What happened?

I had this friend in elementary school, who I'll call Natalie (for anonymity). She was a really pretty, sweet girl that all the teachers absolutely adored. Stereotypical description? Yes, but she truly was like that. Very nice, and always cheerful.

In 3rd grade our school split into two feeders, so I didn't see her until this year in 11th grade. At first I didn't recognize her, because she had changed so much. But gradually, as she began talking about her boyfriend, we realized that we had been friends eight years ago.

She'd changed so much. About three days each week during lunch hour, she goes out of school to get stoned in her car. She's been to juvenile once, and her personality has completely changed. It's not like she grew up in some ghetto area of town - her parents, I remember, were upper middle class and I remembered them to be rather nice as well.

I'm not saying that Natalie, in any way, is a horrible person. She's still nice, though now she's extremely inclined to violence when she loses her temper. She's addicted to three kinds of drugs. This is not the kind of person I, or any of our elementary teachers, would have imagined for her. If anything, I should have been the child that grew up a stoner. I had so many behavioral problems, never listened, and was so socially inept that my first-grade teacher suggested my mom to put me in this sort of special education course at school for problematic children. My mother never did.

I turned out to be okay. I'm not a perfect student, but I actually pay attention in class, I have a lot of friends, and I'm generally regarded as some goody-two-shoes, which Natalie was before.

I'm just wondering - what happened?

Not that it's one specific event, but how did our supposed roles switch like this? In some ways, Natalie has already made it difficult for herself to succeed in later life, what with the marks on her records and her barely-passing grades. It sometimes makes me sad when I think of her (and then I feel bad for feeling sad >.>) and just how things have changed over eight years. Is it that somehow, society has failed on her? Could there have been a moment where there should have been help, but it never came?

It makes me frustrated because of this. I know I'm probably superextending the issue, but because of Natalie, I've tried to be there when my friends look upset, instead of edging away and letting them work through their own problems. I don't want the cumulative effect of not being there to eventually negatively affect the ones I love.

An old friend

In two years' time, I will go to university and begin my life as an adult. With this transition I will forever leave the house, but more importantly, I will forever leave a memory.

There is little at home that I left an imprint on. My name is written in tiny letters on my bathroom window, and written again on the bottom of our sofa. But these imprints are insignificant, and when I look at them I remember only moments of boredom. The only object in the house that I can call my own in terms of emotion, in terms of memory, would be my piano.

Out of my carelessness, and then out of habit, I very rarely took the trouble to wipe it down. The thousand fingerprints were a source of all my teachers' aggravation, but now it serves as an album. I can see a faded smear of my elementary-school hand across the piano cover, left from when I opened the piano for the first time and heard the full colors of each note. On one of the glossy black legs there is a double print of my little brother's and my fingers, pressed there when I joined him to play underneath the piano. The lid has lost its lustre, and is dulled under seven years' worth of prints from lifting and closing. There are a 9-year-old's prints smudged next to a 16-year-old's prints. Hundreds of piano pieces have been played into the strings, their echo in my memory. I can sit at the bench and reach for the keys, as I have done for over ten years, and feel the songs in my fingers.

The piano, by now, is my oldest friend. I must leave it behind when I go to university, and with it, lose a bastion of memories. I will feel the presence of it fade away from my hands until it becomes, finally, only a reminder of my childhood.

Of two tragic characters

You know, the tragic romance plays that women cry over with their boyfriends, who pretend to look bored while they're actually struggling to rein back a tear or two.

We have here character K, a boy. And we have character S, a girl. They might have had a relationship between them once, they might have not. But now K is disinterested, perhaps even a little hateful, and S is still in love with K.

K spurns her and pushes her away, ignoring her advances. S is upset, but still can't help the bright flare in her stomach whenever she sees him. In his presence, she is very aware of all her movements, and her words become lilting and measured. Beside him she wavers on a trembling tightrope, wondering what she looks like in his eyes. K does not pay any attention to her, and instead throws a rude comment.

But the examination here is not in the events, it is in those little flares, in the length of the tightrope.

S wants him to love her back. His words cut, cold as ice, and though she knows she should be hurt, she isn't. She can remember the grey-green of his eyes, the white directness of his words. They were for her. And it is this sole object, this sole idea that outweighs the meaning of those words, and they are gone from her mind, because he had turned to her. He had looked at her eyes, and parted his lips to speak.

It is hopeless love, of the maudlin "Where art thou?" type. And yet we follow along, feel the gasps in our mind as their tragedy continues.

But sometimes, K and S are not scripted characters on paper. Sometimes, they are real. Sometimes, they can be touched, and seen, and kissed.