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016. SHE'S LOST CONTROL ( chapter sixteen! ) ᶜᵒⁿᶠᵘˢⁱᵒⁿ ⁱⁿ ʰᵉʳ ᵉʸᵉˢ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ˢᵃʸˢ ⁱᵗ ᵃˡˡ, ˢʰᵉ'ˢ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶜᵒⁿᵗʳᵒˡ -she's lost control, joy division. 🌙
warning: mentions of suicide, and 'violation'.
THE SINGULAR BAKED potato provided for dinner was flavorless and bland, but it was food, nonetheless. Some form of sustenance to fill the empty void in Asuka's stomach, if only a little, despite her feverishly wishing for something more warm and filling to consume like her mothers home cooking back when she was younger and they had money to waste. Back when they would relish the Japanese cuisine while living in a foreign country as her mother tried her hardest to keep their culture alive with her children. It was only a matter of time before it became swallowed up by society's obsession with keeping things separate, and Asuka fell victim to conformity.
If she were to be greedy, she would like some water, too, to help flush down the dry, and tasteless texture of the cold vegetable clogging up her throat with each swallow. Her teeth struggled to pierce through the skin of the cold and slightly damp meal — not because it was difficult to, even if the workers hadn't bothered to peel the skin off or even cook it properly, but because everything tasted wrong, like tastebuds had changed.
All the times she complained about vegetables when she was a child, throwing on a grimace, and a whine of disappointment when her mom would place down a bowl of pickled cabbage or okra ohitashi, flashed before her mind in rapid succession. At this point, despite her distaste for cabbage, she'd devour it like a starving dog. It's been a long time since she last enjoyed her mom's home cooked meals. She's willing to bet it's been years — she could barely even remember what her favorite meal was when she was a kid, and what food she'd beg her mother to cook every night.
After her father's disappearance, mom felt no motivation anymore to do anything. Asuka sometimes thought her mother believed her husband was a lot more important to her than her own children, or at least she was only a homemaker and a mother to please him, to make him stay, to shape herself into something he wanted because she didn't want to lose the income of being a wealthy man's wife, because as soon as he ran off with a teenager, she stopped cleaning the house, leaving piles of clothes resting on the floor, or old newspapers yellow with age and scattered across the furniture, and she stopped cooking.
No more home cooked meals, no more sitting around the dining table, conversing with their family and recounting their days. Asuka, Mae, and Ichiro had to fend for themselves in both the kitchen and in life, and it only increasingly became worse when mom's health began to deteriorate. Depression hung over her like a heavy rain cloud, and it sometimes prevented her from even getting up to go to the toilet. Her kidney's would have failed if it wasn't for Mae and Asuka forcing her into the bathroom everyday.
