Or at least, to be as upset as I am.
But I’m heartbroken that I didn’t know her.
My mom died when I was little. Sometimes I can’t even picture her face without a photo.
I’ve had my entire life to get over it, but I feel like a part of me died with her.
I don’t know anything about Japanese culture. I don’t know anything about Sylvan culture.
My dad did his best and my stepmother was always good to me
But I was still cut off from half of everything I AM.
I’ve never known anything about her family.
I’ve never known grandparents or aunts and uncles.
PinksPosies&Pearls:So to find out that I had a relative so close . . .
We could have met for lunch, we could have had tea.
She could have been in my life when I was growing up.
I could have been in hers so that she wasn’t alone at the end.
I have this money now and everyone is telling me how happy I should be
but I’m heartbroken.
Trigger warning for a MASSIVE overshare, sorry??
She was mortified with herself for sending something so personal to the stranger on the other side of the screen, but she couldn’t deny that it felt good to get it out.
Her father was human, white, and from the unification. He’d met her mother when he’d been an architecture student, studying on the other side of the world, and her mother had left Japan with him to start a new life as a professor’s wife and give birth to a half-sylvan baby girl.
Sumi had not been born with the shimmering markings around her eyes and on her face that other sylvans possessed. They tracked down her back, visible only in the most daring outfits, but absent as far as the outward world was concerned. She did not have the elongated fingers, butdidhave their slightly tapered ears. At least, Sumi told herself she did, obsessively comparing the shape of her friends’ ears her entire life.
She didn’t have anynoticeableoutward markings that distinguished her as anything other than human, feeling cut off from the photo on her dresser of her beautiful Sylvan mother every time she looked in the mirror. She didn’t know anything about her mother’s Japanese heritage and culture, didn’t speak the language, didn’t know any family.
But now she was a beneficiary to this stranger, a stranger who shared her blood, her mother’s blood, and she couldn’t help feeling cut off from all of it all over again.
When she went to bed that night, her head ached from all the tears she had cried. She was embarrassed for the over-the-top overshare, but there wasn’t anyone in her daily life to whom she could vent in such a way. She didn’t want to make her father and stepmother feel poorly, and her much younger step-sisters — both human, both white, both the majority race and the majority species — couldn’t possibly understand. She didn’t have close girlfriends, not close enough for something like this, and Jordan viewed every topic in which he was not the center as a problem to solve. Rather than a supportive shoulder for her to cry on, he’d told her it was an opportunity for investment. ChaoticConcertina, as pathetic as it was, was the only judgment-free source of solace she had.
ChaoticConcertina:Please don’t apologize.
I totally get it, you’ve got a lot more to unpack just cashing a check.
I don’t understand what you’re going through specifically, but I get it.
I’m a pro at “there’s more to it.”
My grandfather started his business when he came to the unification.
My dad was already a teenager, grew up working in the shop until he took it over.
A few years ago he was diagnosed with a progressive disease.
The dementia is slow, but it’s steady.
