Like A Boy Needs His Mother’s Side

📅 January/February 2019

〚ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ〛

2018 had been a rollercoaster of a year; a lifetime packed into twelve months, with enough twists to make M Night Shyamalan dizzy. Anarchy was at the top of the world by the end of it, happier than he could have ever imagined being, looking forward to whatever else life was thinking to throw at him. It didn’t come sailing out of the blue like Chey had, though. 2018’s last hurrah was just an average conversation that, this time, took root.

It was drawing closer to Christmastime and Athena’s birthday; the band was hanging out more frequently and they were all working on B⬛RN D⬛WN Y⬛⬛R SCH⬛⬛L, Kohao’s pet project. Lyrical work bubbled up into conversation, which twisted and flowed along the creek beds of everyone’s individual psyches. ‘Your grades are not your worth / I don’t care what your parents say / Even a dropout can change the earth’ led into Athena and Kohao having a lengthy discussion about parental expectation, which turned into Sethfire and Athena’s estrangement despite their successes, which became an enumerative list of holidays they were no longer invited to, Christmas next included. 
The concept of ‘outreach’ got kicked around like a hacky-sack, accompanied by Athena’s laughter at the idea of their parents ever realizing they’d done anything wrong, and Aetos had pondered about one day attempting to reach back out to his own parents, or maybe his siblings, and if he felt he could handle doing so while expecting rejection. He and Chey had gotten into a conversation about reconnection, love, and non-biological siblings, and Anarchy had quietly retreated into his own head to muse. 
“Outreach.”

Anarchy had found out in early 2016 that his mother had left California. In the age of information, the age of the World Wide Web, privacy wasn’t something that existed anymore, not really. He couldn’t remember why he’d been churning through the past, but he had been, and while furtively searching through one of those sketch-ass sites that compiled too much information about everyone to be for anything other than weirdos to use, Anarchy had noticed his father was—by then—the only listed occupant of his childhood address. A little more digging found divorce records; complicated ones, because apparently a Korean court was involved in the adjudication. His mother had freed herself. And fled across the sea.
Anarchy wrote it into the line of a song and put it out of his mind as best he could.

Two and a half years had passed, and he suddenly found himself searching again; digging, wondering. Uncertain what he wanted to know but certain that he wanted to know. He wasn’t sure if anyone else would necessarily understand, especially not when he didn’t understand, but of course his boyfriend had always known him better than he knew himself. Chey was enthusiastic and supportive; he was the one who—upon learning that the Hojeok Deungbon, their most likely source of information, could only be accessed in South Korea—suggested that they just make the trip, why not? They didn’t, then, only for detective work—but it planted the idea for when all the digging around through the endless internet finally paid off:
Song Eun-kyung. 
There she was. 
She’d shed her ex-husband’s surname and reclaimed a Korean one, which she shared with the two other people— presumably family—who lived in the same house as her, a little outside central Seoul.

Anarchy knew that just showing up on his mother’s doorstep unannounced might not be the best idea, and some of his friends had alluded to that fact as well when he’d told them what he was doing, but he’d pretended not to grasp it and he and Chey booked the tickets anyway. There was too much uncertainty for him in anything else; more felt at risk with an email or a letter than a 14-hour, 6800 mile plane ride across the Pacific. He denied and denied and denied having expectations or anxieties, but there was something raw and cleaner feeling with the idea that if it all fell through, this way he would see it, hear it; have a hard, definitive stop.
“You’d rather risk having a door shut in your face than risk receiving a disinterested reply,” Kohao had said a couple weeks before the flight, more statement than question, picking up Anarchy’s new passport and glancing over it.
“Or no reply at all,” Anarchy had responded.
“You need her to see you.”
“...Yeah.”
Kohao hadn’t replied, just shrugged and left, tossing Anarchy back his passport on the way out. He flipped it open and stared at the name: Anthony Arland Keystone. His mom had chosen the name Anthony. 
During the long flight over the black, featureless expanse of the Pacific, Chey asleep against his arm, he wondered if she’d be hurt that he no longer used it. 

