Goodnight M. Yang

Chapter Two - Learning How To Die

Chapter Two – Learning How To Die

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

-Leonardo da Vinci

~

My left hand slipped a little as a harsh wind hit my side hard. It was hurricane-style weather with crashing waters below and an ever dropping temperature. The rain wasn’t rain anymore, it was ice and tears. It was years and years of the tears from every single girl who stood at the edge of a building, bridge, cliff or ledge. It was the tears of every girl who had died all alone.

I was hanging off the side of the bridge with my hands gripped to the hand rails behind me. They continued to slip under the rain. I figured that once they finally gave out, once the rain was too much and the night wanted to take me that it would be my time. That would be my sign to go.

Damn those waves below. They continued to rejoice at my pain, dancing and clapping. “Come to us,” they would say, “Come and fall down into our hands and let the world see you for the coward that you are. Let those who have pained you delight in the news of your end and they can laugh and dance and sing! Come to us!”

“Damn you!” I shouted. I had been shouting to anyone who had ever hurt me, ignored me, laughed at me and abandoned me. This was a dedication to anything and everything in my life that had come to this dark end.

It was time to turn another page in the small, meaningless book that had been my life and recall further how I got to this bridge. I would not let these women’s tears go to waste on me this night. I was going to tell it all. The world would know about me. This storm would carry my sorrow for miles.

This storm was my suicide letter.

~

“God damn it, Joseph!” My mother shouted to my father in Japanese, “Here you are, walking in late again from another long work day smelling like Red Door perfume. How stupid do you think I am?”

My mother was not an alcoholic. She was not a drug addict, cheater or gold digger.

My mother had grown up in a very poor home on the outskirts of Japan in a small village nobody knows about. Her parents were rice farmers who worked their hands bloody every day to put food on the table.

My mother had been the most beautiful girl the village had ever seen. The expression “It takes a village to raise a child” must have come from the combined efforts of my mother’s childhood peers as this was just the case from the moment she had been born. Inou Mitsuki, of Kendo Mitsuki and Mai Mitsuki, was the star child of the village the moment she was brought into the world and together the town knew she would do great things.

As a small child, Inou was taught to read and write. She had been so smart that as she hit her early teen years she had out-studied many of the city students and was now moving on to college level math learning English, Mandarin and French. The entire town put my mother through one of the most proficient schools in Tokyo and then most of her way through university.

At the age of 19, Inou Mitsuki had been working directly under the university’s president of science, well on her way to becoming one of the world’s brilliant minds. It was this year that she had met, fell in love with, and bore the child to Joseph K. Yang; a Chinese-American soldier traveling through Asia.

My brother, Kai Yang, was born on November 13th of that same year. It was on November 14th their love story ended… as did their love.

“Get out of my face with this!” He spoke in English. Rarely would my father indulge my mother by speaking in her native language.