Choosing Not to Pass It Forward: The Conversation

Sometimes the people who notice hurt most easily learned to recognise it long before they understood what it was.

The metal legs of the classroom chairs scraped lightly against the floor whenever someone shifted their weight. Morning light entered through the tall windows beside the whiteboard, falling across rows of empty tables that still carried faint marker stains and scratches from years of use. Near the back of the room, a ceiling fan rotated slowly above stacks of unused sketch pads left behind after the earlier session ended.

Only the two of them remained inside now.

She sat across from him with a notebook resting loosely against her lap while he leaned back quietly in the plastic chair beside the window, one hand resting near a paper cup that had already gone cold. The conversation had started casually enough through ordinary things people often became curious about after spending enough time around someone else’s work and reflections.

She smiled at one point while flipping through several printed pages she had brought along with her.

“It’s nice,” she said softly. “The way you write about people. About gratitude. About happiness. You must’ve had a very happy childhood growing up.”

The sentence was spoken lightly, almost casually, but he felt something inside himself tighten the moment he heard it. It was not an unfamiliar question. He had spent most of his adult life quietly dreading it.

He looked at her for a moment without answering.

“It’s nice,” she said softly. “The way you write about people. About gratitude. About happiness. You must’ve had a very happy childhood growing up.”

And suddenly he was looking straight downward again from thirteen floors above the ground, both hands gripping tightly against the outer metal railing hard enough to hurt. Cars moved slowly through the carpark far below while sunlight reflected faintly across the roof of the rubbish collection area near the back of the building. His arms had already started shaking from holding on so tightly, but he did not dare loosen them. After enough years, the memories no longer stayed separate from each other. Only the fear remained clear.

If the man behind him loosened his grip against the front of his T shirt, there would be nothing beneath him except thirteen floors of empty space.

His feet slipped helplessly against the outer ledge while both hands clung to the railing, unable to tell whether this was punishment or whether he might actually fall.

Somewhere behind him, the familiar tension inside the house had already returned again, the kind that made everyone quieter before anything had even happened yet. Those moods arrived unpredictably. Sometimes over noise. Sometimes over something small enough that nobody fully understood afterward why it had suddenly become dangerous.

Everyone listened carefully to footsteps. Watched tone. Measured silence. Tried to sense tension early enough to avoid becoming its next target. There had been shouting often enough that fear eventually stopped feeling temporary and simply became part of the atmosphere inside the home itself.

And sometimes it happened too quickly for the body to prepare first.

A sharp slap across the face.

Being dragged roughly across the floor.

Objects thrown hard enough against the wall to silence the entire room afterward.

After a while, the body reacted before thought even had time to catch up.

Back inside the classroom, she was still waiting quietly for his answer while morning traffic moved faintly outside the windows several floors below. Somewhere further along the corridor, someone pushed a trolley past the room before the sound disappeared again.

“I think so,” he said after a while, managing a small smile. “I can’t really remember much about childhood.”

This was usually the answer he gave whenever people asked about it.

After a small pause, he continued.

“There were happy moments.”

This part was true.

“I think so,” he said after a while, managing a small smile. “I can’t really remember much about childhood.”

There were good days sometimes. Days when laughter returned without warning. Days when outings happened and the apartment briefly felt normal again. There were moments when affection appeared so naturally that it became difficult to reconcile with the fear that existed elsewhere inside the same home.

Love existed there too, at least in the form they understood it back then.

Children rarely possess the language needed to separate love from fear while still living inside both at the same time.

From the outside, the childhood would probably have looked ordinary enough to most people anyway. Nice clothes. Family outings. School. Birthday celebrations. Photographs where everyone appeared completely fine.

That was how life inside the apartment usually continued afterward.

The ceiling fan continued turning slowly overhead while she lowered the notebook slightly and smiled again.

“You seem to understand hurt people very well,” she said. “Like you notice things other people miss.”

Because somewhere beneath the conversation, another memory had already begun returning too. Not the violence this time, but the loneliness that followed after it. The feeling of having nowhere safe to bring the fear once the house became quiet again. No language for it. No explanation for it. No adult arriving afterward to help make sense of what had happened.

He looked down briefly at the cold paper cup near his hand.

He remembered staying alone in his room sometimes while the rest of the family went out together. Hearing movement outside the door while choosing not to join them. It slowly became easier to remain alone than to constantly measure moods inside the house. Easier to stay quiet inside smaller spaces that felt more predictable.

Only the strange feeling of sitting inside ordinary conversations years later while memories like those still remained quietly underneath them.

"He remembered staying alone in his room sometimes while the rest of the family went out together."

He lifted his eyes again after a while and gave a small nod as though politely acknowledging her observation, but something inside him had already begun reopening quietly beneath the conversation.

The classroom remained bright with morning light while voices drifted faintly through the corridor outside.

And for the first time since the conversation began, he could already feel the next question approaching long before it was spoken.

Made In His Image

You are made perfectly. Loved deeply. Never beyond hope.

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