The suburbs—or perhaps the lack thereof—at the edge of Seoul was different from the transition between the boroughs and Long Island, and Anarchy tried and failed to pretend that the architectural and landscaping differences between here and New York City’s outskirts actually held his attention; that the narrow streets and absence of suburban sprawl was of any real interest. But it wasn’t the aesthetics of the unfamiliar South Korean village neighborhood that made his hands shake as he got out of the car outside a small, unassuming house. Anarchy took a deep breath, looking to Chey for reassurance as he approached the door. His boyfriend gave him an encouraging nod and a smile, and Anarchy squared his shoulders and knocked. The door opened and there was a beat where he couldn’t breathe, but shock and recognition lit his mother’s face and he found his voice.
“Um. Hey, mom.”

“Anthony…” Her accent was heavier and her voice pitched tearfully as she leaned forward without hesitation and embraced him. Her head against his chest as he hugged his mother, Anarchy felt acutely, uncomfortably aware that he’d inherited his father’s height. Eventually she leaned back and reached up to cup his face. Her expression crumpled as she ran her thumb over the pale scar that still cut visibly across his cheek. Silently she stepped back to look him up and down, the track scars on his inner arms and the friction scars on his wrists drawing a soft gasp from her lips. Or maybe it was the tattoos that did it.
“Oh, Anthony. What happened to you?” She caught sight of Chey, standing just behind Anarchy. “Who is this?”
“...Chey. My boyfriend,” Anarchy said quietly, after a moment’s hesitation. He didn’t miss her shocked blink; a slight lean backward. Before she could respond, though, a young boy, maybe only three or four years old, appeared in the doorway. 
“엄마?”
Anarchy recognized the Korean word for “mom” from his early childhood, but his mother responded in Korean he couldn’t understand and the boy retreated back inside, blinking over his shoulder in shy curiosity. Anarchy looked at his mom, waiting, and she glanced anxiously up at him. 
“Come in, Anthony, please—meet your—your brother. Half-brother,” she stuttered, “His father will be home from work soon—He’ll want to meet you as well, you can stay for dinner—”

An abrupt feeling of overwhelm washed over Anarchy with the invitation; feeling rushed and strangely wrong-footed, he quickly shook his head, stammering:
“Uh, we actually can't stay this evening, we’re already running late, but—I wanted you to know we’re—in town. Here, my number—”
“Oh, are you sure—?” Despite the worry fringing her tone, his mother looked somewhat relieved, herself, as he scribbled his number down. Anarchy felt Chey’s questioning gaze like sunlight burning his skin as he handed his mother the scrap of paper.
“Yeah, no, we’ve got...other plans? But now it doesn’t have to be such short notice—you can give your husband a heads-up—”
“If you really can’t—but please, tomorrow night, are you—?” She implored, clasping his hands in hers as though he might actually bolt.
“No, yeah, tomorrow should work.” He forced assuredness into his voice and gave her another hug. “Call me, yeah?”
“Of course, of course!” She didn’t seem to want to let him go.
“It’s okay mom, I'll come back, I will, I just—we have dinner reservations,” Anarchy said, trying to sound stable in his reassurance. Chey stepped forward, giving Anarchy a fleeting raised-eyebrows look before offering Eun-kyung a hand and a warm smile.
“I’m sorry we’re in such a rush, I can’t wait for us to meet properly tomorrow,” he said. She bypassed the handshake and gave Chey a hug, too.
“Yes! I’ll call!” she said when they released the embrace. Her eyes were glistening as she waved and watched them retreat back to the street.

