Hey, all! This is a short snippet of my life that I put down on paper, and that I thought turned out well. I'm posting it so that anyone who reads it can learn from my experience, and understand this: Don't forget your friends. Don't wait to tell the people you care about that you love them. You'll regret it.
Life's Dance
By the time that I was seven years old, in first grade, I had still not yet learned how to ride a bike. Among my classmates, this was a growing source of humiliation for me, but even through the impressionable mind of a child, their ridicule didn't bother me overly much.
I held then, and still maintain, the notion that children are cruel and selfish little beasts, fascinated by the rush of power one receives when they know that they have harmed another. I understand now that this applied to me just as much as it did to all of the other children, but at the time, I had a self-righteous streak a mile wide, and a healthy dose of bossiness to match. In all fairness, I wasn't a bad kid. I was respectful towards adults, I did what was asked of me, I performed well in the classroom, and was happy to draw or swim or run or whatever else caught my fancy at that moment. I simply had a hard time understanding emotion, in all its intricacies. I didn't understand why Lauren had given me one of her pretty pink pencils, played with me at recess, and then told me the next day that she wanted to play with Alexis –the girl who had given her two twinkies and a green eraser—instead. I didn't understand why David's mother had yelled at me when I had run to her, crying, when her son pushed me off the swings. I didn't understand why all of the older kids were so mean to little Nick all the time: calling him strange words like 'queer' and 'faggot' that earned me an extended stay in my room when I repeated them. I didn't understand why Emily wouldn't talk or play with anyone for days, or why the adults were always whispering words like 'divorce' and 'custody battle' around her.
To a child, these things are new. Incomprehensible. It was like trying to peer through the opaque glass window in my mother's bathroom. You knew that the back yard, with its beige brick wall and scruffy little plants, was there. You knew because you'd seen it: touched it. But no matter how hard or how hard you looked through that window, the only thing you could see was the occasional blip of color that flirted with a clearer image. This was the world of adults to me.
My life wasn't plagued by undue hardship. I lived in a comfortable house in a nice neighborhood, with two caring parents, my grandmother, and my little brother. I never wanted for anything (except perhaps the occasional Bratz doll, which all of the other girls had, but my mother refused to purchase) and was, on the whole, a very happy child.
And, like all children, I liked to ride my bike.
I was lucky, I now realize, to have lived where I did. My street was absolutely teeming with children. Next door lived little Melena, a tiny, dark-haired little girl, a year younger than I was, who was very sweet. I liked her a lot. She was smart and energetic and fun, and my opinion of her was only heightened by the fact that she was very accommodating, and would go along with pretty much whatever I told her to do. Jessica, who was Melena's age, and her baby sister Kaya, who was too small to play, lived across the street a little ways down. I didn't like her much; she was the kind of girl that liked Lizzie Maguire and the Cheetah girls and played with her mother's makeup and only wore clothes from Abercrombie or Hollister and looked down her nose at anyone who did otherwise. My mother told me to be nice though, so I obeyed. Farther down the street lived Jake, and then Evan. I never took to Jake, and don't remember him all that well, but I greatly enjoyed playing with Evan, and the two were inseparable. They were both my age, and although they were of no relation, they were similar in appearance to my eyes. They were both lanky and fair-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes and quick wits, for their age. Jake always wore his hair gelled up into spikes though, while Evan let his fall flat over his eyes, like the floppy ears of a puppy.
Perhaps my favorite playmates on the street though were the siblings that lived directly across from us, Jonah and Jewel. Jewel was the youngest of the pair of them, being two years younger than her brother and myself. She was small and skinny with a pair of bright eyes that always seemed like they were too big for her face, and full of such energy and vibrancy that she became affectionately known as the 'Energizer Bunny' by the adults. Jonah was very different from his little sister. He was built broadly, and while he was shorter than I was, we were essentially the same size when it came right down to it. He always wore his hair cut short, as if it might prevent it from sticking up like always, which it never did, and he loved to play baseball. He was very much like myself in many ways, somewhat bossy and self-centered, and the two of us were constantly at odds. Bickering, wrestling, racing: it didn't matter what we did, really, so long as we each were trying to one-up the other. To be honest, it confounded me. No other child had ever fought back against my strong personality like Jonah did, if they cared to speak to me at all. Playing with Jonah wasn't like playing with May or Brooke or Tristan. It was frustrating to me, and tiring. The greatest satisfaction came from knowing that it was the same for him. I would have insisted with my dying breath that I didn't like to play with Jonah, but everyone knew that wasn't true.
