Megan Liao
Teacher Amanda Hamilton
Language Acquisition Phase 5-6
29 October 2018
Letting Go
The cold winter wind is blowing upon my body. I’ve never felt such cold. The wind sneaks under my jacket no matter how hard I am clinging to it, I can’t block the cold out, so I stop trying. The weather reminds me of someone. Someone I had once cherished too much. Someone I had once trusted with all my heart. Her name is Patty. Even now, I can still clearly remember the day I first saw her. She was short with long black hair. Her smile was the most captivating in all the ones I had ever seen. Every time when her lips bent into a perfect smile, I could feel happiness around her. Unfortunately, the brightness turned out to be just the very surface of her personality.
She smiled and introduced herself, “Hi, everyone! My name is Patty. I transferred here from the art department, it’s really nice to meet you all,” she said in her cheerful voice.
I had a strange feeling in my mind, “We can surely be good friends!”
Meanwhile, I went up to talk to her. We became close friends within a few days. Due to her outgoing personality, Patty soon got along with the rest of the class too. I regarded her as my best friend ever. She was so important to me at that time, we did everything together. I ignored all the flaws she had. In my childish mind I thought, she was the best and the perfect friend that someone could ever have. We spent countless blissful moments together. However, she had some bad ideas time and time again, such as lying to teachers for skipping classes that she didn’t like.
“Come on, Megan, Chinese class is boring, let’s hide in the bathroom till the class ends,” she said in an excited voice like this was an adventure to be.
“We are not supposed to do this,” I said in an iffy voice.
“Rules are made to be broken,” she always says that when she goes to break a rule. She always made it seem like a cool thing to do.
I actually didn’t like doing these kinds of things. Yet, she would get angry if I didn’t. Unexpectantly, we started having little arguments here and there. I started feeling stressed around her, but I kept holding my anger back to maintain this friendship that I cared so much about.
Until the day, we finally had our first fight. I remembered it was at the end of the winter. The sky was gray and windy, just like today. It was the afternoon that we should be cleaning up the classroom, but there were a bunch of classmates who just refused to help.
Unsurprisingly, she turned out to be one of them. I asked them to perform their duty several times, but they ignored me. I lost my temper. I remember myself shouting, I was overwhelmed with anger,
“ Why can’t you guys just follow the rules and clean? Do something for the class!”
“The teacher isn’t watching. Why can’t we take a break? Little miss perfect,” Patty retorted sarcastically. I didn’t expect her mean words and stood, stunned for a few seconds. I had a lot of feelings amassed in my mind but out of them all, I can clearly remember a feeling of betrayal. “Is this what I got from my best friend? Is all this worth it?” I kept questioning myself. All the things that I’ve done for her. They once seemed to be completely necessary but not worth it at that moment.
That night she called me. I hid in my small closet so my parents wouldn’t see me crying. I didn’t want to face all their worry and questioning. The closet was hot and dark, my sweat and tears made the closet seem like a sauna.
“Sorry to upset you today Megan, I know I’m mean, but sometimes you just have to stop being this bossy” Patty’s voice is a mixture of apology and accusation.
I don’t want to argue with her anymore. I just want to fix this friendship as fast as possible. I agreed with whatever she said on the phone. I told her if what she did in the future wasn’t too over the top I won’t bother her anymore. She vowed to change. For a short second, I felt that everything would be alright. I felt, once again, we could still be best friends forever. The feeling of happiness filled up my heart. Looking back now, I seemed like an idiot to think so. Patty didn’t keep her promise for long. Everything was back to normal. I still had to force myself to participate in a lot of her games, even though they contradicted with my conscience. I had to carve myself the shape of her perfect mold of a perfect friend. I was so tired of all these I’m doing just to maintain this fragile friendship.
Deep in my heart, I wanted to give up. This was way too hard for me. Every day, I stayed with her the guiltlessness was killing me. All these weren’t worth it, but I locked all these thoughts inside my mind and pretended like nothing was happening to me. I still smiled and joked around with her as usual. Even though I tried so hard to preserve this friendship, it still broke down. We had our second fight a few weeks before the graduation. Mr.Greg, our homeroom teacher, was speaking excitingly on stage. “Kids, kids, kids, I know we can do a good job during the graduation performance! I’ve been your teacher for the past six years. I have faith in all of you. I believe you can all do an amazing job!” he exclaimed, trying to inspire the class, but we were all exhausted from the practice. The classroom remained quiet.
“Stop saying that, you don’t even have to practice, Mr.Greg” Patty’s words made everyone in the class gasp.
I could see anger rising upon Mr. Greg’s face. I whispered to Patty, “That’s too over the top, you can’t say that to a teacher” I cautioned.
“Don’t you agree? Or you are being the justice police again?” She said in anger. Her words had crossed the line.
“I’m just trying to help, don’t you know how much trouble you’ll get into?” I shouted filled with fury. I knew this was it. I had had enough.
We didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the week. It felt really strange not to have her around, but I also seemed to be happier. I felt stressed out when I was with her. Now I didn’t have to force myself to do anything anymore. This continued till graduation day. We finished our graduation performance successfully. Patty suddenly walked up to me.
“Hey,” she said, I couldn’t really tell the emotion in her voice, maybe there wasn’t. “I just want to say sorry, it feels really bad when you aren’t around”.
“Fine, we can still be friends,” I replied, but I knew I will never see her as before. If I did so, what would follow were just fights and pain. This friendship was a double bladed knife. It hurt along with the happiness it gave me. Sometimes learning to let go is way better than insisting.