Anarchy and Chey climbed back into their rental car with final waves and smiles out the windows, but as the engine rumbled to life and they pulled away, Chey turned to Anarchy, his eyes searching.
“Okay. What happened there, Kiki? I know we don't have dinner reservations,” he said. Anarchy pressed his lips together and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
“I dunno. I just...I need some time.”
Chey reached over from the passenger seat and gently squeezed Anarchy’s hand. 
“Okay,” he said softly. 
Anarchy knew eventually he’d have to talk about it more. He fixed his eyes on the road and pretended otherwise.

Back at their hotel, Chey took a seat on the bed and looked at Anarchy expectantly.
“So...What happened, ‘Key?” he prompted.
“I don’t even know,” Anarchy sighed as he sat down, avoiding eye contact, “I was...I mean, I was nervous, sure, but I was really excited to see her. To reconnect. But then we got there and it all just sort of hit me, you know?” Anarchy shook his head. “I just need to...to sort through everything, there’s so much going on in my head…”
Chey put a gentle hand on Anarchy’s leg and squeezed. “Talk it through with me.” 
Anarchy focused his eyes on Chey’s rose tattoo and tried to get his thoughts in order enough to speak.
“I didn’t even ask his name,” Anarchy mumbled, starting in the middle of it all and having to clarify; “My half brother. Or her husband...I dunno. That’s...I wasn’t expecting them. Seeing other people listed at the same address as her, I never even thought...I just assumed...siblings, or something.” He swallowed hard, a painful lump having risen in his throat. “I don’t wanna resent her.”
“But it bothers you,” Chey said softly, with too little inflection in his voice for it to be a question, but his tone too pressureless for it to be an assertion. It simply was, just like the ache in Anarchy’s chest.
“She didn’t leave my dad when he was beating the hell outta us,” Anarchy said suddenly, surprising even himself; “She just cried. She’d let me or Hunter get between her and dad, sometimes, too. What kind of mother cowers while her kids take beatings for her and refuses to fucking leave?” He couldn’t keep the pain out of his tone, but pushed through it even though it burned in his eyes as well. 
“She didn’t come find me, either. I was never reported missing. Not after I left, not after she ditched my dad. Whatever the last straw was that made her pack her stuff and run, it came after she lost both her kids, and she didn’t bother at all with trying to track me down after. And I just—it was her dream, New York City, it was hers, and I made it. And I guess deep down I thought if she left my dad that’s where she’d go. Eventually. Even if it wasn’t to find me. But she didn’t. She just caught a plane back to Korea. Found a new guy. Had a replacement kid, apparently.” 
Chey reached out and wiped a tear off of Anarchy’s cheek with his thumb, and Anarchy became suddenly aware that he was crying; had started at some point without even noticing. The lump in his throat ached fiercely and he leaned against Chey’s hand, desperate for comfort. 

“Why did she never—” he choked on his words and had to take a moment to dig them out of the ache in his chest; “...Could I really have meant so little to my mom that she was okay with just leaving without looking for me?” 
“I don’t have answers, ‘Key,” Chey said softly after a quiet moment; “There probably aren’t any. There definitely isn’t an excuse.” He tilted his head to offer Anarchy a small, sad smile. “But I know it’s not something about you. The years I spent without you still ache for me. You’re worth the world. More than that. And you always have been.” 
The silence hung after he spoke and he let it, for a few moments, giving Anarchy some time to try and take in his words and the love with which he said them. It still felt like a struggle, and when Anarchy tried to reply, he could only manage a despairing sort of breath that drew Chey closer.
“It hurts, ‘Key, because this needed to happen the other way around, didn’t it?” he said, taking one of Anarchy’s hands in his and running a soothing thumb across his knuckles. “She should have come to find you. She should have turned up at our door. And she should have said ‘I’m sorry,’ not ‘What happened to you?’ But that’s on her shoulders, my love. It’s not that you ‘meant too little.’ It sounds like she kept allowing fear to outweigh love. Which is the opposite of what you’ve done.”
“...The opposite of what I’ve done?” Anarchy asked, drawing a shaky breath and blinking rapidly as he tried to ground himself. He focused on Chey’s gentle touch; his boyfriend’s smile in his peripheral vision.
“You’ve let love win, ‘Key,” Chey said. “You let love win out over everything else. Despite the values your father had, despite everything you went through, despite stigma and denial and everything—you’ve become yourself. Your kind, loving, loyal, gay self. You’ve flown across an ocean to take this chance at reconnecting: You let love win. Not fear, not bitterness. Love.”