Our street had a great tradition of all of the children gathering in the street during the day and riding our bikes in a circle up and down it while our parents lounged in lawn chairs on the driveways. My mother and Jonah and Jewel's mother, Pam, would always sit together, sipping on the martinis that I always wanted to taste, because they were pretty, but was never allowed to. Sometimes, Evan's mother, whose name was Sharon, would join them if she wasn't busy at her job (She tried to explain accounting to me once, when I asked what she did. I, however, just looked at her with abject horror when she told me that she did math day in and day out, so she gave up.) and they would watch all of us play in the street. We would throw balls and Frisbees, ride scooters and bikes and rollerblades, sell lemonade, play hide and seek, or generally run around in a pack, shouting. With so many of us, there was never a lack for things to do, and it was an unspoken rule that if you'd done your homework and the sun was still up, you'd drag a parent outside, and a sibling if necessary, and head outside to play with the others.
If Jonah and I were out at the same time, it was a given that our activities would be competitive. Catch? Who could throw farthest? Swimming? Who could swim fastest? Hide-and-seek? Who could hide the best, for the longest? I loved it.
One day, Jonah beat me. He'd beaten me in many of our games before, of course. I wasn't ashamed to admit that he often did, being, generally, the more athletic of the two of us. But in this game, I hadn't even begun to compete. Jonah was riding a two-wheel bike, while mine still had the training wheels attached.
The insult was insufferable, of course, but that didn't stop me from accepting his challenge to a race. Training wheels or not, I was not about to give him an excuse to call me a chicken. On the count of Jewel's 'ready, set, go!' we were off. Jonah glided right on ahead of me, wobbling a little, while I labored behind him, training wheels clattering loudly and sending off little puffs of dirt as I rode. He beat me by a mile, and wasted no time in gloating about it as I shuddered into the space between the lamp post and the stop sign. The blow to my childhood pride was severe, and I was very angry. I chewed him out, in the way that children have, that involved words such as 'meanie-face' and empty threats to withdraw invitations to my birthday party. After that, when Jonah just yelled back at me and rode to the other side of the street, I hopped on my own bike and trundled up my own driveway, to my own father, who was playing street hockey with Jonah's father, Seth, and Daniel, my little brother, Melena, Jessica, and Evan. I insisted that he remove the training wheels from my bike, then and there.
That was how I taught myself to ride a two-wheel bike in six hours.
After that, I always had a chance to beat Jonah in our races, or when we played chicken, and we never teased each other about what the other couldn't do again.
Not that we didn't argue about everything else imaginable, or continually come back for more. Jonah and I; we were special. We were best friends, although you'd never get either one of us to admit it aloud, and in a way, we brought out the worst in each other. Independently, we were definitely far less belligerent. Together, we were constantly showing off, and competitive about just about everything. But over the few years that we played together almost daily, we grew.
I unlocked the power of determination brought on by competition. Jonah learned how to treat others as equals. I learned how to play basketball and soccer and street hockey and baseball: how to throw and swing and run and climb. Jonah learned how to draw with chalk and play hopscotch, jump-rope, hula-hoop, and how to fly a kite. My father, Paul, showed us how to pick citrus fruit off of the highest branches of the trees while my mother, Marie, taught us how to use the juicer and make orange juice and lemonade. Pam taught us how to freeze the grapefruit juice in Ziploc bags so she could make martinis out of it later. Seth taught us how to play street hockey, and when he caught Jonah and I arguing over whom had won the game for our team, told us that "There's no 'I' in 'team'." We scoffed at him then, but never pretended to be the best on the team again. The two of us were still abrasive, but we were slowly growing out of it. More and more often, we would work together to solve our problems, be it the other kids arming themselves with water guns or our younger siblings trying to make off with the last of the cookies. We were learning the power of friendship too.
