"The real strength is to continue living with the pain."
"Dad, i'm home!" he yelled as he got home. He could hear movements in the storage room. On days like this he could always find his father from the storage room. He never knew what his father did there yet somehow it was an unspoken rule to not disturb him.
"Oh, welcome home," his father emerged from the storage room. For all his life he had considered his father a strange man. Not in a negative way, but in the way that there was something unusual about him. The few visitors he had were powerful martial artists that kept saying "you know, your father is the strongest man alive." His father, his teacher most definitely was a strong martial artist. Yet he had never seen him do anything that would entitle him to be the strongest man alive.
"There's a package for you," he said pointing towards a box on the table, "how about a sparring session? I'm stiff from all the sitting at school." "Yeah, go change your clothes," his father said absentmindedly as his eyes were nailed on the package.
The strangest part of his father was the look he sometimes had on his face. He would sit on the porch and look at the blue sky and his eyes would say that he wanted to go away. This look on his father's face was something he was scared of. When he was younger he had thought that father was really going to leave them.
When he asked his mother about it, she smiled her sad smile and asked:"you love curry, don't you?" He nodded.
"But there are many curries in the world, right? There's the curry i make, the curry grandma makes, the curry you eat at school. Yet there is one curry that you love the most,right?"
He nodded:"Mom's curry."
His mother smiled again before continuing: "but one day you will get big and i will get old and then comes a day when you can't eat my curry anymore. So you'll have to find the curry you love the second most."
She looked at her son and sat down next to him: "You see love is just like curry. And i am the curry your dad loves the second most."
He felt tears brimming in his eyes - he didn't fully understand what his mother was saying but it made him sad: "Then why doesn't dad eat the curry he loves the most?"
She hugged her little son: "He would if he could... but he no longer can."
This distant look on his father's face had always kept a small distance between them. When he was younger his father played with him, took him to places, taught him martial arts. They laughed together, they had great times together. Yet as soon as he saw the look on his father's face, he felt like he didn't know this man at all. He knew he wasn't the only one. His younger brother was the same. And the sadness in his grandmother's face when she caught their father having this look... yet he had never seen his father cry. While it should have been natural for the strongest man alive to not to cry, it felt unnatural on his father.
The bigger was his surprise when he came down from his room and found his father crying in the living room. The opened package in front of him seemed to be repackaged over and over again, the most inner layer being so worn out that it seemed to have been on the road for tens of years. In his father's hands, there was a letter that seemed to have been written years and years ago.
"Dad?" he asked hesitatingly while stepping closer. He saw the inside of the package - pictures of a girl barely in her twenties - an age he himself was soon to reach. She smiled a dazzling smile to the camera while sitting on a hospital bed. Yet he couldn't figure out whether it was the light reflecting on the corner of her eye or was it a tear finding its way out.
"You know, son," his father finally said, "you can become the strongest man in the world. Strong enough to kill a god. Yet there is one god, somewhere out there, that you can never kill - and he's the one that's gonna hurt you the most."
Yes, his father most definitely was a strange man. Yet at that moment he truly felt that his father was the strongest man alive.