Anarchy wiped his eyes and ran a thumb over the tired metal of the tags around his neck. His brother had flown across the ocean once, too, for love. Anarchy still remembered lines from the letters Hunter had written in the months before his death…

...Just hang in there, Anthony. When I come back it’ll be with a paycheck, okay? I’m working to get you and mom OUT. Stay strong.

Hunter hadn’t gotten the chance to die a war hero; his death had been the result of a careless oversight and not active combat. But he’d been playing the hero role back then, anyway. Lyrics Anarchy had written years ago floated through his head:
‘I hope the men in congress choke on my brother’s BLOOD / They sent him to die for OIL but I know he died for LOVE…’ 
Fearless, loving. Never bitter, only brave. 
I’m working to get you and mom OUT.

Anarchy let out a soft noise; grief over a decade deep welling up from his chest, and knew that regardless of all else, he needed to see his mother living her life now; her life ‘OUT’ and far and free from her ex-husband. The hurt he felt was real—but so, too, had been her invitation to stay. So, too, had been her reluctance to let him go. The pain was real. So was the love. Anarchy leaned hard into the latter.
“We’ll get to see her tomorrow for real,” he murmured, resting his head against Chey’s own. “I’ll—”
His ‘make sense of it,’ was cut off by his phone’s buzzing. He felt his heart seize up as he answered.
“Hello?”
“Anthony? It’s you?” His mother’s voice sounded as anxious as his heartbeat.
“Yeah. Hey, mom. Um…?”
“I know you’re probably at dinner! I’m sorry,” she apologized hurriedly, making Anarchy bite his lip with a pang of guilt; “I just—needed to hear your voice again! Sang-woo isn’t even home yet, I don’t even have a time to give you for tomorrow…I’ll call back? Sorry, sorry.”
“You don’t gotta be sorry, it’s—it’s good to know the SIM card works! And...to hear from you. Regardless. Call as much as you want,” he said, rather awkwardly, he felt, but if she thought so she gave no hint.
“ㅋㅋㅋ! I’ll try to let you finish your date night first,” she chuckled self-consciously. “...It’s the world to me, that you are here. I’ll talk to you later; I love you.”
“Er—love you too!” Anarchy stammered. As he hung up the call, he felt Chey’s smile before he saw it.
“‘Needed to hear your voice again,’” Chey murmured, his voice, like the brush of his hand, warm and gentle. 
“...Yeah,” Anarchy breathed. “...Needed to hear my voice again.”

Anarchy felt sturdier and far more grounded the next day, and even if his heart’s thud in his chest seemed just as loud to him as his knock on his mother’s door that evening, he was prepared this time around and able to notice the way his mom’s eyes lit up when she saw him standing there. The presence of his half brother, Seo-jun, failed to spark jealousy in Anarchy’s chest; instead he ended up wishing he spoke more Korean just so he could talk to him—or tell him to be careful, he was going to knock his head on that table. Sang-woo, his mother’s new husband, seemed genuinely pleased to meet both Anarchy and Chey; even if he couldn’t easily voice it in English, the smile and enthused handshake said it anyway. Anarchy drank in his mother’s excitement at showing him off and showing him around, and no amount of emotional baggage could keep him from appreciating the new life she had built for herself. The house was small and cluttered but so obviously a home; lived in and loved in, with hand-addressed envelopes on the table and family photos in frames. He paused at one near the kitchen and studied it, struck by a sudden thought.
“Mom...do you have any pictures of Hunter, still? Or are they all stuck back in Fresno?”
“Oh! I have them! Here, come.” 