At least, until the unthinkable happened. Pam and Seth moved out of state, to Temecula, California, taking Jonah and Jewel with them.
I didn't see him, or speak to him, for years. I missed him terribly, and I guess I always blamed him for making me feel that way, unable to forgive him for it. Our parents kept in touch, and one time when we were in California a few years later, we visited them for a couple of days. Jonah played and lost a baseball game, and I could clearly see that his competitive spirit had not left him. Yet, it was hard to fall into a new rhythm that we felt comfortable with. We were both older. We had grown apart. I don't think he had forgiven me, either. And by the time we had finally adjusted to each other again, I had to go home.
For years after that, I again had no contact with him. I was older. I had new friends. Evan, Jessica, and Melena had chosen to attend different high schools than I, and the only one I still spoke with regularly was Evan, even though his parents had divorced and he and his mother had moved to a different area. I joined the marching band, took all AP classes, volunteered regularly at a center for disabled children, and planned on getting my undergraduate degree in Psychology once I graduated from high school. At seventeen years of age, this didn't seem so far away. I was, for all intents and purposes, nearly an adult, and I understood a lot more about almost everything now than I had ten years prior. I had lost most of my superiority and my bossiness (Although the band members who had to answer to me as the Drum Major might disagree.) and generally mellowed out, to as great an extent as possible for a hormonal teenaged girl. I never lost my competitive edge, however. It was a part of me that had always stayed with me, much like it had with Justin the last time I had seen him. I never could resist a good debate. But I never rode my bike anymore.
I hadn't thought about him, or the friendships of my childhood, for a very long time when the news came from Temecula. Seth, the man who had taught me about teamwork –how to play street hockey and how to swing a bat—who had given me a pink band-aid and an applejuice when I had scraped my knee when Evan had pushed me in the pool, had died. Suddenly, unexpectedly, gone. I was sad, and scared. Seth had died of a heart attack at an age that was a little over two years older than my own father, leaving sweet Pam, little Jewel (who I supposed was not quite so little anymore) and Jonah, only seventeen, like me, alone. I mourned for him, in my own, quiet way, as I had grown into someone who was fiercely independent, and rarely shared my emotions. And that was all right. I had expected sadness. What I had not expected was the guilt. I couldn't bring myself to regret our strangely cruel childhood friendship, but I did regret, bitterly, not keeping in contact with Jonah. I regretted not thinking of him more often than I had, and I regretted that the regret only came when I was reminded, quite viciously, of how much that that friendship had meant to me.
It seemed that, in all my new wisdom, I had missed something important. I had forgotten to think of those that had made me what I was. I had never thanked Seth or Pam or Jonah or Jewel, nor bothered to keep in touch, upswept in the new world that was unfolding before me as I grew. I would have liked to think that, had I done so, Jonah might still have been my best friend. But I couldn't bring myself to speak with him. Cowardly, I knew. But I couldn't delude myself into thinking, selfishly, that Jonah would care about my regrets. Not now, when his father had just died. And I only now realized that what I was missing was a part of myself.
Growing and learning, it seemed, never stopped. Jonah had helped me again: teaching me the lessons of death and regret. Lessons that I had thought I had already learned.
I did not, could not, thank him. I did the only thing that I could think to do. The only thing that I knew Jonah could do.
I carried on, feeling only the slightest bit wiser, and a great deal older.
Because life is just a dance. It is unavoidable that the music might change, and it is necessary to change your steps if you hope to ever find your feet.
Just a recent event that made me rethink a few things. Names were changed for privacy reasons. Please review with any comments on writing style, because I'm a bit nervous about writing in the 1st person.