There was once a moment in time where I was not as spiteful towards other men, but I consider it a time of ignorance. When I was young, I considered it my fault that my own father took all of my mother’s savings and left home without saying goodbye, my fault that me and my mother had to constantly eat cheap fast food and gain bloated, flabby bodies. And at night I can still hear the echoes of tears of every single schoolgirl I ignored while devilish boys pulled on their hair. It was not until the 12th of 2002’s March, the last time I ever saw Hemingway at school, that I finally let myself gaze into the truth.

During the last few minutes before lunch, the classroom had already become a cacophony of cackling and gossip. Whatever words our teacher had spoken at the start of class had been completely buried, although I do remember the banality of the shallow buzzwords that were obviously stolen through a quick internet search. With a pencil in my hand, I sat silently, separate from the disdainful attitudes that possessed dozens, perhaps thousands in other classrooms nearby, and even then what I heard was enough to cloud my thoughts. The screech of the bell, the only known thing in existence that was able to pierce silence into boorish students, signified a break from this routine. As they stumbled out of the room, it seemed as if the students could walk through the teacher without noticing. This instance had already happened countless times in all of my classes before, and I knew that it would come again soon.

After the classroom had cleared, as my foot stepped beyond the line between the room and the hallway, it was stabbed with the foot of another. Hemingway, ever the egotist, made sure that I felt his presence while he struck a stare that by itself could do more malice than any insult. He was a human enigma to me. I usually oversaw him partaking in the low-brow activities I expected from fellow classmates, but he switched to this silent stoic persona when he first saw me. Shortly after our first “meeting”, without warning, I became his personal punching bag, his way of physically venting out when he was handed poor grades for his work or a girl laughed at him, and our sessions always ended with me dead on the floor while he stood triumphant, akin to a god. By now, however, my body had endured so much of him that it could no longer flinch as he curled his spindly fingers into a weapon before shoving it between my eyes. My head knocked against the wall as he brought his violent storm upon me, not wasting more than a half-second between blows. To me, it was never as if his fists were merely hands, but instead gloves wrapped with barbed wire, leaving no portion of my portly form unbruised. Once my body had completely slumped to the floor, blood was dripping from my lips and my vision was fading, but beyond the ringing in my ears I could hear a feminine shriek. “How could you?” followed the shriek. When my vision returned to a sharper state, there were two people looking at me: Hemingway, his expression unchanged, and a dark-haired girl, devastated at what had occurred. The idea of empathy towards me was completely alien in my mind, especially since this was the first time, long after the day when Hemingway first glimpsed at me, that someone saw what could have been a dying body and did not look away. But as her body leaned closer to me, her left arm met Hemingway’s suffocating grip as his lips revealed gritted teeth. Then, as every student and teacher turned their heads towards the scream of “Leave him alone!” I witnessed something that I thought would only exist in fantasies: a swift kick to Hemingway’s face that threw him into the floor. There was something about her dark red sneaker being firmly set on Hemingway’s chest that allowed the worst of my memories to be snapped into place only to be blown apart, as if I was drenched in holy water and born again. My mother must have been alerted about the incident, as the moment I came back home, she wrapped her arms around me as she squeezed me in a warm embrace, with my head resting against her soft body.

Before he left my world, my father had always told me that men, and only men, were built to thrive in the world of their own making, and that to have, in his words, a ‘controlled’ wife was a symbol of a man’s strength and victory. But ever since that encounter, I had realised who truly was the strongest.


back