Anarchy followed her to a little room which seemed to function as her own personal office, and was hit by a sudden rush of warmth for her new husband, who was quiet and polite and let her have the things and space she wanted without making her pay through fear and violence. He’d only seen the room in passing during their brief tour, but standing in it and looking around more thoroughly he was suddenly startled when he met his own eyes: His ten-or-eleven-year-old self looked shyly up from a bronze framed photograph on the desk, beside another picture that made Anarchy’s breath catch; Hunter, grinning, almost done with basic training and not knowing what was to come. He looked far younger than Anarchy had remembered him being. 
Suddenly something was being pressed into Anarchy’s hands; from a drawer, his mother had pulled a bundle of almost all the pictures of Hunter—and Anarchy himself—that he could remember. Rendered speechless, he bit his lip and thumbed through them; finally stopping on a picture of Hunter taken directly before he’d gone off to the military, and a different, older snapshot taken of the two of them playing in the sandy ‘yard’ out front of their trailer home.

“I have his letters too, so many of them were for you, you can have those…” his mom said, pulling yet another bundle of papers from the drawer and handing it to him. She looked at the two photographs he’d stopped on and gave him a small smile.
“You can keep those pictures, too, if you’d like! Just, please get copies made and send them to me? You can include pictures of you and your boyfriend.”
Anarchy only barely managed to nod. Teary-eyed, he shuffled through the papers and photographs, unable to look at her.
“...You cared enough to keep these,” he finally said, the lump in his throat making it difficult to speak; “You cared enough to take them with you across the ocean…...Why didn’t you come find me, mom?” He looked up at the same moment that she appeared to crumple; her face fell and she started to wring her hands, her lip trembling as she shook her head.
“Your father was such a scary man, Anthony, he was such a scary man,” she choked out. She cupped a hand over her mouth, clearly at the mercy of her own memories. Anarchy felt halfway to heartbroken at the sight and reflexively reached out his hand, which she took and clung to; briefly pressing it to her lips.
“I only got away...four years ago, now,” she said, her voice wavering. “My brother found out where I was. He’d managed to make money for himself here, enough that he wanted to try and put our family back together...He found out what my life was like, in America, and he helped me get away...but it was all so scary, I had to do so many things in secret and I had to leave in the midnight...and you were a man by then, and I had no idea where you could be, or if you were ok. I looked for your name on the internet, many times over the years, but I never found you.” There was an ache to her voice that Anarchy recognized; agony buried deep enough to pretend it had dulled but which had never ceased. He swallowed hard.
“Oh. Yeah...I...I guess I don’t use the name Anthony anymore, really…” he said. His voice nearly cracked with the sorrow he felt for his mother and all she’d suffered through—and for so long: He’d assumed his parents had been separated for some time before the divorce had been finalized; apparently, he’d been wrong. “...You were stuck in Fresno for seven years after I left?”
She waved away the question in order to back-track. 
“Never mind it—What about your name? You don’t use ‘Anthony’? Why? What name are you using now?” she asked, blinking in surprise. Anarchy faltered his way to a somewhat embarrassed smile.
“Well, it’s Chey’s fault, first of all: He said I don’t look like an Anthony. So…I go by ‘Anarchy,’ now. It’s my full name, just...shortened.”
“‘Anarchy,’” she repeated after him, saying it with a tiny smile and lilting the last syllable like birdsong; Eh-nick-kiii.
“Lots...lots of people I'm close to just call me ‘‘Key,” he mumbled, his own smile strengthening though a blush began to creep up his cheeks; “and Chey will sometimes call me Kiki.”
He knew her eyes would light up and they did: “Kiki?!” she repeated delightedly. Her smile made her seem younger, like it banished the years wasted in torture from her life and let her reclaim the radiance she deserved from them. 
“Kiki,” Anarchy affirmed, opening himself to an embrace that she all but melted into. He never wanted that smile to fade again.

