. They’ll never amount to anything in life.”
My mother always did that—she’d lambast “problem children” she saw as potential bad influences on me with a slew of scathing denouncements. In her mind, kids like them would only ever grow up to be disappointments to their parents, would never get into a halfway decent college, and would struggle to find any employer who’d take them. She genuinely seemed to believe this too—and while I didn’t think the simple act of hanging out with one’s friends was such a horrible thing, I really didn’t have the energy to fight her on it at that moment. All I could really do was nod and say, “Yeah, no kidding.”
We pulled further away from the commercial district that surrounded the station toward our more residential part of town. The newscaster on the radio was giving a report on some international border dispute happening overseas—a lot of innocent civilians had just been killed by a suicide bomber. It was the fault of religious extremists, apparently—so extreme that they would gladly lay down their lives and take countless others with them for the sake of their so-called faith, all while truly believing they were completely in the right and dying for a righteous cause.
“How are your studies coming along?” my mother asked. “Remind me how far you are in math again?”
“Right now, I’m doing binomial coefficients, graphing all possible paths of a given parabolic equation through the coordinate plane… Stuff like that,” I said.
She liked to ask me questions about each of the subjects I was learning in cram school—and if ever she found something for which my understanding appeared to be lacking in her view, she’d let out a sigh of disappointment and chide me as she drove.
“Why can’t you just stay on top of things, like I did at your age?” she said.
As her lecture went on, I could feel my heart beginning to deflate in my chest. I slouched my shoulders shamefully at the implication that I was defective in some way. Even though I knew I was well above average for my grade, I could never be proud of that fact. I would never be enough for her, and that had been instilled in me from an early age.
“Have you settled on your first-choice college yet?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
I’d written the names of both my first choice and a few alternates down on my ideal higher education plan report that I was expected to turn in to my homeroom teacher at the start of fall semester. Not that there was much point in doing so other than saving face, though—I would be dead and buried by the time exam season rolled around.
“You’re very blessed, you know that?” said my mother. “Do you have any idea how expensive it is to send your child off to college? When I was your age, my family’s finances couldn’t pay for my education. I had to work multiple jobs while in school just to pay for my own tuition. You’ve got it easy, I tell you. I worked awfully hard to save up money for your college fund, all to ensure you’ll be successful in life.”