Chapter Text
“And with such, we leave all of our belongings to our beloved child for them to do with any of it as they wish so long as they’ve reached legal age.”, you numbly read through the paper, signed by both of your parents whom you hadn’t expect to be gone so soon from your life.
You’re sure none of you expected any of that to happen. You have already told yourself countless of times that it’d be best for you to slowly accept all of these unforeseen circumstances as they would have wanted for you.
But you still couldn’t help but heed to the heaviness rolling in your chest like wild wrecking ball attempting to shatter through your entire sanity. Why had they have been taken away so soon from you? And especially while you weren’t even in the country.
Oh how you started despising your choice of studying abroad for high school the entire time you were flying back to your hometown, Home. Despite the cozy name that this small town had, it started to feel like the complete opposite the moment you stepped out of the cab to stand wearily tall in front of the small house that catered you and your humble family for as long as you could remember.
Walking through the front lawn, with flowers and bushes left unattended for a few days now, felt like centuries of dragging weighted chains with your ankles. Opening the once exciting wooden front door was just as burdensome unlike the days when you were much younger, being greeted by hues of warm tone welcoming you in like a warm summer evening. Yet now, the living room only whispers a hushed devastation, the lack of life clinging in each abandoned furniture with no promised future.
You sighed, the clacking and pounding clanks of the heavy metal ball lodged deep in your chest growing louder as you entered your house. Letting your luggage rest scattered across the floor, you ran up to another set of notes left for you on the glass coffee table in the middle of the living room.
It was a letter from your mom. She wrote shortly of how you shouldn’t be too saddened and worried about the funerals; they’ve already prepared for deaths and invested in the equipment and expenses necessary—though, they just hadn’t prepared for the off-chance that the end of their lives would just be months away from the last large sum of money invested. As if death was just waiting for that last deposit to be made.
What a sick and cruel thing that death fellow is. But try as you might to be angry with fate, you’ve already cried enough back while you had first known of the news, up until this morning before finally calling a cab to bring you home. And besides, your mom and dad wished for you to cry only for a while, but not allow their absence to wreck your future.
“…and we hope you find yourself a good college to study in. We know just how capable you are when it comes to your future— whatever you may wish that to be.”
Whatever you may wish that future to be… yeah, right. As if you even knew what you wanted to do with your future.
Sure, you’ve been hoping to be a teacher before all of this, but it’s not like that was much of an impactful ambition. You still felt as if you’d be stuck doing meaningless 9-5 jobs if you were to pursue a career in education. You’d already forgotten why you even wanted to be a teacher in the first place. It’s not like you’ve got a knack for teaching itself either.
Maybe it’s because your parents were both teachers and your admiration for them invaded even your lack of ambition. Ah great, that just makes the wrecking ball inside your chest grow more destructive.
“If you still want to be teachers like us, sweetheart, you can always study under Home Integrated University that I and your father teach in. Who knows? You might just find more comfort in learning there than you think, love.”, the long letter ends, marked with love tied to the cursive signature of your mother.
Home Integrated University? HIU? As in the campus that has those “puppet teachers” you’ve been hearing about from your friends abroad. You don’t know how it’s possible for puppets to be teachers in the real world, and not while inside a tv show of sorts but you didn’t have the time to worry about that while you were studying out of the country and having your parents die off so soon and whatnot.
It kind of also felt natural? To have these puppet teachers exist, even when you know in yourself that you’ve never come across one of them at all. You think so, at least.
“I mean, I would know if I did, right?”, you whispered to yourself as you mindlessly reread through the handwritten letter of your mother earlier.
Oh how disappointed she would feel if she knew you didn’t even have an ounce of willingness to choose a program you liked to apply for in college.
And yet, as if your mother heard your depressive thoughts, a brochure slides downwards, falling lightly on the floor, from between the pages of the letters.
A brochure sponsoring Home Integrated University.
“Home is where the heart is.”, you read through the glossy sheet of colorful paper. Pfft. What a corny tagline, but alright. The brochure’s theme colors were mixtures of reds, oranges, yellows, and blues. All of which mixed and danced along the pages captivatingly as it waltzes with the simple curves of the fonts featured in each of the page of the advertising paper.
You thoroughly read through the brochure, scanning the programs offered by the university alongside the requirements needed to apply. All of which seemed very typical, nothing out of the ordinary from a college that offers post graduate classes, hence university.
But as you continued treading the lines with your sight, you notice something that they offer that does not seem to be offered in any other colleges that you currently know of. Written in a brightly bold fiery red text floating in white wrote the following enticing words:
“Not sure about the program you’ve chosen? Good news! We offer FREE UNLIMITED ELECTIVE CLASSES UNTIL GRADUATION!”
Your mind was made up immediately that day. A decision that would lead you to something more meaningful than you ever thought would be possible at the time.