I was nervous. Before this night, or should I say the party began, celebrating my marriage through this grand bash scared the crap out of me. Mostly because now everyone would know my face, which was the last thing I wanted in my life. If I measured the lighting of the camera all around this room, it was easy to calculate. By now, I was on the news feed of every social media with a hashtag. That would be my first time having this celebrity moment, which I mostly dreamed about on my old half-broken bed in the morning, right before my alarm rang.Come on, didn’t you dare roll your eyes at me? I stood on the lowest steps of the staircase when it came to the financial situation of this damn society. Perhaps I was lower than the lowest that people invented over the years, but despite that, I was free to imagine anything I wanted in my dreams.So I dreamed. Every time I appeared at a high-profile party with my boss wearing a dress that was either borrowed from Selena or rented from the stor
Dean was talking to a bunch of women, drinking as his heart wished, with a smile on his face. He was a charmer. Women always preferred him for his bad-boy personality, flirty attitude, and refined behavior was the reason for his popularity. It worked for him. Every day there was a brand new woman in his bed. He did everything he desired with them and didn’t regret forgetting them the next morning, as if they were some worthless shit that he didn’t deserve.After Celine and I got inter-tangled in a relationship, Dean was the first one to warn me about her. There were several times when he interfered between me and Celine, which one time brought tears to my girlfriend’s eyes. That was a wake-up call for me. That day I drew a fine line between my friend and my girlfriend.The conversation I had with Dean the following night was very straight. We both wouldn’t ask anything about our personal lives until the other one was eager to share that. That was what we have maintained to this date.
The worst thing about alcohol was the after-effect that we underwent the very next morning. The amount I gulped last night was something that I wouldn’t dare do in my regular life when I had a tremendous acquaintance with this aftermath for a long time. Headache, dryness in my throat, nausea feeling that kept hanging in my mouth, and the morning light that was hurting my eyes were all my friends with whom I had a love-hate relationship.“I hate this,” I said, opening my eyes and using all the energy left in my body. At this moment, if I needed anything, it was food.I assumed that the only person who didn’t eat any of the food that was served throughout the entire night at my grand reception last night was me. The menu was worth more than a million dollars and people devoured it without thinking. Instead of drinking a ton of alcohol, it would be great if I ate a little of everything, especially lobster.It was the first time I was at a party where bisque was served as a welcome drink.
A family trip was always on my list for a long time. During my elementary school and teen years, whenever any of my classmates came back from a trip with their family, I always wished to do the same thing with my parents, too.Going somewhere together, spending time with one another, talking, playing games, eating, laughing, perhaps could give our family a chance to bond. There were so many times when I told my mother about going on a family trip. It didn’t have to be outside California, somewhere near the state would be fine, too. Just for two days, away from home, this routine life, somewhere peaceful, would be nice to think about our bond.But that never happened. Both of my parents were too busy to fulfill the obligation that their little boy had. My mother was a total badass businesswoman at that time, working long days and nights, doing everything to save the Astor Empire while my father was working hard between the legs of random women.It was fascinating to see how my parents
Mrs. Kennedy was chatting with Randy in the lounge when I came out after an hour-long sleep. The smile on those two people’s faces who lived enough to have a splendid notion of how this cruel world worked was a precious treasure to notice. They were in their 60s, lived and saw more than me. Perhaps the life experience that they had in their book was worse than what I went through. Still, there was hope in their eyes.After learning the nature of this ruthless world, having hope and faith in the heart was one of the most demanding jobs to do in this world.Randy was one of those unfortunate people in this universe who never really had a chance to have anything on their own. The moment he thought he had a home to call his own was the moment he came face to face with a bitter truth. His wife of seven years was sleeping with his boss, who was a billion times higher than Randy in terms of money, power, and fame.Spoiler: it was my father, and his wife was none other than Maria, our maid.A
The last time I saw my mother laughing at a joke, well, that was an eternity ago. The more I tried to figure out when that time was, the more I got a vision of those awful days of the scars on her face, broken ribs, hands, and black eyes. There had to be a moment where she smiled, which came from her heart. Not some show, but that memory didn’t come to my head. Simply put, there were none.Her downfall began after she married my father. The beginning of the marriage had some joyful moments to share, but as the infatuation crumbled down and reality slapped hard on this young couple’s faces, the love that compelled them to tie the knot became extinct.Slowly, their family of two grew from three to four, and indignant hit them harder. The more they tried to survive the waves of hardship, the more they were drawbacks from them. So the love that they worshipped was once adrift on a deserted island, from where it was hopeless to bring it back. They worked to put food on the table all day an
6 pm on the clock and me swallowed Cheval Blanc, one of the most expensive wines, while sitting near the poolside, dripping my legs in the lukewarm water, it felt like a luxury that I wasn’t born to have.In my usual life, I would have been running from one floor to another clutching a file in my hand to take a sign from someone important just as my boss would have commanded. There were a few times when I set my foot inside my apartment before 9. It was another new world of chores I needed to do after coming home. Cooking food, washing clothes, having dinner, watching some funny kid’s video on my phone, and before 11, calling it a night. The sun rose, so did I, and I repeated the same routine like a robot for three years. What was more surprising was that I barely had any complaints about that.Believe me or not, I was sort of missing those days. In the past week, all I did was sit in that million-dollar apartment, attend parties, and doll up with all those high-priced brand names. I
Romance. What was the definition of romance? In my understanding, it was a moment or collage of a few flashes that stayed with a person for the rest of their life. Whenever the person they cherished came to their mind, it was those moments that spontaneously knocked on the door of their heart that thrived a wide smile on our faces.The romantic life I had with Celine was the complete opposite if you compared it with other couples. There were good and bad moments in every relationship on this planet, but the good memories that I had with her somehow weren’t anything private or a secret conversation that was meant to stay only between us. Now that I reflected on those days with Celine, there simply wasn’t one of them I could recall and smile.The days I spent with Celine before breaking up with her over the phone were more over texts than words, as we hadn’t seen one another for three months now. The last time I saw her was when I went to Paris to celebrate her birthday with her model f