When the pair of them returned to the kitchen, they found that despite Chey speaking next to no Korean outside of BTS lyrics, and Song Sang-woo’s grasp on spoken English only slightly better than that, Chey had somehow managed to half-charade his way through something that left both him and Sang-woo bent over in laughter. Anarchy and his mom exchanged glances.
“What’s happened?”
“Ok, well,” Chey started, managing to catch his breath and straighten up; “now we’ve realized he was trying to ask about what I do as my livelihood, but how he said it—I sort of thought the question was ‘what do you feel your life is all about,’ and I’m of course, like, ‘love,’ people, you know, but it’s really hard to explain how everyone interacts back home; there's so much nuance—”
“What did you say?” Anarchy asked. He might have pulled some kind of face without realizing it; Chey laughed again.
“A LOT but I guess it ended up sounding like what I do for work is make people love each other. So he thought I was a matchmaker and pulled up a video of this dating show, Heart Signal, and pointed at one of the ‘love experts’ and asked if that's what I meant and how climbing through windows was involved—”

By the time Chey’s explanation got to it, Sang-woo had pulled up the video clip in question and was pointing at it again, still laughing. The joy was contagious; Anarchy started grinning too, along with his mom. The only one not smiling was Seo-jun, who sat on the floor and pouted because no one had told him yet what was so funny.
With Eun-kyung translating when necessary, they managed to clear up Chey’s line of work over dinner, and ended up talking about Edge of Infinity. Enamored with the concert photos they pulled up on their phones and taken by the opportunity to say ‘rock star,’ eventually Eun-kyung managed to get Seo-jun to repeat it after her while she pointed at Anarchy, who felt a tug again that he couldn’t communicate as fluently as he wanted to with his half-brother. Fortunately, Seo-jun was young; perfectly willing to settle for showing off toys and plenty of play, and in the hours after dinner Anarchy found that toy cars make the same noise when crashing in Korea as they do in the USA. 

Seo-jun eventually grew sleepy after a few hundred Hot Wheels drivers met their repetitive demises and he allowed his mother to herd him off to bed, but it wasn’t too much later than that that Anarchy noticed his own tiredness; the sun had set some hours ago and he and Chey would need to get ready to head back to the hotel: They wrapped up the evening warmly and reluctantly. 
As he put on his coat, Anarchy’s mom came up and cupped his face in her hands, just as she had when she first saw him on her doorstep.
“You act so much like your older brother,” she said softly. “Seeing you with Seo-jun...it was like seeing him with you. Where did you both get so much love in your hearts that it pours out so easy?”
“Well, it wasn’t from dad, so…” Anarchy found a lump in his throat again. “Must’ve been you, right?”
She forced an almost rueful smile, tears shimmering in her eyes. “I don’t think I did that good by you,” she said. She hugged him, then, and pressed her head to his chest. “But you love anyway, and I’m so proud.” 

Anarchy couldn’t find his words; it sounded like what Chey had said before. He could feel his boyfriend’s presence behind him; could hear Chey zipping up his own coat. 
“...Does it bother you that I’m gay?” Anarchy asked, because he couldn’t not. His mom made a sound that made his heart lurch in the split second before he realized, with relief, it was a laugh.
“You are alive and you are you and you are here, there is nothing else,” she said. She stepped back again and gave him a watery smile. 
“Proud,” she repeated. “...When are you due to leave? You’ll have time to come back? You’ll call; write?”
“Of course mom, of course I will. And we’ve got another few days. Don’t worry.”
“I have to worry. I’m your mother,” she said. They ended up in another embrace, tears welling up in both their eyes all over again. 

Even outside the comfort of his arms, though, she was safe, with a home she could be happy in, living with people who showed her love. The same was true for him. He wondered if she could feel the worn faces of Hunter’s dog-tags against her cheek. 
“...We made it,” Anarchy thought to his brother, just in case he could hear; “Just so you know...We both made it.”