September.
We learn as babies to do whatever we can for attention. It’s funny how we can understand that just by crying, our parents will drop everything they’re doing and run to our side. To comfort us and make sure we’re okay.
We had been grouped together since before kindergarden had even begun. Her parents, my grandparents, brought together by something as simple as the winter weather in Maine. We didn’t have much in common, she was always trying to be more girly, and I was the soccer kid. But then again, maybe we werent really that different after all.
She was always there, in almost all of my classes. Always a shadow of mine at the sandbox, choosing to sit next to me at lunch, playing jumprope with me during recess. We spent time together out of school too, playing in the small playhouse they had in their front yard. She was a cheerleader too, always trying to fit in with the right crowd. That was the thing about going to a small school, if you dont find the right group in kindergarden, you were screwed until high school.
But she was always there.
And then one day, she wasn’t.
How could a bunch of third graders pretend they cared about someone that days before they had made fun of, had made rude remarks about both behind her back and to her face? It all comes back to that simple idea of attention. We do anything we can for attention. The girl who wrote the poem. She didnt know her. She wasnt her best friend, hadnt been at her house the week before listening to her new kidz bop cd because back then that was cool. But she could put a few words together and make them rhyme, so people believed she was hurting too, and she got what she wanted. Attention. (she’d never liked me anyways, in second grade I beat her in our spelling bee.)
I still miss her now, sometimes. How can someone so full of life be reduced to nothing by something that nobody ever thought would happen? She was my first best friend. I wonder what things would be like if she was here now. What would she look like? Would we still be friends? But I guess I’ll never know.
Maybe we’re put on this earth for a different purpose. And once we serve our purpose, we must dissapear. Perhaps we’llnever understand it. Maybe death will always be a mystery to us. I’m not one to question it.
But then again, I was one of the few who didn’t cry for attention.
I cried for my best friend.
(this was written last year which is why the style is quite different from the one I have now developed.)
