Inspiration Words: Butterfly and Card
Tan Shuwen (tahn shoo wuhn) lay on her bed. It was late Tuesday morning, but she hadn’t left her bed since Sunday night. That horrible night. Against her will, her thoughts returned to those moments at the restaurant. She tried to think of something else, but she couldn’t manage to pull her thoughts away from the things he had said to her.
She opened her phone and swiped through some of the recommended videos on her TikTok For You page, but she didn’t see anything that could distract her. She didn’t laugh at the video of a man trying to take money from his wife’s purse while she slept. She swiped to the next video of a dog running aimlessly around a park. The screen of her phone was shattered. Last night it fell off her bed, and the screen was now a broken mosaic of whatever she was trying to watch.
“Wen Wen (wuhn wuhn), here’s your lunch,” Shuwen’s roommate announced gently as she and the other roommates entered quietly.
Shuwen had given her roommate her campus card to pay for lunch, but now that she was back with food, Shuwen had no desire to eat. “Just put it on my desk.”
“Come on, you really should eat it. If you wait, it will be cold and nasty.” Another roommate came over to stand near Shuwen’s bed.
“I’m not hungry.”
“We got your favorite soup dumplings!”
“Thanks, just leave it there. I’ll eat it later.”
“Our anatomy teacher asked about you today. We said you aren’t feeling well.”
Shuwen didn’t answer.
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
Shuwen wished her roommates would go away. They were being so considerate, and it made her feel worse. She knew she couldn’t stay in bed forever, but maybe if she just stayed here a little longer, the ache would go away. Maybe she would stop feeling his arms around her when he hugged her, and maybe she would stop seeing his kind brown eyes burning with anger like the last time she saw him.
Sometimes, in the last few days, she had thought of his anger, and sometimes that helped. How can I be with someone who is so angry? And the things he said! I don’t think he ever loved me! But then she would remember the week before, when he bought her flowers and chocolate just because, and told her how much he loved her. She tried to push away the dichotomy. Her head ached, and she knew she should eat.
“We’re gonna go to the library. Send us a message if you need anything, okay?”
Shuwen knew she needed to go to the library also. Midterm exams were coming soon, and their classes this semester were hard. There were so many things to memorize, but right now, she couldn’t make herself care.
“Ok.” The door closed behind them, but she could hear them chatting out in the hallway. They were probably talking about her, but again, Shuwen couldn’t make herself care. She knew they wanted to help, but she didn’t know how to help herself, so how could she let her roommates help her?
Maybe I should eat some food. I guess it might help my headache. She left her phone on her bed, face down so she didn’t have to look at the shattered screen. It reminded her of her shattered heart. Everything in my life is broken.
She nibbled at the food, but quickly gave up and went back to bed. As she lay there, she wished she could stop looking at her phone, but the impulse was so strong, and she couldn’t think about anything else. Maybe he texted me. Maybe Mom texted me again. The only ache that matched the ache of missing him was the one that came when she thought about her conversation with her mom on Saturday. Why did I tell her about him? We were fine before she found out.
Shuwen again heard the accusation in her mom’s voice, If you really want to be a doctor, don’t you need to focus on your schoolwork, rather than wasting time with a guy? Shuwen knew her parents were still disappointed in her for choosing medicine over business. And maybe she had made a stupid choice. She couldn’t please her parents; she couldn’t please her boyfriend, and now she was going to fail her classes because she couldn’t even study.
Thinking wasn’t helping Shuwen to feel better, so she tried to watch her favorite TV show. A few minutes later she gave up, because it was too hard to see what was going on through the cracks on her phone. She lay on the bed, both wishing again that he would text her and also somehow dreading seeing his name on the screen. He won’t text me. He can’t. Why does it hurt so much to end it? Why do I feel so broken? Will I ever be whole again? Why was he so mad that I hadn’t told my parents? We’ve only been together for a year. My friends have kept their relationships a secret for a lot longer, and that never bothered their boyfriends. It’s not that strange. Besides, I was doing him a favor—my parents probably wouldn’t have been happy that he was dating me, would they? The questions felt endless.
Shuwen drifted into a light sleep, dreaming of that Sunday night once again. Maybe if she had just done something a little differently, there would be a new outcome. Maybe if she had introduced the topic in a funny way, he would have laughed instead of exploded. Maybe if she had agreed with him and said she should have told her parents earlier, their relationship would have been okay. But when she woke up, she realized that nothing had changed except the position of the sun.
Shuwen sat up. Her head was still pounding, and she knew she had to get up. If she didn’t die from a broken heart, this lifestyle would surely kill her. But at the thought of moving, she fell back against her pillow. Her phone vibrated against her arm, and she reached for it, her heart racing. Mom.
“Hello?” She hesitated as she answered.
“Hi, did you already have dinner?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s pretty late. You should go eat.”
Shuwen tried to hold back, but just hearing her mom’s voice deepened the ache in her heart. “Mom, we broke up on Sunday. He was angry that I hadn’t told you about him. He thinks I’m ashamed of him. He said it’s impossible to have a real, successful relationship if no one knows about it.”
Shuwen waited for a response, but her mom was quiet.
She took the silence as encouragement and poured out the whole story. By the time she was finished, she was sobbing.
“I just made some of your favorite steamed bread. I’ll send you a package; it should arrive in a few hours.”
Shuwen sniffled, and a small piece of her heart felt better. Growing up, her mom always made her steamed bread when she was sad.
A few minutes later, Shuwen left her dorm room to go find her roommates and join them for dinner. She kept her broken phone in her pocket as she looked at the bushes and trees lining the sidewalk. A butterfly fluttered around some flowers, and Shuwen realized that not everything was broken, and not everything that was broken would remain broken forever.