Revenge is Sweet

“I’m sorry.”

It’s horrifyingly surprising how much two words can change your life. Forever.

And I’m only telling you this now because I don’t want you to end up like the others. Oh they always say that they’re not to blame, that they’ll be fine. But trust me when I tell you that it’s all an act. Because deep down, they’re scared. Frightened. Horrified. Call it whatever you want but it’s true.

Now I want to take a break from my confession to assure you that I’m not lying to you. I have no reason to. If you don’t believe me, you can go away right now. Turn around and never look back. But remember that wherever you go, I will find you, and I assure you that next time we meet the conditions won’t be so friendly.

If you still want to leave, that is completely up to you, but for those who have wisely chosen to remain, I will tell you part of my story, and who knows? Someday you might just might become part of it. So listen, and listen well, because you’ll only hear this once.

I won’t tell you who I am, not yet anyway, that will become abundantly clear in just a few minutes. But I will tell you what I do.

It’s my job to observe. Every breath, every word, every action, I know of. Rather, I must know of. Because this is a job only I can do. And it’s an important one. So it is rather shamefully that I confess, it’s not a job I particularly enjoy doing.

But observing itself isn’t my job. Because with the responsibility to observe comes the curse of thinking about what I observe. And more times than I care to count, I find myself wishing for other things to have happened than I observed. Therein lies my identity.

Still don’t recognize me? Alright, here’s a hint: I tell you what could have been. Get it? Anyway, enough sidetalk, on with my story.

As with any good story, this one has a star. And as much as I want to be it, it’s not me. So we visit the star of our story to introduce ourselves, right around the time she starts becoming relevant to my story.

And so here we are, some decades ago, in one of the poorer areas of London, on a rainy evening.

We catch a glimpse of her face through choppy, wiry dark hair. She has dull green eyes, with a hungry look to them. Her nose is thin and sharp, something you would expect to see on the face of a strict, mean old lady. Her lips are chapped and dry, almost white but still retaining a slight pink color. Her cheeks look sunken and hollow, with a faded peachy complexion. At the time, she is wearing a bare, dirty pink shirt with scruffy blue pants and a pair of green shoes that look extremely worn out. Before we can continue our assesment however, she ducks into a narrow alley, holding a small bag, ripped in places.

Of course, we follow her as she makes her way through the dark alley, with no lighting but for the moon. After an eternity of walking through muddy puddles and ducking into various alleys one after another, we come to an abrupt stop, right along with her, in front of a rickety old cottage. She brings up her empty hand and knocks softly on the door, which looks like it may fall over any second. The sound of footsteps shuffling on carpet reaches our ears and soon, the door creaks open, revealing a woman with a pinched face and the same dull green eyes.

“Oh so you show up after all, you ungrateful child!” the woman exclaims. “Well Nancy,” she starts again, “you can’t come and go as you please, arriving just in time to eat up the bread I work to put on the table when you don’t help me at all! Why you’ve been nothing but a nuisance since the day you were born, a nuisance.” She stopped her tirade, peeking down to see how the girl, Nancy, as we now know, was taking it.

And Nancy was simple looking up, with those haunted eyes of hers, suspiciously bright, her mouth quivering. Indeed, she was a young girl, sadly, forced to encounter the darker side of humanity almost since the day she was born. If anyone had the right to complain about an unfair life, it was her. For it was indeed her, not her mother, the woman with the pinched face, who was the more productive of the two.

Every morning, she would go out to work in a dirty factory near her home, and come home late at night. The working conditions were barely suitable for a grown adult, let alone a child of nine. The gases coming from the factory were toxic, and the conditions inside the factory were hardly any better. And she dealt with it all for the scant pay she would receive at the end of every week, with which she bought food for her and her mother. All things considered, now you might understand why her mother was such a despicable character. Back to Nancy now.

“I - I’m sorry. I promise I’ll be better from now. Please Mama - ,” Nancy started to say, only to be interrupted by her mother.

“You know what? Enough is enough. I’m not dealing with you anymore. It’ll be easier on me with only one mouth to feed, rather than two, not to mention prices are going up. Just leave already, will you? If I had any sense, I would have told you to get out long ago.” The woman finished with a flourish.

“But Mama, I brought bread, ” Nancy whispered, terrified eyes directed toward her mother. She held up the small bag for emphasis. For, although Nancy was the bread earner, she had no place to stay other than her mother’s cottage, and it terrified her to think where she would go if she was kicked out.

The woman looked at it greedily, “Oh well, as long as you can be of some use, I suppose you can stay here. Come in now.” For the woman had been angry because Nancy had earned less than the usual amount the past few weeks and had not been able to bring home enough food for the both of them.

Nancy walked in slowly, terrified eyes darting about, as if she was scared of something. Poor girl. “Here Mama, the bread,” she handed her mother the small paper bag.

Her mother took out a small loaf of bread from the bag and eyed it hungrily, “Well come now, we’ll have this with some soup.”

“I’ll wash up first and eat later Mama,” the girl proclaimed, and walked to the restroom. Once she was inside, she closed the door and leaned against the sink, a small satisfied smile on her face. She had seen a small dark colored snake on her way home, and caught it using a smaller paper bag she had stashed next to the bread she bought. She didn’t know much about snakes, but since she was a young child, she had been told to look out for the small dark ones, and to beware of their lethal poison. And so, looking at the snake, she happened upon the perfect plan for revenge. Revenge against her mother for all the work she made her do.

And when she heard her mother’s screams coming from the kitchen, she smiled and quietly slipped out of the house through the back door. The perfect plan.

She would come back in a few hours, of course, and then she would “discover” that her mother had unfortunately been bitten and killed by a poisonous snake. Completely a coincidence of course. An “unfortunate” one at that. She would then reveal her findings and display the appropriate amount of grief. Nobody would suspect her, a child of nine, to have committed the act. It was almost too good to be true. And indeed, revenge is sweer.

And here, I will stop my narration of Nancy’s story to explain why this is part of my story, and perhaps, you will learn something from it too. So you won’t make the same mistake Nancy’s mother did. After all, that is the reason behind why you’re hearing all of this.

You have displeased a large nuber of people in your life. Both you and I know that’s true. And we also know that it’s impossible to please everybody, and that’s completely fine. As long as you accept responsibility for your mistakes.

Mistakes are common. Everybody makes them. Sometimes we learn from them, and sometimes we don’t. That’s normal too. But what’s important is the apology. When you make a mistake, you must apologize. Two words, that’s it. Not too complicated. And it can save your life. From what? From somebody seeking revenge.

Because revenge is sweet, and regret is bitter. You don’t want the two to mix. And that is my final warning.

Good bye, and for your sake, I sincerely hope we do not meet again.