When the Egg Sticks to the Nonstick Skillet

I held such high hopes when my mom announced their arrival in August of last year. I was thrilled, overjoyed, and out of my mind; or as my mom called it - behaviors only to be found in insane asylums. Whatever mom.

I didn't get this excited for no reason, she was a long lost friend. After I moved to Michigan, seven years have gone by without any communication. We went to the same school together and lived in a close proximity, I guess the latter was the reason why I visited her so often. Now that I look back at it, our parents were unreasonably close friends as opposed to "good morning, you" kind of relationships. Suppose they also had high hopes of us getting serious with each other. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there wasn't free access to pornography, or else we would've gotten serious. Too much for the liking of our parents though.

However about two years ago they've also emigrated and settled in Maine with her uncle. They weren't exactly having the best time of their life, she said they were conned into staying there with their uncle. Her dad left for home, her mom worked long hours in the restaurant, from day break util stars twinkle in the night sky. All the while she was struggling with school because of the language barrier and was forced to help in the restaurant with whatever spare time she has left. From what my mom told me, it didn't sound like they liked it very much over there.

"Why don't we invite them over for a visit ma?"

My mom agreed and so did my dad and we soon formulated a flawless plan to help them if they do decide to live here, the visit was just a way to show them how nice it was over here. We were too nice back then.

Undoubtedly expectations didn't translate well into reality. I was still excited when my mom and I picked them up at the airport. Her physical appearance didn't deviate too much from what I had imagined but she was a little shy. Okay I can understand that, tired, overwhelmed, shocked; I've thought of every imaginable possibilities to explain her lack of talkativeness to convince myself that she is still the person I knew.

As days gone by I've discovered that she was a lot less intelligent than what I thought she would be, a lot less. Total lack of common sense and not capable of carrying out intellectual discussions about anything useful. Out of all the other things she could've done, she does exactly the ones that fueled the anger inside me. She is either dumb, clueless, ignorant, or all of the above. But I managed to keep the fire contained, with a lot of effort of course. I couldn't wait for the last day to come.

It was such relief when it did came. When they disappeared into the crowd, my mom and I acted as if we had won the lottery. We were smiling and cracking jokes all the way from the airport to home. We couldn't help ourselves, we were too happy and so was my dad. He described it as having the giant cactus off his back.

Ever since that week, I forcibly cut off all kinds of communication with her established during the first few days of her visit. I blocked her account on my instant messenger, closed my email account and pretended to be busy when they called. And I didn't feel bad about doing any of it.

Just the other day, my mom told me that our family had dinner together few years ago when we went back for a visit. Funny how I had no memory of it. Suppose my subconsciousness knew all along how much I hated her.