#mk system

Translate this sentence: If he’s working at the restaurant, he won’t be able to come to the concert at nine.

 Glaring at your laptop screen, you could feel a cluster headache starting to form, its presence looming at the base of your neck. 

 Who cares if he is at the restaurant? Who cares if he isn’t able to come to the concert at nine! Who the hell is he anyways??

Gods above and below, you could hardly stomach another conjugation exercise. If the stats bar was any indication of your language proficiency and process, you were sitting at an unsightly 54%.

It wasn’t a matter of motivation. More than any other learning endeavor, you wished to be proficient, dare you say, fluent in Spanish. Many of your friends conversed in a lively flow of innate Spanish that had always eluded your comprehension. Their cadence was so swift, the various dialects colored by distinct intricacies that had you searching for meaning that tended to come too late if at all. 

Jake, Steven and Marc had all offered their own expertise. Active learning in the throes of conversation would offer a fuller sense of language immersion, but you could only imagine yourself stumbling your way through even the most basic verb conjugations and sentences. Just imagining your own humiliation had you waving away their offer. 

With the last vestiges of your patience, you typed your answer into the text box before pressing enter on your keyboard. As if mocking you loudly and with short fanfare, the language app emitted a sharp buzz before highlighting your answer in red. Your answer was unequivocally wrong except for a few nouns, bringing your accuracy percentage down to 51%. 

“Fuck!” 

In a burst of anger, you brought your fists down on your laptop keyboard with enough force to make the goldfish tank tremble nearby. 

“Okay. That’s enough. You’re done for today.”

Having heard your outburst from the living room, Marc made his way hastily to your side before closing your battered laptop and tucking it under his left arm. 

“What the hell is going on with you, kid? That’s like the third time this week.”

In short, the three of them were not around as often as any of you would have liked. Their fates were intertwined with something within the dire straights of the divine. And while you loved your fathers with a ferocity, when you had first asked them about their work that kept them so far so often, Jake had been the one to tell you not to press and you had listened. Nevertheless, such distance meant they were not privy to the temper you had inherited.

“It’s fine. It's fine. I’m just frustrated.” You muttered with your face pressed against your palms. 

Marc, could recognize himself in the way you immediately bottled your anger when he entered the kitchen. He could see himself in the way you would monitor him sidelong, calculating when he would leave you to your anger in peace. 

“Yeah. ‘Fine’. You’re not fine. Come on, holding it in won’t do you any good.”

A torrent of beginnings, placations, words of affirmation wormed their way to the tip of Marc’s tongue only for Steven to find it in your best interest to take a more balanced approach. 

That near-permanent purl of tension between their brows eased. With a light breath, you could recognise Steven’s presence and the impending lecture that would follow. 

“I’m sorry for losing control like that,” you started, looking down at the kitchen table, “I don’t mean to–”

“Yeah, we know you don’t mean to and we’re not angry.” Steven released a measured sigh before gently patting your hand. A touch awkward, but you could appreciate the sentiment. “I think we’re just worried, and I’m worried about what….that means. You’ve been awfully tense lately.”

“The losing control part?”

Steven nodded. 

“Great.”

The threshold of your control had been waning for days now. Language learning aside, you found yourself thoroughly irritated with the world on a near-molecular level. Coursework, your health, your job, obnoxious co-workers, the neighbors that always pestered you with questions about your fathers…

Such worldly stressors frayed your patience to the point of hypersensitivity. The very texture of your clothes, the brush of your own hair against your face was enough to raise your blood pressure, if only for a moment. 

“I’m fine, really.” Sparing a glance in Steven’s direction, his eyes, almost perpetually pleading, made your throat clench. “Everything is just…overwhelming. And learning Spanish isn’t exactly helping.”

“Spanish?” Incredulous, Steven leaned forward as if to ensure he was hearing correctly. “But you’ve always been a brilliant student.”

‘Brilliant’ felt delusional and rather generous. 

Before you could respond dryly, you watched Steven tense before relaxing once again.

“What do you mean you’re ‘struggling’ with Spanish??”

You could have laughed at the dire expression Jake bore that bordered on exaggeration. The very notion that his kid was struggling with Spanish seemed too much for the man. 

“You never told us you were struggling with Spanish? How long have you been struggling? What doesn’t make sense? Why didn’t you say something sooner? Have you been watching the videos I send you?”

“Papá!” Cutting him off with a strained smile, you could tell he had on deck another twenty or so questions to bombard you with. “It’s not life or death, I’m just struggling! That’s it. I’m overwhelmed with…everything.” You confessed with a placatory gesture of your hand.” But I can handle it. Teaching myself this stuff isn’t all it's cracked up to be.”

“Jesucristo…”

Open streams of communication were something the entirety of the family lacked, but seeing it within you had Marc, Steven and Jake wondering what other qualities of theirs you might have harbored. 

“There’s no reason for you to be doing this all by yourself.” When in pensive thought, Jake often brushed his thumb across the trimmed length of his mustache, but now he found himself without that creature comfort. “You know you don’t have to do this all on your own, no?”

At the gentled inflection in his voice, you ceased making eye contact and very rapidly found the floor to be much more interesting than the conversation at hand. 

“Nope. None of that. You don’t have to look me in the eyes but you better be listening to me.” Jake straightened his posture, unwilling to let the conversation go. “If you’re feeling overwhelmed, let us help. I can help you with the Spanish and the others can help around the apartment. I know we leave you in the lurch but it's because…well, maybe there’s no good reason for it, but if you need us, we’ll be there for you. Okay?”

When you failed to answer them Jake leaned closer. “Okay?? I know we’re not parents of the year material, but at least let us help if we can.”

“Yeah, okay, okay, Papá…” 

Finally, you acquiesced. 

With Jake’s help you’d be more casually conversational in a matter of weeks. 

The very idea of Jake as a teacher did bring to mind a rather amusing image given his penchant for nonconformity, but perhaps that would work in both your favors. 

“Don’t give me that look.” Cracking half a smile, Jake was merely bringing back a sense of levity. “I’ll make a fantastic teacher.”