Page 16 of New Growth
I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering over the decline button. I couldn’t bring myself to answer her calls because I couldn’t stomach the apologies I knew she didn’t mean. She’d had more than enough time to reach out directly, and she hadn’t said a word that didn’t pass through our mother first.
Now, she wanted to talk?
The phone stopped vibrating, and a new text message appeared:
Ryan: Elliot, please call me. I need to talk to you. I can’t stand this silence anymore.
I scoffed, tossing thephone onto the bed.
She couldn’t stand the silence. She’d destroyed my engagement, humiliated me in front of my friends, and broken what little trust I had left in the world. And now, she was the one suffering.
I pulled the blanket over my head, squeezing my eyes shut. I hadn’t even been able to cry today, probably because of dehydration. My tears had all dried up, leaving nothing but an empty ache in their place. It was worse than the crying—this numbness that settled over me, making it impossible to think, to feel, to breathe.
Another buzz. Then another.
The truth was, I didn’t have the energy to deal with any of it. Not my mother, who seemed more concerned with keeping up appearances than comforting her daughter. Not Ryan, who was probably more worried about her own guilt than my pain. And definitely not Johnathan, whose every attempt at contact felt like a slap in the face.
Another buzz. Another voicemail.
I turned onto my side, curling up into a ball. As I tussled under the covers, my phone fell onto the floor, and I let it vibrate uselessly against the carpet. I pulled the covers tighter around me as if they could shield me from reality. The darkness felt safer than the mirror across the room, which used to reflect a brighter, younger me but now only showed my discarded ambitions.
I’d given everything up for them—every dream, every ounce of potential—all of it, gone because I wanted to help them. Case in point, when Jonathan and I got engaged, he had just been accepted into Med school, and I had submitted an application for a loan. At the time, I wanted to fund a passion project of mine, though admittedly, I was unsure of which one. It was the first thing I had done for myself in a long time, but the dream never left the vision board.
Foolishly, I let him convince me to put my dreams on hold so he could pursue his own. On top of that, my mother needed help with her bills after the divorce, and I had taken on caring for Daddy while Ryan was away doing God knows what. So, like the reliable fixer I’d always been, I traded my ambitions for long hours at a dead-end job and parental care.
All of that sacrifice for him to leave me.
He was thriving in the life I helped build with the sister, whom I helped raise. And I was here, wondering what it would feel like to be the girl who held her own life in her hands again.
Finally, the tears came. They burned as they slid down my cheeks, hot and angry, but at least they came. They came as a new feeling of grief took over, the grief of another life lost. The sobs of a promising future I’d buried with my own hands, and now held the funeral. Nevertheless, they reminded me I was still alive. Even if it didn’t feel like it. The tears left my face sticky and my chest heavy, but they brought a strange clarity with them.
For the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe.
I rolled onto my back and pulled my sheets off, staring at the ceiling again. I couldn’t keep doing this. Staying in bed wasn’t going to change anything. Daddy wasn’t coming back to life, Ma wasn’t going to suddenly take my side, Ryan wasn’t going to undo her betrayal, and Johnathan…Well, he was a problem I didn’t want to think about anymore.
It was time to resurrect the life I had killed, as Daddy’s words were like sirens in my head. ‘Elliot, you do so much for everyone else. Please take this money and do something for yourself.’
I needed to make a move.
My phone buzzed again from the floor, but I ignored it. Instead, I sat up, pushed the blankets away, and grabbed my laptop from the nightstand. It had been sitting there for weeks, untouched, gathering dust like the rest of my life. I opened it and logged in, the soft glow of the screen illuminating my darkened room. For a moment, I just stared at the desktop, unsure of what I was even looking for. Then I remembered.
Before all of this, I’d been thinking about taking courses when the wedding was over. Not for anything academic. I’d already been through that phase, earning my business degree that was now gathering dust in the same metaphorical corner as my old dreams.
No, this was different. I wanted to do something I’d actually love.
The idea came to me months ago, during one of my countless late-night scrolling sessions on Instagram. I stumbled across a video of a woman creating the most intricate, beautiful nail art I’d ever seen. Her workspace was small and cluttered, but her hands moved like magic, transforming a blank canvas into something dazzling. I watched the video three times before I realized I wasn’t just admiring her work—I was imagining myself doing it.
For weeks, I’d quietly researched beauty schools, narrowing my search to places close to this suffocating city. I’d kept the idea to myself,unsure if it was just a passing whim or something real. Then Daddy died, and the engagement party had taken over my thoughts, so I’d let the idea fall to the wayside.
But now? Now, it felt like my only lifeline.
I opened my browser and typed “beauty schools abroad” into the search bar. A flood of results filled the screen, but my eyes were drawn to one link in particular:
The International Academy of Beauty and Design – Phuket, Thailand.
Curiously, I clicked on it. The laptop’s glow cast long shadows across my room as I stared at the screen, scrolling through the website. The school offered many courses, including professional nail art, hairstyling, microblading, eyelash extensions, and even waxing. The programs seemed perfect, offering everything from basic techniques to advanced levels. It was exactly what I’d been looking for: a way to focus on something new, something that was mine and mine alone.
But the location…Thailand?
